Susan began her professional career in the early 1980s as an educator with the Justice Institute of British Columbia. In 1984, she moved from a focus on justice issues at home to work on international ones, first with Canada World Youth and subsequently with the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada.

From 1985 to 1990, she served as the organization’s project officer for its Nepal and Indonesia programs. She moved to the helm of the World Food Association next, then spent over ten years as the Director for Latin American Programs with the Winnipeg-headquartered Canadian Lutheran World Relief.

Susan returned to Ottawa and USC Canada in 2004 to become its Executive Director. She helped to steer the organization into a focus on farmers and sustainable farming livelihoods that begin with secure seed systems.

A contract opportunity to review the educational programming at the Coady International Institute of St. Francis Xavier University lured Susan to Antigonish, Nova Scotia in the fall of 2016. Coady draws development practitioners from around the world for leadership education on asset-based and citizen-led social change. Susan has since turned to writing fiction and in 2018 won the Nova Scotia Writers’ Federation’s W.H. (Bill) Percy Award for her first long-fiction manuscript tentatively titled, Where the Lamprey’s Meet.

Susan holds degrees from Simon Fraser University and a doctoral degree from the University of Manitoba in Development Anthropology. Her doctoral experience among indigenous farmers and the NGOs in the Bolivian highlands is the focus of this book.

She has also been active within global policy networks related to food, farming, biodiversity, agroecology and rural livelihoods, the most recent being the Civil Society Mechanism of the Committee on World Food Security. Susan enjoys sharing her experiences and insights about these important areas and is available for interviews and public engagements.