Julie Ristau

Minneapolis

Julie Ristau is Managing Fellow of the Tomales Bay Institute, and also deeply involved in public education work about commons issues with organizers and communities about commons issues. Her professional career has been strikingly varied. She has been a farmer, swine breeding consultant, home economics teacher and business consultant on sustainable development as well as the publisher and co-chair of Utne Reader magazine (which she helped start in 1983), director of the League of Rural Voters, and the co-founder of Regeneration Partnership, which pioneered new approaches to community organizing and civic engagement. She has been president of her neighborhood organization in Minneapolis and currently serves on the leadership council of a local public school. Ristau is drawn to the commons out of a keen interest to test this emerging concept on a practical level—inspired by her agricultural background to seed ideas and action, fertilize the ground to nurture new possibilities and see what grows.