Jess Rimington
Jess Rimington is a next-economy strategist, practitioner, and scholar focused on ethics and methodologies of emerging post-capitalisms.
Her practice and research is grounded in historical analysis, accessible truth-telling, present-day prototyping, and imagination. Jess is a small-business leader and considers herself a microeconomic activist. She writes and speaks regularly about practices to help businesses and groups move out of the neoliberal culture and structures of late capitalism.
From 2015 to 2019, Jess served as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Global Projects Center, co-leading an ambitious research effort with more than 50 collaborators and cases across the U.S. In applying this research, she has co-led several multi-stakeholder co-creation processes amongst finance, philanthropic, government, small business, and community actors focused on developing new models of economic interaction grounded in emerging, next system values. The research is shared in the book Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work (2022) and a podcast series. You can learn more about Beloved Economies here.
For over a decade, Jess has supported nonprofit and business enterprises in transforming their internal work practice to be in alignment with their justice-oriented missions. Her applied work has been informed by eleven years of experience leading two global nonprofit organizations. As both an Executive Director and Managing Director, she built cross-cultural staff teams with innovative work cultures rooted in post-capitalist frameworks.
Today, Jess's work is focused on awakening the economic imagination of individuals and groups, cultivating their ability to step out of the current system and into a more resilient next paradigm by transforming the way they work. She also supports the documentation and translation of next economy cases and ideas into accessible media and tools for mainstream audiences. She is a Co-Creator and Executive Producer of The Light Ahead podcast.
Jess's collaborative, grassroots research is housed in the Lab of Possible Futures. She also offers practical resources and hosts learning conversations through the School of Possible Futures.
Her early career was spent in popular education, creating curriculum, rubrics, guides, and training.
Select past keynotes & speaking events
Her Story
My parents married in their teens, left school, and forged their own path. They pledged to never work for someone else. This commitment, coupled with the lack of an "entry-pass" to opportunity from formal education, sometimes meant the bill collectors were calling. But my parents taught me of the abundance that exists in what really matters, and to remember that money is just a human invention…