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Greetings, and thanks for visiting! I'm Jessica. My work focuses on helping people collaborate to advance systems-wide, sustainable solutions and on making those solutions understandable through solid storytelling.
From March 2014 through July 2016, I served as the first-ever community and communications manager at RE-AMP, a network of over 170 nonprofits and charitable foundations tackling climate change in the Midwest. As an integral member of our five-person leadership team, I worked to advance the network's innovative approach to systems thinking by strengthening its membership and communications. This involved everything from administration to creative conception: membership management, engagement strategy, meeting design and facilitation, internal and external communications, and website management. Most importantly, I helped increase members' capacity for collective impact by emphasizing the importance of relationship building. Prior to joining RE-AMP, I held a similar position at On the Commons, a strategy center that advances the commons movement through its online magazine and grassroots activism. There, I helped develop and sustain the organization's online presence by sourcing, editing, and writing content. I also fostered a nation-wide network of supporters by promoting resource sharing and collaboration. In addition to this experience, I've written extensively about the sharing economy, the emerging economic revolution where access has become more important than ownership. My work has appeared in The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing (Penguin 2010), a Wall Street Journal bestselling business book, and at media outlets such as Guernica Magazine, Minnesota Public Radio, Shareable Magazine, and Resilience Magazine. I was also invited to speak on a panel at the 2014 SHARE Conference, co-hosted by SoCap and Peers in San Francisco, to discuss how the commons makes the sharing economy possible. My experience to date suggests that we live in a complex world where systems change requires leadership and collaboration across traditional divides. It has also confirmed my suspicion that when we act like we are all in this together, we will discover an abundance of goodwill, imagination, and drive to create the kind of future we want. To develop my capacity for creating change for the common good, I'm currently pursuing a graduate degree at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. The program focuses on sustainable development, systems thinking, and collaborative leadership. You can read about what I'm learning here and follow my journey via social media—or you can get the highlights via my monthly newsletter from Saltö, a small island in the Baltic Sea where I will live through June 2017. |
