Mary ZumBrunnen Joins CCED Team

For two decades Mary ZumBrunnen has worked across communities at home and abroad on sustainable development to improve quality of life. Since 2005 she has focused on Michigan, helping hundreds grow their community vision to fruition. It is from the impact of these experiences that she founded One-Community Consulting in 2007 to help connect industry expertise to solve local cross-sector challenges. In 2019 One-Community Consulting was awarded a “10 Over the Next Ten” social change-maker award from the Greater Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce and Grand River Connections.

Mary believes in paying it forward and offers rich training ground for those also wishing to give back to their community through One-Community’s unique social entrepreneur knowledge leadership system. Learn more about Mary’s background, including her commitment to national service, sustainable development, public health, and regional food systems, on LinkedIn. A serious Spartan, she holds a B.S. in agriculture and natural resource communication, an M.S. degree in community resource development, and an executive M.B.A. from Michigan State University. She is a two-time fellow through the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Program and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

In March of 2018 Mary’s first book, Transcendent Partnership: Aligning Agendas for Collective Impact, was published by Difference Press and a second edition was published through Morgan James Publishing (2018). This reached No. 1 on Amazon in both Business & Money and Politics & Social Science in the areas of philanthropy and charities. Combining professional expertise implementing sustainable development with nonprofit partners, she applies business supply chain management principles to work through many common system and relationship challenges that citizen stakeholders run into when solving large scale community issues. 

An AmeriCorps* VISTA alumna, Mary continues to serve and volunteers for the One Love Global Beloved Community Fund and the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing. In her spare time Mary loves yoga, painting, importing coffee, and working with startups. With family on multiple continents, most of her free time is spent traveling. However, stateside you can find her hiking around Lake Lansing and playing with her rescue animals including two cats, two pit bulls and a parrot. 


2 https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-resources/about-educational-outreach/activity-resources/us/


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