Building a movement for social change takes passion, energy and resources. Social movements have a life cycle: they are created, they grow, they achieve successes or failures and eventually dissolve and cease to exist. In this session Mary Rowe will highlight this lifecycle by examining a variety of tools to encourage innovative, holistic approaches to building a movement. Mary’s long and productive career has focused on facilitating solutions to complex problems in the public realm. In particular she played an instrumental role in advocating for a new deal for cities in Canada as Director of Ideas that Matter and currently works with a US philanthropic initiative fostering self-organization in urban communities.
(More Than) Five Good Resources
- Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience . Harper Collins, 1990.
- Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-organization and Complexity . Oxford University Press, 1995.
- Johnson, Steven . Emergence: The Connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software . Scribner, 2001.
- Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done Much Ill and So Little Good , Penguin, 2006.
- Goldsworthy, Andy (sculptor)
- Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business , Economies, Societies, and Nations. Doubleday, 2004.
- Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business , Science and Everyday Life. Plume 2003.
- Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals . Penguin, 2006.
Mary W. Rowe
Vice President, Urban Programs, blue moon fund
Mary W. Rowe is the vice president, urban programs for the blue moon fund, a philanthropic organization based in Charlottesville Virginia. The focus of the blue moon fund is on fostering the resilience of the global ecosystem to adapt and evolve sustainably. Since joining the fund Mary has focused on self-organization in cities as the underpinning of urban resilience, with a special emphasis on the city of New Orleans, post the levee-breaches of Hurricane Katrina. blue moon has responded to and supported a variety of community initiatives that foster connective tissue between neighborhoods and across sectors in the city. Prior to joining the blue moon fund Mary worked on a variety of citizen engagement projects across Canada, and coordinated Ideas that Matter, a convening and publishing program based on the work of Jane Jacobs.
