Julie Thomasson Mooney
Visiting Lecturer, Public Policy Studies

Julie Thomasson Mooney is a consultant in the fields of leadership development and community capacity building. She currently serves as a “coach” to collaborative leadership teams in rural communities in the Program for the Rural Carolinas, a Duke Endowment-funded initiative. As a Senior Associate at MDC, Inc., a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit, she developed and directed a number of regional and national projects designed to strengthen the capacity of organizations and communities to lead significant change efforts in the areas of education, workforce, and economic development. Most recently, Julie directed the Southern Grassroots Leadership Development Learning Program, designed to build the capacity of 16 organizations in the Southeast to develop and lead grassroots leadership development programs. Prior experience includes work in community development planning in city and county government (in California and North Carolina) and in community organizing (in North Carolina and Texas). Julie is a founding member of the Governing Council of the NC Community Solutions Network. She serves as a visiting lecturer at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy, where she teaches an undergraduate seminar called Making Change in Communities: The Work of Leadership. She holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Masters in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley.

Publications issued by MDC include co-authorship of Fertile Ground: Reflections on Grassroots Leadership Development (forthcoming, 2003); Building Communities By Design: A Guidebook for Community Change (2002); Creating Economic Opportunities for Every Young Person: Lessons from the Hitachi Foundation’s Partnerships in Education and Economic Opportunity Initiative (2000); Walking the Talk: Increasing Educational Options for Southern Youth (1993); The Rural Futures Program: A Guide for Trainers (1991).