Author Biography
Joanne Poyourow is an author, an educator, a gardener, and a community builder.
She is the co-founder of the Environmental Change-Makers community organzation in the Westchester area of Los Angeles. Since their first meeting in 2006, the Change-Makers have focused on What We Can Do about our environmental issues, supporting greener lifestyle change and grassroots activism via public meetings.
With Joanne at the lead, the Change-Makers have created a variety of local events including Seed Swaps, local food potlucks, solar cooking craft events, and a "Life After Oil" conference. They created an ongoing series of reskilling classes -- classes which teach the skills of everyday life which we have forgotten over the past 50 or so years of energy surplus. These classes have included an Organic Vegetable Gardening series, breadbaking, and more.
Joanne's love for gardening has extended far beyond her home edible landscape. In spring 2008, Joanne designed the Community Garden in Westchester, which grows food for the needy, broadcasts the beauty of front-yard vegetables, and teaches the skills of food cultivation to local volunteers.
In December 2008, Joanne -- together with Environmental Change-Makers co-founder the Reverend Peter H. Rood, Jr. -- released Environmental Change-Making: How to Cultivate Lasting Change In Your Local Community (Cathedral Center Press). The book tells the story of the Change-Makers' first three years, how the group is run, why this work is so vitally important, and how other communities can create similar gatherings.
Most recently, Joanne has been active in bringing the Transition Towns movement to her "hometown" of Los Angeles. The Transition Los Angeles city hub and Transition Westchester are preparing local communities for the changes coming with global warming and peak oil.
In 2005, Joanne released her first book, Legacy: A Story of Hope for a Time of Environmental Crisis (VBW Publishers). Set in Los Angeles, the novel examines the environmental possibilities before us over the next 30 years as our society journeys toward a greener future. Rather than leaping directly into that imagined future, Legacy is a tale about the journey -- what it will take for us to get there, how we can do it, and the likely triumphs and pitfalls along the way.
Joanne speaks frequently for audiences around Southern California. Her audiences have included environmental groups, city groups, business networks, faith communities, and groups of children.
Joanne holds a B.A. in Business Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and was a C.P.A. in public practice for 13 years. She is a founder of the Culver-Westchester Homeschool Network.
The mother of two young children, Joanne hopes that Sustainability will be the environmental legacy we leave to future generations.
Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn't a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist--and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. So the generalist--and that's a derogatory term, by the way, for academics--gets into a range of other problems that are more genuinely human, you might say, than specifically cultural.
--Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
