Meet the J&M Team: Mary

We’d like to use this forum to introduce you to some of our J&M all-stars.  Each of our employees has come to J&M with interesting work-related and personal experiences that you may not know about.  First up is our analyst, Mary Curry-Ledbetter.

Mary joined us just about a year ago. She started part-time and was immediately immersed in a complex change management project. We liked her so much that we decided to bring her on full-time. Since becoming a “J&Mer,” she has been involved in organizational development efforts, preparedness exercises, mitigation-related outreach and communications, and post-disaster economic recovery activities. She has been a great addition.

Before joining J&M, Mary was involved in program management, looking at projects critically to identifying ways to improve program delivery.  During her internship with the U.S. Economic Development Administration, she assisted in the evaluation of grant programs aimed at investing resources in communities to promote job creation and economic development.  Her efforts included assisting senior management with design and implementation of an interagency grant application review process and developing and analyzing customer satisfaction surveys.

While studying history at Rhodes College in Tennessee, Mary served as president of Rhodes Rebuilds, a student-led service organization that assists in rebuilding hurricane-damaged homes in New Orleans.  Not only did she work hard to establish strong relationships with home owners and community organizations, Mary reviewed and then updated the application, budget, and fundraising processes.  By simplifying unnecessarily complex activities, she made Rhodes Rebuilds into a recognized program notable for its positive outcomes at the family and community level.

Whether its managing volunteers or review processes, Mary has shown her ability to evaluate and improve upon past practices to increase efficiency.  Not only that, she has also demonstrated her aptitude for translating complex ideas into easy to understand language, a skill that we are harnessing as part of our workshop development efforts.  J&M is currently preparing a three-hour economic resilience workshop and rural economic recovery panel as part of RES/CON 2017, a resilience conference to be held in New Orleans March 7-9, 2017, that has both a domestic and international audience.  J&M will provide a deeper understanding and path to economic resilience by sharing case studies, best practices and actionable tools.  If you are planning to attend RES/CON, stop by and say, “hi!”