Terry Lowe, Ph.D.

Terry Lowe is Director of Strategy, Communications & Special Projects for The UCLA Family Commons. You’ll find her mark on this website, in all of our print materials, and on many of our programs and projects. For over 20 years Terry has been developing and managing programs, fundraising, and creating strategic communications for organizations working in a wide range of fields: youth development, the environment, economic justice, and women’s health, among others. Before that she was a philosopher, teaching briefly at Cornell University and San Jose State University.

Terry’s favorite thing to do is… write, especially poetry. She’s also busy raising two teenagers, a 14-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter. Terry and her children traveled to South Africa twice with The UCLA Family Commons’ Global Buddies program, where she discovered a newfound love of international travel. She’s made peace – more or less – with the fact that she will probably always spend more time sitting in front of a computer screen than is really good for her.

Before her involvement in The UCLA Family Commons, Terry would have said that the habit she’d been hoping to change for years was to get more exercise. However, she was so inspired by her talks with our Ambassadors – and so struck by the research she reviewed for this website about the positive effects of activity – that she decided she had to find a way to get her body moving. She’s now in love with Nia, a combination of modern dance, martial arts and yoga whose fundamental principal is the joy of movement. Terry’s at Nia classes two to three times a week these days, and hopes that her delight in this practice will keep her from getting too busy to fit it in. Next on the self-improvement agenda: scaling back her email and Facebook habits in favor of spending more face-to-face time with the people she cares about.