Dr. Jayne Engle

Director, Cities & Places Portfolio The McConnell Foundation

Dr. Jayne Engle leads the Cities and Places portfolio at the McConnell Foundation, where her team has built an ecosystemic approach to inclusive urban innovation. The portfolio includes Cities for People, Participatory Canada, Civic-Indigenous 7.0, RegX, and Community Wealth / Civic Capital, and recently they co-founded the Emergence Room, an ‘anti-war room’ for the new context created by Covid.

Prior to McConnell Jayne worked globally at the intersection of insurgent city planning, long-range policy innovation, participatory research, and economic and social change. Her experience ranges from urban regeneration in cities of North America and Western Europe, to contexts of deep societal change, including directing an entrepreneurship centre in Slovakia following the fall of communism, and post-disaster community research in Haiti following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake.

Jayne is passionate about bridging transformative community action on the ground with policy and systems change, particularly in ways that foster freedom and flourishing of people. She is Adjunct Professor at McGill University and holds a PhD in Urban Planning, Policy and Design. She lives in Montreal, Canada with her two wonderful teenagers and is excited to be working on a new collaborative book project called Sacred Civics, exploring how to value differently what matters now, in society’s great reset.

Twitter: @JayneEngle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayneengle/