E. F. Schumacher Society Executive Director

 
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Susan Witt was the Executive Director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, seeing through its transition to the New Economics Institute which she now serves as Interim Director.

In his book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Dr. Schumacher argued for a system of diverse regional economies based on social and ecological principles. The Schumacher Society was organized to implement these ideals. It maintained a research library, organized lectures and seminars, published papers, developed model economic programs, and provided technical assistance to groups working to build sustainable local economies by linking people, land, and community.

Susan Witt helped found the Society in 1980 and led the development of its highly regarded programs while at the same time remaining deeply committed to implementing Schumacher’s economic ideas in her home region of the Berkshires. She helped found the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires in 1980 and has been responsible for many of the innovative financing and contracting methods that the Land Trust uses to create more affordable access to land. In 2006 she co-founded the BerkShares local currency program that has won unprecedented international media attention as a model for other regions. She created and administered the SHARE micro-credit program, the precursor of BerkShares, and in 1985 helped Robyn VanEn form the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in this country at Indian Line Farm.

Her essays appear in Rooted in the Land edited by William Vitek and Wes Jackson (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1996); People, Land, and Community: Collected E. F. Schumacher Society Lectures edited by Hildegarde Hannum (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1997); A Forest of Voices: Conversations in Ecology edited by Chris Anderson and Lex Runciman (Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, CA, 2000); Environmental Activists edited by John Mongillo (Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT 2001); The Money Changers: Currency Reform from Aristotle to E-cash edited by David Boyle (Earthscan Publications, London, UK, 2002); in the 1999 edition of Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by Ernest Fritz Schumacher (Hartley and Marks Publishers, Point Roberts, WA and Vancouver, BC, 1999); The Essential Agrarian Reader edited by Norman Wirzberg (University Press of Kentucky, 2003); and What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs edited by Stephen Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth (New Village Press, 2010).

Susan Witt speaks regularly on the topic of citizen responsibility for shaping local economies. Her work has been described in various radio, TV, book, magazine, newspaper, and on-line interviews.

Her B.A. is in English Literature from Boston University and M.A. in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire. She trained in Waldorf Education at Emerson College in England.

She names among her primary influences: Jane Jacobs, Leo Tolstoy, Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Robert Swann, Rudolf Steiner, and her colleagues at the E. F. Schumacher Society and New Economics Institute. She loves her hillside home, her garden, her Great Barrington community, and she loves to travel. Once an Executive Director is appointed for the New Economics Institute, Ms Witt will become the Institute's Education Director.

Archive of Susan Witt's articles and essays

To contact Susan Witt:
New Economics Institute
c/o E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230 USA
(413) 528-1737
neweconomics@neweconomicsinstitute.org
www.neweconomicsinstitute.org

 

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