Biography

Mike Bell is a management consultant specializing in communications, group animation and community and organizational development. He honed his skills as a public speaker, writer, trainer and group animator in a wide variety of work environments.

After spending a dozen years in a Roman Catholic monastery, Mike worked as a priest in New York City and Baltimore. He gave retreats, served as a chaplain in jails and hospitals, and worked in various inner-city poverty programs. In the late 60s he went to Paris, France where worked on a theology degree and served as a student chaplain on a large campus for international students. He worked with students during the student riots that broke out in May of 1968.

In the 70s, Mike worked as a community organizer in Milwaukee's East Side counter-culture drug community, as a consultant with an architectural firm in Vancouver, and as an administrator for two community health centres in northern British Columbia. In 1980 he moved to Baffin Island in the Eastern Arctic and worked for three years as the Superintendent of Social Services for the Government of the Northwest Territories. In 1983 Mike and his family moved to Yellowknife where he held senior management positions with the territorial government.

In 1986 he set up his own consulting firm, Inukshuk Management Consultants, to do community and organizational development work. Since then he has worked on a wide variety of projects in the areas of community justice, health care and addictions, education, political and economic development and community planning. Much of his work focuses on the development of aboriginal self governments that will take over or develop their own forms of public government.

Mike is an expert group animator and trainer. He runs small-groups workshops and focus group sessions using his storyboarding technique. He also works with large groups (30-100 participants) and runs Future Search and Open Space Conferences. Most of these are community-based planning activities to develop community visions, wellness strategies and economic development strategies. He provides foundation workshops and organizational retreats in community development, strategic planning, board development, leadership training and teambuilding. He also provides a variety of communication workshops.

Mike has a special interest in helping to build a conceptual bridge that links the traditional teachings of aboriginal elders with the insights of the new science and cosmology. These insights are leading to a growing awareness that organizations and communities are organisms, are part of a living universe, have a self-organizing capability and are guided by the same developmental principles that guide the development of the earth itself. Mike has written a number of research papers on this subject and these have been distributed widely.

Mike has an M.A in Communications from the University of Wisconsin, and an M.A. in Theology from St. Paul's University in Ottawa. He has done postgraduate work in communications and theology in a number of universities in the U.S. and France.

In June 2006, after 26 years living in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Mike and his wife moved to Comox, British Columbia.  He continues to work on northern projects,  most of them in the area of aboriginal self-government.