Jewlya Lynn
Systems change facilitator
Background
Jewlya Lynn is a facilitator, advisor, and researcher focused on helping leaders around the world tackle wicked problems. She focuses on developing practical tools and processes that help people unpack complexity, explore the many potential futures ahead, ask powerful questions, and find answers. Her emergent strategy stories and tools, learning models, evaluation frameworks, and other planning tools have been published by the Foundation Review and the Center for Evaluation Innovation. She has forthcoming book chapters looking at the intersection of futures thinking and evaluation and exploring why causal pathways need to be made more visible when evaluating systemic change strategies.
Jewlya has served as a facilitator, researcher, evaluator, and strategy partner to major US and international initiatives, including the National Science Foundation’s EarthCube initiative (building cyber infrastructure in the hard sciences for the 21st century), N Square (the cross-roads for nuclear security innovation), Horizon 2045 (an audacious project to end the nuclear weapons century), Humanity United and the Freedom Fund’s joint effort to end slavery in the seafood industry, ClimateWorks sustainable finance initiative, the Ford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies’ global Narrative Initiative, and Imaginable Future’s work to transform education systems in Kenya and Brazil, among many others.
At the School of System Change
Jewlya is a member of the MEL in Systems Change Inquiry Group hosted by the School of System Change in 2023. The inquiry group convened people specialising in monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) to co-produce thought pieces on what is emerging in MEL in the field of systems change as well as bridge traditional MEL with complexity-informed developmental MEL. Learn more about the project.
With Julia Coffman, Jewlya is teaching two related courses on mental models in systems change in February 2025. One course is for philanthropic partners, recognising that power dynamics are part of how we navigate differences in mental models. The other is more generally focused for anyone engaging in systems change work.
