Hi! I’m Megan Goering Mellin.

By Day

I’m currently building a program and ecosystem at Stanford for Ethics, Tech + Public Policy for Practitioners. I love connecting with leaders and ecosystem members at the crossroads of tech, society, and governance, and hope you’ll apply by August 25, 2023. (No Stanford affiliation required!)

This year, the focus of this program is to transition from a 7-week semi-underground course for professionals toward a Community of Practice.

By day, I also coach Impact Entrepreneurs. I work with founders, leaders, and innovators who are motivated by a spirited desire for impact that uplifts themselves and others. Recently, my practice has focused in on Businesses Ending Oppression, through arcs of embodied abundance (starting from true self, right relationship, and systems awareness), business as healing, and aligned scale. I’ve been described as a lightning bolt, and love jazzing people up about the critical importance of each person’s unique purpose!

As a person, I ask, “Who gets to create and innovate?” again and again. I tend to return to the question, “Whose voices matter?” Growing up in Topeka, Kansas in the late 1980s and 1990s, I learned under the John Brown mural in the Kansas State Capitol Building that everyone’s voices must. Reconciling that perspective with the activism of the Westboro Baptist Church, six blocks from my house, was a formative experience of learning how radically our beliefs can inform the societies and communities we live in. I’m ethnically Mennonite, the granddaughter of a doctor, a nurse, an engineer, and artist. I’ve come to care deeply about the dignity and wellbeing everyday neighbors get to experience based on the way we shape our opinions and believing. I strive to use my freedom of speech, thought, and action to shape a more congruent and integrous neighbor for the web of life around me. As a matter of integrity, I proactive viewing people with power as people, and people without power as people with inborn greatness.

I practice ecological and personal integration through Way of Nature and farming dahlias, basils, and tomatillos at First Light Farm.

On the Side

On the side, I read, write, explore, and build companies and products. I also teach, advise, and codevelop/produce online courses on creativity. I’ve co-lead the Cohort Based Course Approachable Design with Nate Kadlac for a few years now, and am midway through recording a podcast on Empowered Communication (for toxic workplace environments!) with the inimitable Meredith Holley of Eris Conflict Resolution (stay tuned - ETA ~September 2023!).

I’ve worked in management consulting, corporate fraud and financial investigations, venture capital, SaaS tech, professional services, design/design thinking, philanthropy/nonprofit sector, and online and offline education.

I’ve studied and taught Prototype Thinking with Tom Chi and J Li, which still influences me massively. I helped NASDAQ build the early stages of its Milestone Maker accelerator, including coaching programs, innovation content, and program structure.

Teaching innovation and upskilling and encouraging innovators from every background continues to be a lifelong passion. I love collaborating with organizations like Pracademy in Bergen, Norway, Mina Raver’s incredible 2K Days Project, NASDAQ, and other global crews. I’m a passionate member of Rachel Rodgers’ “We Should All Be Millionaires: the Club,” a wonderful place to meet other diverse entrepreneurs and changemakers. I co-lead my local Stanford GSB Women in Management circle.

In the Heart

In December 2021, I became a mom! Orion Mellin is a fresh shot of stardust and re-minds and returns us to the practice of being deeply, fallibly, interconnectedly human on the journey of parenting. I learned a lot about systems leadership and large-scale systems change as an Master’s student at Stanford GSB, but I find myself most in awe around the incredible leaders in the Snoqualmie Valley east of Seattle who run families and moms’ groups, community farms, and Tribal leadership structures (and their related community stewardship institutions). I’m an active practitioner of anti-oppression and deradicalization of racism and civic dehumanization. The roots of my practice feel most nourished in the presence of justice & joy, adult sleepovers with raucously hilarious friends, devotion to grief and honest feeling through writing and experimental frankness, and courageously reclaiming and rebalancing righteous rage. (Antiracism work and nondomination/abuse work is the #1 health intervention I would recommend for white Americans concerned for our long-term private and public health.)

I’m an Enneagram 8w7 and my favorite article is Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. I love building ways of animating that work and most of my favorite readings, like workshops on systems thinking & prototyping to shift student loan exploitation and experimental courses for activists and adult students of all ages, who are curious to leverage the tools of human-centered design and systems seeing for rehumanizing and rebalancing systems visions.

We can do AMAZING things together. I hope you’ll reach out if it’s time to get up to incredible things in community!