American Express Emerging Innovators Campaign--Changemakers Interviews Nancie C. Zane
Nancie C. Zane, Ph.D., is an award-winning social psychologist and a principal with Praxis Consulting Group. For more than 25 years, Nancie has worked with not-for-profit and public sector organizations to build diverse leadership teams, strengthen staff relationships, and develop effective conflict resolution and communication strategies—all in the service of helping organizations achieve their goals. Read more about her work here.
In this interview, Nancie provides key advice for emerging leaders of social change.
Who is a leader you admire and why?
Faye “Honey” Knop was a Quaker minister who, in addition to being a peace and civil-rights activist, was a leader in the prison abolition movement in the U.S. and the Netherlands. Her book, Instead of Prisons, was one of the first articulations of a community-based justice model founded on the principles that have become known as “restorative justice.”
Knopp was a woman of enormous compassion, taking responsibility for “bearing witness” and listening deeply to both the joys and sufferings of others, which she then channeled into reparative action. She had a deep sense of urgency for solving seemingly intractable social problems, yet enormous patience for bringing together multi-disciplinary groups for creative dialogue, strategy development, and piloting new projects.
