Julie Mooney was the project manager during the incubation of Made in Durham. She has directed a number of local, regional, and national projects designed to advance strong education, workforce, and economic development initiatives in economically distressed communities throughout the South. She is coauthor of several MDC publications, including Building Communities By Design: A Guidebook for Community Change and Walking the Talk: Increasing Educational Options for Southern Youth. She recently served as an MDC consultant “coach” to community-wide partnerships focused on increasing educational opportunity for low-income youth in Savannah, Georgia, and Brownsville and Amarillo, Texas, resulting in strong collective impact in those communities. In her other consulting work, Julie coordinates Grantmakers for Southern Progress, a network of funders with the goal of increasing funding for social change in the South, and co-founded the N.C. Community Solutions Network, a learning network of N.C. practitioners involved with systems change. She has served as a visiting lecturer in the Hart Leadership Program at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy, a community development planner, a community organizer, and served on the Durham City-County Planning Board and the Board of the Durham Workforce Partnership. Educational background: City and Regional Planning, Community and Economic Development (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of California at Berkeley).