The obligatory bio
I remember the first time my dad met Jo Green. He said, "She will be your friend for life." He was right. Our souls touched immediately, and forty years on we are still best friends. We have seen
life together, the positive and the negative, and we support and encourage
each other with integrity, spirit and love.
Having grown up in the Catholilc Church and left it in my early twenties, I trod a solitary spiritual path for years afterward. I started meditating in 1973, and as my awareness grew through meditation I began to read and study spirituality and metaphysics. By experiencing Divine Light in many ways, I recognized that my strong intuitive abilities, listening skills and problem solving acumen worked together, the intellectual being informed by the spiritual. I also began to see very clearly the connection between spirituality and the arts, and I walked a career path that supported artists in doing their work.
From 1970 to 1995, I worked with artists and arts organizations, where I wrote every conceivable kind of document, from actors' bios to mission statements, including two handbooks under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. My guiding principle was always to help artists and organizations to find the appropriate words to connect with their audiences and donors. My focus has always been communication: to break down barriers and to create and develop paths to clarity and constructive communication.
I helped stabilize and grow organizations and advised individual artists on funding. I worked across cultures and artistic disciplines, with new, small and expanding organizations. My clients addressed a broad spectrum of objectives and cultural missions, and reached many different audiences with varying needs and expectations.
In a career that included full-time staff positions, board membership, consulting and writing, I worked with widely diverse organizations, for example, Sacred Sites International Foundation, NAYAEE--Native American Youth Art Exhibit and Exchange, Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts, and the League of Historic American Theatres. I was also founding president and general manager of Upstart Stage, a theatre company devoted to reading and producing new plays; and I started and ran two service-oriented businesses.
In 1990 a deliberate "church search" brought me to Strawberry Creek Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). A friend and I, both with our own personal spiritual practices, both wanting a spiritual community, set out to find one by attending as many different services and events as it took to find a spiritual home. We looked at each other knowingly only moments after entering silent meeting for worship one Sunday morning, and Strawberry Creek has been my spiritual community ever since. Even 6,000 miles away, now living in England, I feel connected to my home meeting.
For most of the 1990s I focussed on personal writing, dividing my time between that and some coaching and editing, pursued peace and forgiveness studies. I completed Stanford University's Forgive for Good seminars with Fred Luskin, the founder of the Stanford program; and the Peace Empowerment Process™ of the World Wall for Peace with Carolyna Marks, creator of the process.
Qualifications: MA, Arts Management, American University, Washington, D.C.; BA, History, University of California, Berkeley. MA, Thesis Pending, International Management (including cross-cultural communication), School for International Training, Brattleboro,Vermont; Certificate in the Eight Training Compentencies, American Society for Training and [Human Resource] Development; Teaching Certificate in Adult Literacy. Completed Forgive for Good, Stanford University. Qualified facilitator, Peace Empowerment Process of the World Wall for Peace.
