“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy it. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
– E. B. White
This quote increasingly sums up my approach to life and service – and it makes me smile. From early in my career, working in the movement to end hunger and poverty, I noticed the benefits of balancing my service to intractable challenges with big doses of celebration of all that I loved in people and the world.
Now, as a strategic advisor to regenerative business and community development efforts, this approach is at the center of my work. As our days become more uncertain they also become more precious, with more at stake as we consider the contributions we each are alive in this moment to make. I’ve come to know that action sourced from appreciation, celebration, and love generates results beyond our ability to imagine or predict.
Regeneration is about repairing our relationship to the land (and considering it to be “all my relations,” as indigenous peoples demonstrate.) The joy and guidance I find in my relationship to nature, as an athlete, adventurer, and as daily spiritual practice, is something I prioritize. It’s where I source the courage and renewal to engage with the “wicked” issues we face.
As a staff member of the international citizen action group RESULTS, I coached and trained volunteer political advocates world-wide in the movement to end poverty for over a decade. I learned about being a game-changer by working alongside visionary leaders like Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Muhammad Yunus (RESULTS Board Member, Founder of Grameen Bank), Sam Daley-Harris (Founder of RESULTS and The Microcredit Summit Campaign), Lynne Twist (The Hunger Project, Founder of The Pachamama Alliance), and Marshall Saunders (RESULTS Group Leader, Founder of the Citizens Climate Lobby.)
Based on my experiences with heart-centered activism and a politics of inclusion, I wrote a book called Strategies for Active Citizenship in 2005. During that time and since, the principles of compassion, personal transformation, and collaborative leadership guide all my offerings. As an integralist, I support others (and myself!) to find their greatest impact through becoming more whole, balanced and authentic in all areas of life.
In my 20’s I began meditating, attended regular meditation intensives with my teacher, and lived in her ashram for a year. This experience was foundational in healing the wounds from losing my father to cancer when I was 16, the collapse of my family and the eating disorder that accompanied my grief, and a near death experience from a climbing fall in my late 20’s. I’ve had a lifetime of learning about resilience and what it takes not only to bounce back from existential hardship, but to show up fully and generate a positive vision in the midst of it. I help others to source this capacity for themselves and their endeavors – because it’s becoming non-negotiable.
My career has included community organizing, social entrepreneurship, sustainability consulting, local food systems development, and executive coaching – all with the focus on how we are called to evolve in this moment of dire urgency on the planet. Along with an accreditation from the Post Carbon Institute in Community Resiliency, my unique background has given me a keen ability to assess the resources and opportunities of individuals and groups and help them distinguish their most leveraged strategies to regenerate communities and the planet.
My degrees are from Williams College and an M.A. in Community Leadership from Regis University. But some of my greatest learning has come from being intrepid single mom to my two children, now teenagers. My business dedicates a portion of its profits to support a world where the dignity and safety of all our children, of all species, receive our highest attention.