MERLE LEFKOFF
Merle Lefkoff is the president of the Center for Emergent Diplomacy. She is a social change entrepreneur whose practice is devoted to applying nonlinear complex systems thinking to whole system change. Merle holds a PhD from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In the early seventies, as president of Save America’s Vital Environment, Merle became the first environmental lobbyist at the Georgia State Legislature, where she and then-Governor Jimmy Carter worked together to pass legislation protecting the sand dunes along the Georgia coast from development. She later worked in the White House in the first year of the Carter administration. She led the planning group of civil society leaders at the United Nations’ launch of the Gross National Happiness Index. Merle is a member of the Global Advisory Board of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network at Columbia University. She is a member of the Spirituality, Emergent Creativity, and Reconciliation Research Group at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada, a visiting faculty at the Upaya Zen Center, and in 2012 she was elected a Lindisfarne Fellow.