ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Photo by Ruby Somera
CARRIE MELISSA JONES is a community leader, entrepreneur, and community consultant who has been creating community online since the early 2000s.
Her work influences the world’s leading brand communities, including the American Medical Association, Brainly, Buffer, Google, and Nerdwallet. In 2016, Salesforce’s Mathew Sweezey named Jones one of three experts to follow on community management.
As the founder of Gather Community Consulting, she consults brands to build robust new communities and audit existing communities, and trains brands to lead their own communities. She has worked with organizations including Brainly (the world’s largest social learning network), the American Medical Association, and nonprofits including DoSomething.org and Canada’s PovNet. Together these brands connect well over one hundred million people worldwide.
In 2014, Jones joined CMX and served as COO and founding partner until 2017. CMX (acquired by Bevy Labs in 2019) provides training, events, and programs for community builders around the world. It now boasts a twenty-thousand-person and growing membership. With CMX, Jones trained teams at Google and Facebook, and community leaders within Salesforce, Airbnb, ADP, Discovery Channel, and other firms.
Her writing has appeared in Venture Beat, The Next Web, First Round Review, and CMS Wire.
Jones continues to volunteer with Seattle-based organizations, including Young Women Empowered and Empower Washington. She has a BA from UCLA in both English and mass communication. She is pursuing an MA in communication at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Photo by Tony Deifell
CHARLES H. VOGL supports leaders in for-profit, nonprofit, and civic organizations to grow in alignment with their core values. He draws from the realm of spiritual traditions to understand how individuals build loyalty, strengthen identity, and live out shared values. These principles apply to both secular and spiritual leadership.
Vogl teaches how to build critical connections that change lives and global organizations, and impact generations. He believes that every effective leader relies on a community of stakeholders on which their success depends. Several of the world’s most well-known companies use his work worldwide to connect the people most important for their success.
His book The Art of Community distills concepts from three thousand years of spiritual traditions so that leaders can use them to create a culture of belonging in any organization, field, or movement. The book won a Nautilus Silver Award for business and leadership writing.
His book Storytelling for Leadership draws on his experience as both an American PBS documentary filmmaker and a human rights advocate to teach leaders to share the truth with emotional resonance.
After conducting his own work in human rights advocacy on three continents, he went on to study leaders in social movements, business, and spiritual traditions at Yale University. He earned a master of divinity degree as a Jesse Ball DuPont foundation scholar and continues as a regular guest lecturer at Yale.
He lives in beautiful Oakland, California, where on good days he sits with his best friends without talking, because they don’t have to.