Brendan Miller
Brendan is currently working as a project manager with SGProperties in New Mexico, including overseeing the development of Plaza Contenta in Santa Fe. This is an pedestrian-oriented, infill retail and office space development that will provide public space and serve the surrounding community. He is also working to create a cohousing neighborhood in partnership with the Wonderland Hill Development Company at the Galisteo Basin Preserve (a project of the Commonweal Conservancy just outside of Santa Fe). He serves on the Board of Directors of the Permaculture Credit Union, where his goal is to increase the lending capacity of the Credit Union and ensure that it continues to provide innovative, environmentally responsible loans that other institutions cannot or will not provide.
Prior to his work in New Mexico, he was the assistant development manager on the Sawyer Hill Cohousing development in Berlin, MA. This "40b" development will be two neighborhoods of 34-units each, including 25% affordable housing and approximately 30 acres of conservation land and open space. His work on this project was the result of a partnership between the Fellowship for Intentional Community, Chris ScottHanson, author of The Cohousing Handbook and Stew Mayer, a founding partner of the Nexum Group.
Brendan has years of experience with community process, facilitation, and training in a variety of settings including the Boston Foundation, City Year, and New Leaders for New Schools. He was a founding partner of The Meristem Group. He has served for two years in AmeriCorps, first as a volunteer coordinator then as an AmeriCorps Leader. He worked as the lead Research Fellow with Professor Peter Frumkin at Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, studying national service and citizenship for a forthcoming book.
He has degrees from Brown Univeristy, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where he was a Public Service Fellow. While a graduate student, he studied democratic theory, leadership and negotiation techniques, organizational learning, systems thinking, urban policy, real estate, affordable housing, entrepreneurship and general management.
Brendan's resume is available here.
A collection of quotes Brendan likes can be found here.
Brendan is always looking for opportunities to put more Democratic Development theory into pratice. If you know of possible opportunities or would like to explore partnering, please contact him at brendan@brendanmiller.com
Friends, family and colleagues
Some other important people, groups and organizations in my life and work.
My family
Bob (my father) recently retired from AT&T and is working on a book of poetry. Mary Kay (my mother) is close to retirement as well, but still working as an ESL teacher with the East Windsor, NJ school district. Stacey (my sister) is a physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) resident at UMDNJ.
My wife, Tamara Bates, splits her time between fundraising for educational institutions and programs, early childhood education policy and dance instruction. Her father, Gary Bates, is a sculptor in Bozeman, MT. Her mother started the Montana State Ballet and has since returned to school to look at how the arts can be used to promote peace.
Some friends and colleagues
- Sean Gilligan and SG Properties
- Jim Leach and the Wonderland Hill Development Company
- Ted Harrison and the Commonweal Conservancy
- Samanthan Tan and Brendan O'Day with the Meristem Group
- Orion Kriegman with the Tellus Institute
- Greg Searle with Bioregional
- Jesse Smith at Tay River Homebuilders (and my brother-in-law)
- Chris ScottHanson at Cohousing Resources
- Stew Mayer at the Nexum Group
- Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute
- Micha Josephy and the folks at Boston Community Cooperatives
- Federico Stubbe with the PRISA Group
- Shai Shwartz at Legg Mason Real Estate Investors
- Laird Schaub at the Fellowship for Intentional Communities
- Peter Frumkin at the LBJ School at UT Austin
- Charlotte Kahn and Geeta Pradhan at the Boston Foundation's Indicator's Project
- John Sterman at MIT's Systems Dynamics Group
- Drew Jones and Don Seville at the Sustainability Institute
- Ron Heifetz and Hugh O'Doherty at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership
- Jane Mansbridge and Archon Fung at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
- Dan Kriegman and the people of Yoism
- Sean and Trina Sheridan at the Wooden Spoon in Chicago
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License by Brendan Miller.