Her work begins with a question her own life taught her to ask: who actually keeps the world’s economies running?
Growing up in the Bronx, she saw the answer before she had the language for it. Women of color moved money across borders, organized savings circles, fed families, built businesses out of apartments and storefronts, and held entire communities together. Geography gave her the language. She came to see the diaspora not as scattered people but as a working economy, and women of color as the ones running it.
Belle built her career in city economic development and teaching. She then founded Consult Espinal LLC, a workforce development, curriculum design, and community investment consultancy, and Reclaim Our Wealth, doing business as Sisters of Economic Action, a 501(c)(3) dedicated to community wealth-building on Cleveland’s Southeast Side.
Today she is a PhD candidate in Geography at Kent State University, where she also teaches World Geography. Her research centers women of color in community economic development and how they define success on their own terms. She studies these leaders as experts in their own work rather than as subjects to be explained.
She holds an MBA from Cleveland State University, an MA, and the CCSP and GCDF credentials, and she received the 2026 Cleveland BBB Spark Award.
Belle wants every student from a neighborhood like hers to know that their lived experience counts as knowledge, and that the map has always had room for them.