ABOUT
Mick Minard
Taken by Mick’s mother in the Okefenokee Swamp, GA in 2010
“Do you still not know how little endures?
Fling the nothing you are grasping
out into the spaces we breathe.
Maybe the birds
will feel in their flight
how the air has expanded.”
Mick is a writer, photographer, and strategy consultant specializing in program design, marketing communications, and impact assessment. Over the past twenty years, her professional and artistic work has largely been focused on promoting promising ideas for restoring connection between human society and the natural world.
Her photographs have been exhibited in New York City and sold commercially, and she uses visual and written narrative to inspire new forms of leadership, organizational transformation, and community engagement.
Since 1998, Mick has worked in the United States, Europe, East Africa, and South Asia, with both non-profit and for-profit social ventures, and she has facilitated the growth of early-stage capacity-building and income-generating initiatives serving the underprivileged and the rural poor.
From 2009 - 2015, Mick led REEF Reports (Realizing the Ecosystem Effects of Finance™), a strategy consulting company she founded in response to the growth of impact investing which was unlocking significant sums of private investment capital to complement public resources and philanthropy in addressing pressing global challenges. REEF partnered with social enterprises, impact investors, foundations, academic institutions, and international development organizations (projects, teams, and networks) to design an “impact practice” to improve performance, attract capital, inform investment decisions, engage stakeholders, and influence policy.
Mick’s public speaking engagements in the U.S. and internationally have expanded awareness of the need for a sharper focus on the world’s women farmers. In 2012 and 2013, she was invited to present her research on the subject at the UN’s 56th and 57th Commissions on the Status of Women. In 2014, she was appointed Representative to the United Nations to advocate for the empowerment of women and girls through life-long education.
Since 2015, the year her first book was published on women leaders of India, Mick has worked for the REI Co-op, the nation’s largest consumer cooperative in the U.S. She currently leads REI’s experience business, philanthropic strategy, public policy and advocacy initiatives, and local brand engagement and stewardship investments in the Oregon-Northern Rockies region. She is based in Portland, OR.