Thank You To Jessica Lipnack

It is with both sadness for us and excitement for her that we report Jessica Lipnack, BFI’s co-chair, is stepping down from the board. Jessica has played a critical role over the past two years, providing invaluable assistance during the Institute’s move from NYC to San Francisco. As the author of six books on collaboration and networked organizations, including The Networking Book for which Buckminster Fuller wrote the foreword, Jessica’s pioneering work has benefited BFI immensely. She helped both expand and deepen our thinking about how to engage the global community of accomplished and aspiring design scientists and brought her writing and editorial skills to bear on our communication.

The BFI board is deeply grateful for Jessica’s creative input, clear thinking, attention to details, and eloquent consideration of others. All of these qualities have helped to lay the groundwork for the next phase of the Institute’s development.

Jessica met Buckminster Fuller in the 1970s and became life-long friends with his daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, and his grandchildren, Alexandra May, and Jaime Snyder. About the same time, she discovered the work of Bucky’s great aunt, the prolific feminist-futurist, Margaret Fuller. Jessica’s writings on the Fuller family can be found here.

We are happy to report that this departure enables Jessica to focus exclusively on her nonfiction writings (see her recent essay in Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent), and on her novel-trilogy, Women in the 21st Century, in which Margaret Fuller returns as a ghost to update her 19th-century treatise on “woman”—and in which Bucky is a character. For an excerpt from the first volume of Jessica’s trilogy, see “Some Peculiar Errand,” a finalist in the Solstice Literary Magazine’s Novel-Exerpt contest. Ander her direct contribution to Bucky’s work continues as a member of the board of the Dome of Contemporary Arts, a visual and performing arts center planned for Bucky’s iconic and oldest extant dome that he participated in the building of in Woods Hole, Massachusetts USA.