JESS SCULLY IS A LEADER WITH VISION
SUBJECT
Jess Scully
OCCUPATION
Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney
LOCATION
Sydney, Australia
DATE
July, 2020
Jess Scully is the embodiment of hope. Every time we connect, the conversation expands immediately into a bold, audacious vision of what more we could all be doing. Over wines and whiskey sours, our catch ups have punctuated various jobs over various years and the joyful urgency she brings deepens every time. Jess is infectious.
As we chat over our COVID-inflicted Zoom call, she sits in the courtyard of her home in Sydney, and her partner Pat pops into the screen to say hi with their daughter Elinor for a quick cuddle. Used to seeing Jess on the stages of city halls and theatres around Sydney leading public discourse, I’m heartened by this snapshot of domestic family life and the reality of a vivaciously authentic leader balancing both.
Those we think of as truly wise aren’t generally wise because of epiphanies and light-bulb moments. They’re wise because they carry something innately profound within them from childhood. Jess’ fight for social justice started early and runs deep. Her insatiable determination as the Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney has her seeking out regenerative opportunities the world over. She is determined to do nothing less than pivot our communities from an extraction economy to a regenerative one – and it’s not just lip service. Jess is in the work: talking to the people, focusing on the care economy, inviting citizen juries, rebuilding policy frameworks, elevating storytellers, re-visioning our cities. She straddles the dreaming and the doing.
It all begins at the community level. It’s not enough to comment on politics from the cheap seats as so many of us do – it’s about elevating the civic conversation and involving a truly representative community to rebuild policy from the simple ripples created when we each home in on what it is we care about and see a better alternative for. It’s a gift to us all that Jess Scully is in the world, and her book,
Glimpses of Utopia is an offering to inspire a hopeful vision for what the future could be and what our children’s generation deserve.
ELEANOR GAMMELL: So I want to begin by framing this moment we’re in. It’s been a year of brutal intensity for a lot of people – environmentally, emotionally, physically, economically and politically. It’s also been an intense moment, in the reckoning that change is needed more than ever, to a system that was built to sustain itself. What has been coming up for you during
2020, and how have you been processing it all?
JESS SCULLY: I think it’s been so disruptive and traumatic for a lot of people all over the world. It is a year of reckoning, in that our lifestyles have caught up with us, and the unsustainability of everything we’ve been doing has been exposed. I have always thought that just more energy, more work, more connections and more, more, more, being out more, being more visible, that’s what I needed to do. That was the only way that I could contribute. I had to just keep working and picking up projects. And when you hit a wall like this year, I think it’s what a lot of people would experience with an illness perhaps, where they are forced to re-evaluate how they live. It’s happened for me on a personal level, and I think it’s also happened to our society in that we’ve realised a lot of the practices we had and particularly the economy that we’ve had has been about endless growth, about extraction and also about drawing people from overseas to spend money. Being very outwardly focused has diminished all of a sudden. We’re having to turn to our inner reserves of strength, whether that’s as individuals, as families or as smaller local communities or even
