Linda Stout

Linda Stout has been a grassroots organizer and activist for three decades. As a thirteenth-generation Quaker born to a tenant-farming family in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, Linda first recognized racial and economic injustice in the mid-1970s. In 1985, after several years working for a civil rights law office, she founded a successful grassroots organization called the Piedmont Peace Project. PPP quickly attracted national attention for its success in drawing leadership from within a poor and working-class community and building an organization where a high level of diversity was achieved and maintained at every level.

In order to work at the national level, Linda Stout accepted the Executive Director position at the Peace Development Fund in 1995. Under Linda’s leadership, PDF tripled its grant making capacity and initiated several groundbreaking projects, including the Community Media Organizing Project, the Southeast Training for Trainers Program and the National Listening Project on creating a winning movement for change.

She is also the founder director of Spirit in Action, an organization that seeks out transformative tools, models and resources for building a powerful and visionary progressive movement.

Linda is the author of 100’s of articles and a critically acclaimed book, Bridging the Class Divide. Her awards and honors include a Public Policy Fellowship from Harvard and Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College, Scholar in Residence at University of Madison, Wisconsin, Honorary Doctorate of Allegheny College, the Freedom Fighter Award of the Equal Rights Congress, the Petra Foundation Fellowship and Studs Terkel’s profile of her life in his new book, Hope Dies Last.

In 1990, Linda and Piedmont Peace Project was awarded the National Grassroots Peace Award. She has been active in several volunteer organizations including Class Action, United for a Fair Economy and the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute Economic Justice Task Force. Always a crusader for justice speaking from the heart, Linda has given over 600 lectures, sermons and workshops in the last 30 years in an effort to use her voice to unite change-makers to create a just world.

Her newest book, Collective Visioning shows how to create an inspiring vision, including a process for building trust so that people from every background work together with passion, commitment and joy.