My friend Lois Graessle, who has died aged 73, was a creative and inspiring mentor, teacher and writer, involved with many organisations and individuals.
Born in Jacksonville, Florida, to Lois Thacker and Albert Graessle Jr, both lawyers, Lois studied journalism at Northwestern University, in Illinois. During her student years, she marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery. Lois settled in the UK in 1967, after she had worked and hitchhiked from Europe to Japan.
Lois was closely involved in the 60s feminist movement: editing Shrew, the first women’s movement newsletter; helping to organise the first protest against a Miss World contest and the first National Women’s Liberation Conference at Oxford in 1970; and putting feminist stickers on degrading posters – or men’s behinds. After working with NGOs helping disaffected teenagers in London, she worked with education bodies to create unconventional routes into higher education and met Eric Bourne, whom she married in 1990.
A revelation on Waterloo Bridge – that she didn’t want any more bosses – led to 35 years of work as a respected freelance adviser. Lois used her unique “perspective of the outsider” and her soft American accent to gently question and articulate the challenges of organisations, groups and individuals. She would then find creative ways to help them (re)discover the practical inspiration in their work and find solutions.
Lois worked with a variety of educational, public sector and non-profit organisations supporting the most vulnerable in society, including Refugee Action, Water Aid, the Mental Health Foundation, Shelter, the International Tibet Network, Vietnamese community groups and many others. She received an honorary master’s degree from Buckinghamshire New University for her work.
Lois wrote or co-authored 11 books on subjects such as collaborative ways of planning, teamwork and meeting; managing money; refugee community organising and oral history; and biographies of two of her mentors. The book she wrote with the cartoonist and illustrator Steven Appleby, Blessed Mess – Tales of Living, Loving and Dying With Stuff, is due to be published later this year.
Though she missed the Florida beaches, Lois enjoyed life on the Thames in London and in Milldale in the Peak District, where she and Eric had a home, and where she was involved in book art, meditation and community groups. She had a unique talent for friendship; her large, diverse, global group of friends included professors, shopkeepers, artists, taxi drivers and CEOs.
Eric died in 2014. Lois is survived by her four siblings, Nancy, Julie, Bill and Bob, and her two stepdaughters, Deborah and Susan.
