Greg Fuson
I’m the cultivator of The Vine and content director for PCBC and its family of conferences. I guess you’d say my occupation is conference planning, but I like to think of it as giving people something meaningful to gather around. And so I aspire to create — and help you feel connected to — something bigger and more significant than yourself. To get you outside of your day-after-day routine and exposed to very different ways of thinking about the world.
I am: An assimilator of disparate ideas, people and perspectives; an avid reader and aspiring writer; a passionate fan of baseball; the proud creator and cultivator of community on a smaller scale — two beautiful, ever inquisitive children, Anna and Josh.
Chris Grant
I’m a Hungarian-Jamaican South Londoner, and feel — somehow — more like myself when I’m speaking French, so it’s probably no surprise that I now consider my trade to be the building of bridges. At an early age, I developed a fascination for the way that groups function. As some people learn to be funny as a defense routine, I learned to read group dynamics primarily as a survival tactic.
Thirty years later, I am applying that passion and those skills in a very broad range of activities, spanning leadership development, executive coaching, group process design and facilitation, change management, strategy development and mediation. I have an MSc in Human Resource Development, but my years of experience in facilitation tell me that this is where Art meets Science meets more mysterious forces: so it is that I aspire to being a great Alchemist.
Andrea Learned
I’m a marketing dot-connector with a focus on gender and a long-term view on coming trends. In my view, over-eager brands can easily miss the point when they start to focus on women — in that their core customers are not simply either “men” or “women,” but a much more complex group of people with varying interests and passions. Learning more about how women buy should provide clues for reaching everyone more effectively.
As the coauthor of Don’t Think Pink, the founder of the Learned On consultancy, and an active blogger, I spread my gender trend knowledge near and far. My Vine involvement stems from a personal passion for sustainable living and business, which I see as key to reaching the female home buyer/influencer. With a sturdy Midwestern/U. of Michigan foundation, I happily moved on to find my home in incredible communities such as Portland, OR, and Bellingham, WA. I now hang my dog’s leash in ever-lovely, often cold, Burlington, VT.
Ann Oliveri
I am a freelance strategist for sustainable enterprises. As a consultant, coach, speaker and blogger, I help mission-driven entrepreneurs, organizations, and communities become engines of knowledge and learning, problem-solving and innovation, social change and wealth creation.
For 15 years, I was a senior executive at the Urban Land Institute, a think tank formed in 1936 for those working in real estate development and community building. My goal now is to create new platforms that connect corporate, government, and civic leaders, mobilizing power for good.
I am interested in your ideas about the nature of community, the zen qualities of leadership, civic entrepreneurship, corporate citizenship, communities of practice, pragmatist philosophy, slow food, travel and cities as means for cultivating trust and tolerance.