ESSENTIAL PARTNERS - Key Persons
Adam is a Consultant for Essential Partners as well as a coach, facilitator, and trainer specializing in relationship management, negotiation, dialogue & effective communication and leadership development.
He has worked internationally with Fortune 500 companies, non-profit organizations, government agencies, academic institutions, communities and individuals. As a practitioner with Essential Partners he helps clients better understand and improve their relationships and communication amidst conflict driven by difference in identities, beliefs and values.
This work has included training community facilitators to lead dialogue on Race and Religious Bias among 56 religious communities in Howard County, MD, a program spearheaded by Rep. Elijah Cummings and supported by other members of federal and local government. Prior to his practitioner role with Essential Partners, Adam served on their Board of Directors from 2015-2018.
Adam holds an MBA from Brandeis University focusing on Social Impact Management and Entrepreneurship and a BA from Goucher College in Peace Studies, Philosophy and Religion. He is a certified mediator through the Harvard Mediation Program as well as Harvard trained in negotiation and dispute resolution, advanced mediation and difficult conversations. He is also a certified Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) practitioner.
Adam has practiced mindfulness meditation for 20 years and weaves mindfulness theory and practices into client engagements where appropriate. Originally from Boston, MA, Adam received early training in conflict resolution from his identical twin brother.
Allyson Bachta is an Associate at Essential Partners, a PhD candidate at the McCormack School of Policy and Global Studies at University of Massachusetts, and currently works as a researcher on the Learning and Evidence team at Alliance for Peacebuilding. Allyson holds an M.Ed in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and M.S. in Global and International Education from Drexel University.
As a certified teacher and school administrator, Allyson worked in Massachusetts' K-12 public schools as a high school Biology teacher and elementary school assistant principal from 2000-2018 with a 2-year hiatus to teach overseas at the American International School of Zagreb, Croatia. Allyson is passionate about supporting educators at all levels and experience of practice in incorporating trauma-sensitive, restorative, and positive behavior intervention practices into their roles within the entire school community.
Allyson studies how governments may or may not participate in domestic and international peace building and reconciliation; patterns of violence associated with attacks on schools, students, and teachers, and international law associated with children's human rights and the United Nations system.
She has conducted research for the university's Conflict Early Warning and Analytics Program (CEWAP) and served as primary research assistant to Professor Padraig O'Malley, John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at University of Massachusetts Boston on his book The Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland (2023) on Brexit's impact on the Northern Ireland peace process.
Job Titles:
- Consultant
- Consultant With Essential Partners and a Senior Mediator at Boston Law Collaborative
Audrey Lee is a Consultant with Essential Partners and a Senior Mediator at Boston Law Collaborative, LLC where she specializes in resolving workplace conflicts and facilitating dispute resolution workshops. In her work, she brings a dialogue-centered approach to create spaces conducive to constructive learning.
As a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, Audrey teaches courses on Mediation and Diversity & Dispute Resolution. Since 2016, she has also served as affiliate faculty for the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, currently as a lead faculty for the Harvard Mediation Intensive. Previously, she has also served as a mediator for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.
In her consulting practice, Audrey works with clients to increase their effectiveness in difficult workplace conversations and negotiations. Drawing on her experience as a mediator and conflict management consultant, Audrey has worked with clients ranging from musicians at the League of American Orchestras, mediators at the Australian Fair Work Commission, and lawyers at Am Law 100 firms. Audrey has been featured in Harvard Business Review's "Insights" series on Leadership and Managing People and in the BBC Capital's Work Ethic column, and her writing on mediation and dispute resolution has appeared in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review and Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal, among other publications. Audrey is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law school and resides in the greater Boston area with her family.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Board of Directors
- Director of Health Policy
Brendan Abel is Chair of the Board of Directors for Essential Partners. Brendan is a Director of Health Policy and Advocacy Johnson & Johnson, where he works with health care professionals, patients, and employers to inform and connect on policy issues affecting access to care.
Prior to J&J, he was the Director of Government Affairs at the Massachusetts Medical Society, where he directed the state and federal legislative affairs for the organization representing over 25,000 physicians in the Commonwealth.
Brendan also serves on the teaching faculty at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, where he teaches a course on health law, policy, and bioethics, among other teaching and mentoring responsibilities.
Upon completing undergraduate studies at Syracuse University, Brendan earned his JD from Suffolk University Law School. He completed a fellowship in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School.
Brendan lives in Ashland, Massachusetts with his wife, Emily, their children June and Griffin, and their COVID-rescue dog Sasha.
Brian Blancke Ph.D. is an Associate with Essential Partners and a senior consultant at Vantage Partners, a Boston-based consulting and training firm. He is an instructional designer and trainer in negotiation, relationship management, and influence. In this capacity, he has worked with a large number of Fortune 500 companies across many industries, including animal health, to design skill development programs for individual contributors through executives.
Dr. Blancke is also adjunct faculty at Bay Path University's Master's in Leadership and Negotiation program, where he teaches a course on three key topics of negotiation-emotions, trust and culture. Prior to Bay Path, Dr. Blancke taught in Creighton University's Masters in Negotiation and Dispute Resolution program.
Besides training and teaching, Dr. Blancke conducts research and writes on developing mastery in negotiation and conflict resolution through developing multidimensional practice. He has published articles and chapters in Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, PON Books, and Jossey-Bass.
He is also pursuing a certificate in somatic coaching from the Strozzi Institute. Dr. Blancke holds a Ph.D. in Social Science and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Conflict Resolution from Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Cara Cargill is an Associate at Essential Partners. Cara also works as a facilitator and mediator covering a spectrum of subjects from agriculture, food systems, land access, to family systems, and civic engagement. The civic engagement dialogues have included such topics as mental health, substance use, community-police relations, transportation, environmental resiliency, education, and strategic planning for communities. She has also done projects related to animal welfare.
Currently, she works as a mediator and program coordinator for the New Hampshire Agricultural Mediation Program, as the New Hampshire field agent for Land For Good, as a contractor with the State of New Hampshire as the North Country FAIR facilitator, as a New Hampshire Listens Carsey Fellow and an associate of Essential Partners. Cara received her MS in Mediation and Applied Conflict studies from the Woodbury Institute of Champlain College and her BA in Political Science and Environmental Studies from Mount Holyoke.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Carole Kasper is a member of the Board of Directors at Essential Partners. Originally raised in New England with deep family roots in the region, Carole has lived in various parts of the United States and traveled extensively throughout the world.
Prior to founding and helming an organization development consulting company based initially in Denver and then in Greater Boston, Carole was partner and senior consultant in a Washington-D.C.-based consulting firm, account manager in an Atlanta-based change-management firm, and a professional administrator at two major New England universities. She has considerable background as an external collaborator with public organizations at every level of federal, state, county, regional, and local government, with experience consulting, training, and facilitating in the private and non-profit sectors as well. Carole was named the founding Kidder Scholar during her years at The University of Vermont, before graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Communication Science and receiving the university-wide Mary Jean Simpson Award.
Carole holds a Master of Education (M.Ed.) from the University of Massachusetts / Amherst, with a specialized focus in Multicultural Organization Development. At UMASS, she taught the College of Education's Social Diversity semester course, while also facilitating workshops with the Social Issues Training Project. Carole completed an additional year of graduate course work within Boston University's College of Education, and has also earned various post-graduate professional certifications. She offers 20+ years of volunteer experience as a board member, community leader, local contributor, and publicly-elected official in two MA municipalities.
Carole has been a proud and consistent supporter of The Public Conversations Project, now Essential Partners, for 25+ years. Early in her career as a process facilitator and practitioner, she began integrating dialoguing into her diversity consulting and training approach within client systems. These dialogic conversations, centered in deeper understanding among participants, began to transform human systems from within, resulting in strengthened workplace relationships and increased performance effectiveness within teams and organizations broadly. Carole and her husband raised their two now-college-age sons in the suburbs of Boston. The family enjoys nature, travel, and ongoing community volunteering and connections.
Job Titles:
- Founding Associate Emerita
Corky Becker, Ph.D., is a Founding Associate of Essential Partners. She is a clinical psychologist, family and couple therapist, family therapy supervisor, teacher/trainer and consultant. Her private practice focus has been transforming conflict into dialogue. Corky has had ongoing involvement with the American Family Therapy Academy, a special interest in dialogue as it relates to couple work, narrative therapy, and movies.
The highlights of her work with Essential Partners (previously known as the Public Conversations Project) included the development of the approach to dialogue with pro-life and pro-choice participants in the early 1990's, work on Population and Development for the UN summit, dialogues at Randolph College transitioning to co-education, training at the Chapin school, Intra Jewish dialogues on the Middle East, and dialogue with Zen teachers. Her workshops included work on interviewing to prepare for dialogue, neuroscience of arousal and how our approach addresses those dilemmas for participants and facilitators. She collaborated with IFS therapists to develop approaches to dialogue that incorporate Internal Family Systems ideas.
Corky has taught family therapy, consulted, and supervised since 1985. She currently teaches The Masters Series in Couple Therapy for Therapy Training Boston. She has been teaching and supervising family therapy as an adjunct faculty in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical, at Cambridge Health Alliance. She was faculty of the Family Institute of Cam-bridge from 1985-2009; Adjunct Faculty at the University of Massachusetts Graduate College of Education, Department of Counseling and School Psychology in the Family Therapy program from 2009-2013; consultant to the Project on Negotiation at Harvard Law School from1992 to 2018; a board member of the American Family Therapy Academy 2001-2009, Secretary from 2011-2013, Program Chair for the 2010 AFTA Meeting, and Chair of the Dialogues at the Annual Meeting in 2013 and 2014; and a member of the Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative from 2000-2006, developing post-war approaches to family therapy.
Job Titles:
- Director of Marketing and Communications
A writer, translator, and editor, Daniel Pritchard serves as the Director of Marketing and Communications for Essential Partners.
In his prior role as Senior Communications Associate for MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Daniel worked with some of the world's leading scholars and managed a diverse array of communications campaigns. Before joining MIT, Daniel worked in educational, trade, and magazine publishing.
In 2017, Daniel was elected to the Watertown Free Public Library's Board of Trustees in Watertown, MA. He is also the founding editor of The Critical Flame, an online journal of literary nonfiction and criticism.
Danielle Isbell began her work with Essential Partners during graduate school at Boston University, where she studied Religion & Conflict Transformation while earning her Master of Theological Studies. A member of the inaugural class of EP fellows, she joined the organization as an Associate in 2019.
Danielle's dialogue and community engagement work stretches beyond her educational background and includes projects on economic development, design thinking, and education. She has experience working with international groups, in higher education, in interfaith settings, and with business leaders. She also launched a podcast called Godcast, a program that empowers guests to investigate the intersection of their religious experiences and identity.
Danielle is based in Seattle and works for a social impact consulting firm that helps leaders from the social, public, and private sectors solve their most challenging problems.
Previously, she worked as a consultant developing communications for tech companies and as a Community Initiatives Manager in Kansas City tackling issues on both sides of the Missouri and Kansas state line. Her belief in the importance of fostering space, contemplation, and questions without answers is complemented by her dedication to efficiency, effective collaboration, and time management. She is working on using these modes simultaneously both in life and as a facilitator.
Danielle continues to be humbled by the long-lasting effects of dialogue to foster new ways of being in community.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Secretary of the Board of Directors
- Operations Specialist
Darwensi Clark is Secretary of the Board of Directors at Essential Partners. Darwensi is an operations specialist with nearly two decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, engaging with diverse populations while supporting social justice and human rights initiatives.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Academic Associate
Dr. Jennifer Ellis West is an Academic Associate at Essential Partners. She helps facilitate trainings for faculty in using dialogic practices in the college classroom.
As a writing teacher, Jennifer has been helping college students connect their convictions to their stories for almost 20 years in a variety of settings. She currently serves as a faculty member in the English Department and as the Director of the Core Writing Program at Samford University. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University and a B.A. and M.A. in English from Mississippi College.
Jennifer lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and two daughters, where they enjoy baking, taking long walks with their dog, and playing spades.
Dr. Jill DeTemple is an Associate at Essential Partners as well as the Chair of Religious Studies, Professor of Religious Studies, and, by courtesy, Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
Her research focuses on religiously sponsored development in Latin America and on the uses of dialogue for teaching in higher education. She is the author of two books that focus on the intersection of religion and international development in rural Ecuador and numerous articles on that subject as well as the use of dialogue for inclusive teaching and deep learning. She is currently working on a co-authored book that will introduce EP's Dialogic Classroom to college professors.
Dr. DeTemple's research has been supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, the American Academy of Religion, the Tinker Foundation, and the General Board for Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church.
She has taught courses on Religious Literacy; Social Scientific Approaches to the Study of Religion; Identity and the Sacred in the Southwest; and Religion, Gender, and International Economic Development, among other topics.
Dr. DeTemple is also the winner of the 2018 Award for Teaching Excellence from the American Academy of Religion.
Job Titles:
- Academic Associate
- Kevin Minister
Dr. Kevin Minister is an Academic Associate at Essential Partners and an Associate Professor of Religion at Shenandoah University. Kevin helps design and facilitate trainings for faculty and students on using dialogue practices in classrooms and across campus.
Beginning in 2018, Kevin collaboratively designed and implemented Shenandoah Conversations, a university-wide initiative which uses practices from reflective structured dialogue to promote student self-reflection and engagement with multiple perspectives in relation to course content. As part of the leadership team for Shenandoah Conversations, Kevin has trained and supported more than 100 undergraduate and graduate faculty in teaching through dialogue as well as more than 200 student fellows equipped to support faculty by facilitating dialogues in the classroom. Kevin is currently researching proven practices and persistent challenges to building momentum for teaching through dialogue and a campus culture of dialogue in higher education.
Job Titles:
- Director of Finance and Operations
With almost two decades of experience in business and operations, Elena Batrakova serves as Director of Finance and Operations for Essential Partners.
Elena previously held management and accounting roles in the biotech, life sciences, and consulting industries, most recently at Fuld + Company and Locust Walk, where she led administrative operations and project delivery while contributing to overall business strategy. Now, Elena finds tremendous joy at Essential Partners, helping her team usher forth trust and lasting change for a wide range of stakeholders and is very passionate about our mission. She manages the firm's overall budget and accounting processes, including financial reconciliation, compliance, recruitment and systems development, among other varying responsibilities.
Elena attended Penza State University in Penza, Russia, and is currently a student of Harvard Business School's CORe program. She lives in Somerville with her partner and their dog, Umi, but you can find them all across Greater Boston, happily traversing the local food and coffee scene.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Developer for the Constructive Dialogue Institute
Eliza O'Neil is an Essential Partners Associate. She first became involved with Essential Partners as a curriculum-writer for a secondary schools dialogue project, and found an ideological home in EP's work and community. Since then, Eliza's work as an Associate has taken her into communities of all ages who strive to bridge divides, connect more meaningfully, and understand others and themselves in new ways.
Eliza is senior curriculum developer for the Constructive Dialogue Institute where she builds online dialogue resources for educators, and previously was a program director for Seeds of Peace, where she ran dialogue and facilitation programs and trainings for educators and young adults across the US. Eliza has taught at experiential semester schools in Maine and Colorado, led wilderness trips around the world for high schoolers, developed leadership and social-emotional learning resources for educators across the US, and led dialogue and mediation trainings for teachers, law school students, and teenagers. At its core, all of this work has centered around bringing together communities who might otherwise never meet to forge connections and learn from difference.
Eliza has a B.A. from Bates College and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her practice combines training from Essential Partners, plus nonviolent communication, mediation, and group counseling.
Eric Schildge is an Associate at Essential Partners. Eric is also an eighth grade English teacher in Newburyport, MA, where he serves as his school's dialogue coach. He has taught for more than a decade in a variety of Catholic, charter, independent, and public schools, both in the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Eric is an instructor at Mount Holyoke's Masters in Teacher Leadership program, where he teaches classes on Education Policy and Leadership. In addition to dialogue, he loves to incorporate his training as an actor and director in order to help facilitate engaging and embodied learning opportunities for students and faculty.
Eric is an experienced curriculum designer, working to bring a diverse array of perspectives and lived experiences into the classroom; using interactive and performance-based activities to help students develop empathy and understanding across lines of difference. He seeks to empower students through creative, project-based assessments and helps them develop their voice by facilitating dialogue, deliberate democratic decision making, and shared leadership in the classroom and his school.
Eric earned his M.A.T. in Teacher Leadership at Mount Holyoke College and a B.A. from Dartmouth College with a degree in Women's and Gender Studies. He is currently a candidate for a Certificate in Advanced Graduate Study in Educational Leadership at Salem State University. Long ago, Eric was a professional cyclist.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Gary Sandhu joined the Essential Partners board in 2019. He is a partner at Noblestone Capital, an alternative investment management firm headquartered in New York. Prior to this endeavor, he worked at Morgan Stanley, D.E. Shaw, and Bay Capital.
Aside from his work in the investment industry, he is passionate about a variety of nonprofit efforts centered around women's rights, education, and social discourse. He hopes to couple his professional experience with his nonprofit management experience at Our Children and the United Nations, to further the mission of Essential Partners to build a community strengthened by differences, connected by trust.
Gary completed his Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and his Master's degree from Harvard University.
"Betsy" has been engaged in the campus-wide dialogue initiative at Bridgewater for more than a decade. She served as a Co-Principal Investigator on a multi-year, multi-institutional grant, "The Dialogic Classroom: Teaching for Humility and Civic Engagement" funded by the Humility and Conviction in Public Life Project at the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut and the John Templeton Foundation.
She teaches a first year seminar on anthrozoology, as well as a seminar on the sociology of birth and death.
Academic Associate Harriett E. Hayes is the Dean of the Rhodes School of Arts and Humanities at Bridgewater College.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Vice Chair of the Board of Directors
Jeanne Emanuel, Vice Chair of the Board of Directors at Essential Partners, has been a publishing executive for the past thirty years, most recently as COO at Zibby Books, a New York-based startup.
Jeanne has a track record of leading multi-million-dollar sales teams that deliver revenue, value, and profit. She has held vice president positions at Ingram Content, The Perseus Books Group, and Candlewick Press, and was a leadership gifts officer at WBUR, Boston's NPR station.
Jeanne holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MBA from Boston University's Questrom School of Business. She lives in a suburb of Boston with her husband, two daughters, and rescue dog.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Co - Executive Director and Director of Program Development
John Sarrouf Co-Executive Director and Director of Program Development of Essential Partners. He teaches people how to facilitate dialogue across differences, mediate conflict, and manage interpersonal as well as intergroup challenges in their lives, communities, and workplaces.
Over more than two decades working with Essential Partners, John has facilitated dialogues on issues such as the role of guns in American life, police and the Black community, Israel and Palestine, interfaith relations between Muslims and Jewish people, human sexuality in the Christian church, as well as race and ethnic diversity. With Essential Partners, he has helped found sustaining, independent dialogue programs at universities, museums, and civic organizations across the country and has also supported civic participation projects in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Florida, and Utah, among other locations.
John studied in the masters program in dispute resolution at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and served as the Assistant Director of Difficult Dialogues at Clark University, where he taught dialogue to faculty and students. He also co-founded the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Gordon College, where he taught for fifteen years. John teaches reconciliation at the European Center for the Study of War and Peace in Zagreb and sits on the advisory board of the Center for Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina.
John has authored curriculum and dialogue guides for schools, documentary films, and journalists as well as public dialogue guides on the opioid crisis, guns in America, the red-blue divide, and returning to post-pandemic life, among others. John has also served as the primary investigator on research and innovation grants from the Templeton Foundation and the University of Connecticut, the Fetzer Institute, and the American Arbitration Association Foundation.
To all of his work, John brings fifteen years in the theater as a professional actor and director. He is a member of the stage actors' union, Actors Equity.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Advisory Board Member for State Stox NY
- Founder and CEO of Partenaire
Kara Boyle is the founder and CEO of Partenaire, an advisory firm currently based in Manhattan. Previously, Kara spent four years at Morgan Stanley and three years at the global law firm Womble Bond Dickinson. She began her career graduating from college a year early and working in Manhattan real estate.
Kara earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland and her JD at the University Maryland School of Law. She graduated as a Fuqua Scholar when she earned her MBA at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.
Kara currently serves as an Advisory Board Member for State Stox NY, which enables New Yorkers to invest in their local community by providing a trading market that quotes only New York companies.
She also serves as a Board Member for the American Friends of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which supports the Orchestra's international touring program, educational projects, and a wide array of musical activities in both London and the United States.
The seeds of Kara's interest in the mission of Essential Partners were planted during her year-long Mediation Clinic in law school. Her interest was reignited during the Fuqua MBA program, when she participated in facilitated conversations concerning race, gender, and geopolitics, among other topics.
Job Titles:
- Consultant
- Consultant With
Karen Ross is a consultant with Essential Partners and an Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.
Karen's research focuses on both substantive and methodological (how do we know?) issues connected to the role dialogue and other grassroots peacebuilding initiatives can play in creating positive social change at community and societal scales. She has explored these questions in Israel-Palestine and South Africa as well as the United States. At UMass Boston, Karen teaches courses on dialogue & facilitation, education and peace/conflict, conflict theory, and research methodology, all of which center dialogic approaches to help create spaces for effective student learning.
Karen is a long-time dialogue practitioner trained in a variety of approaches; in addition to her evaluation and facilitation work with Essential Partners, she has worked with Soliya, the Jewish Dialogue Group, UNESCO, and the American Friends Service Committee.
Kathy Eckles is an Associate at Essential Partners and Project Manager. A skilled facilitator, trainer, business person, and therapist, Kathy has built an effective ongoing community dialogue program that uses Essential Partners' approach and knows what it takes to build and sustain community dialogue projects.
Kathy brings a deep background in business, psychology, group facilitation and training to her work with private individuals, organizational leaders and community groups. Formally trained as an executive coach, psychotherapist and mediator she focuses on helping people develop and/or integrate relationship, organizational and facilitation skills.
She was formerly a Division Vice President in the retail industry and adjunct professor at Lasell College where she taught Organizational Behavior and Ethics in Business. She has a Masters in Counseling Psychology and extensive experience in design and facilitation of private and board retreats, custom-designed workshops, and delivery of year-long training programs where she taught trauma resolution skills and the Enneagram to psychologists, doctors, coaches and therapists in the U.S., UK, Ireland, and Sweden.
She focuses on listening for people's central message, their existing gifts and what's needed to help them move forward.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Co - Executive Director
Katie Hyten is the Co-Executive Director of Essential Partners. She completed her master's degree in international negotiation and conflict resolution at Tufts University's Fletcher School, where her research addressed foreign policy in religious conflicts. Katie has held appointments as a Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at Tufts University where she developed and co-taught a course entitled "Dialogue, Identity, and Civic Action" and as a consultant for Harvard Medical School's Scientific Citizenship Initiative to co-design a course on science communication for ethical community engagement.
During Katie's tenure at Essential Partners, she has served as the program lead on collaborations with local grassroots groups, churches, foundations, and colleges, training stakeholders to design, convene, and facilitate dialogues across differences. She has helped communities hold dialogue about topics such as the role of guns in American life, ethnic violence and civil society, racial and ethnic diversity, as well as campus inclusion and belonging.
Prior to joining Essential Partners, Katie served as a mediator and independent consultant in conflict resolution processes and helped develop and manage the first university-wide interreligious institute at Pepperdine University. She was awarded Harvard's Program on Negotiation (PON) Summer Fellowship to support her research and work with Search for Common Ground in Lebanon.
Raised in a military family, Katie lived in six states before entering college. She and her partner now live in Massachusetts when they're not visiting family in Colorado, Alabama, and Australia.
Kimberly Shaw is an Essential Partners Consultant and the Director of Diversity, Equity, Justice, and Belonging at Duke School. She has been in secondary education for twenty-plus years and holds a Master's degree in Educational Administration from The University of Scranton.
Her passion for dialogue began with the implementation of dialogue at Cary Academy in 2016. Shortly after, she became an EP fellow and joined the organization as a practitioner in 2019.
As an EP practitioner, Kimberly has worked to improve the connections across campuses by facilitating difficult conversations and training others to do the same. This work has included training students, faculty, and staff members at Valdosta University, North Central College, and Cary Academy.
Job Titles:
- Founding Associate Emeritus
Maggie Herzig is a Founding Associate of Essential Partners. She has facilitated dialogues on topics including abortion, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, forest management, scripture and sexual orientation, and population and reproductive health.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Associate Emerita
Mary Jacksteit is an Associate Emerita of Essential Partners. For more than 30 years, Mary served as a practitioner in dialogue, deliberation, mediation, and dispute resolution with an overarching interest in how this work can contribute to community-building (broadly conceived) and depolarizing our society. Her work with Essential Partners focused on non-profits, religious and educational organizations, community groups, and other private and public entities, both providing training and supporting dialogue about challenging issues and ways to embed new ways of dealing with differences.
Mary is based in the Washington DC area and her primary work over the years has ranged across the conflict resolution field. She directed two projects for the non-profit organization Search for Common Ground. The Network for Life and Choice, a project for which Essential Partners (then Public Conversations) was a close advisor, brought together people opposed over abortion in 20 cities across the country during the decade of the ‘90s. A later initiative, Collaboration DC, helped residents and local leaders in the city of Washington DC work together on education, community development, poverty, and other critical local issues. More recently she was a senior practitioner with the DC-based facilitation firm, Justice and Sustainability, where the focus was community engagement in land use decisions.
One other stream of practice has been in the area of employment and labor relations. Starting out as a union labor lawyer Mary shifted into arbitration and mediation. She served on the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP), as a Presidential appointee, during the Clinton Administration. She was again appointed by President Obama in 2009 and served as Chair of the FSIP until 20017.
Mary has also been for many years a volunteer mediator and facilitator with a local conflict resolution center.
Job Titles:
- Project Partner / Liberia
The thing that always feels like magic to me-and I've used it in several meetings that I've had since-is how the practitioners start by setting out pacts or agreements.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Associate Emerita
Meenakshi Chakraverti is an Associate Emerita of Essential Partners. As a Senior Associate, she brought her experience in economic development, a master's in public affairs, and a doctorate in social anthropology (Cornell) to her role.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Director of Programs
Meg Griffiths is an Associate and the Director of Programs at Essential Partners. Her professional background is at the intersection of education, dialogue, ministry, and the work for justice, with over 15 years of professional experience in higher education and community-based organizations. She has experience leading facilitation workshops, dialogues, and culture change initiatives in higher education, theaters, foundations, and religious, civic, and community organizations. Meg is also a Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory.
While Meg's work has varied, at the heart of it all has been a belief in the power of relationships, storytelling, reflective practice, and good humor. Always an interdisciplinary thinker and learner, Meg received a Masters in Pastoral Ministry from Boston College's School of Theology and Ministry and a B.A. in American Studies with a concentration in Women's Studies from the College of the Holy Cross.
When she's home in Providence, Rhode Island, you can find her cooking vegetarian food and hosting game nights and community dinners with her wife, Heather.
Mika'il Petin, PhD, is an Associate with Essential Partners. He is an impassioned professional with over 20 years of experience in solving problems within private and public organizations.
Dr. Petin was first introduced to EP in 2018 by a former colleague and student of Dr. Jill DeTemple. Along with his PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, he holds a MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BFA in two-dimensional art and graphic design from Radford University.
"MP," as he is known by acquaintances, is based in Virginia, and currently serves as Equity, Inclusion & Strategic Initiatives Director for States Newsroom. At his core, he is a resourceful collaborator, incessant social justice seeker, and courteous facilitator with an aptitude for managing projects, crises, and relationships.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Molly Zuker is a member of the Board of Directors at Essential Partners, a trained facilitator of Reflective Structured Dialogue, a mediator, as well as an independent nonprofit consultant specializing in cultivating cultures of inclusivity and belonging at scale.
Most recently, Molly served as the Chief of Strategy & Innovation at Boston Community Pediatrics, where her responsibilities included human resources, fundraising, grant writing, and community partnerships. During her tenure there, Boston Community Pediatrics was the recipient of a Open Door Grant from The Boston Foundation and was awarded the 2021 Red Sox Foundation IMPACT Award.
Molly first encountered Essential Partners as a graduate fellow while earning her Master of Arts in Conflict Resolution & Coexistence from Brandeis University. In her time connected with EP, Molly has drawn upon her Masters of Education from Lesley University and her background as a classroom teacher to help adapt EP's dialogic classroom model for secondary schools.
Montressa Washington, PhD, is an Associate with Essential Partners as well as the co-director of Shenandoah University's Institute for Entrepreneurship and is an assistant professor of management in the Shenandoah University School of Business.
Dr. Washington worked in management consulting for 17 years, specializing in change management, technology adoption and business transformation before transitioning into academia. She teaches courses in entrepreneurship and design thinking. She holds a Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) SCP certification and teaches courses in human resources at the university as well as for SHRM. She enjoys mentoring and coaching students about career choices as well as nominating high-performing students to the Omicron Delta Kappa Leadership Honor Society, of which she is a member.
Washington's education credentials include a doctorate in management from Case Western Reserve University, an MBA in international business and marketing from Johns Hopkins University, and a bachelor's in English from the University of Maryland College Park. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Zonta International, and Leaderships Maryland and Howard County.
Nadiya serves on staff as the Program Manager as well as an Associate, and co-holds the programming for secondary schools at Essential Partners.
As an Essential Partners (EP) practitioner, Nadiya has focused on collaborations with public and independent secondary schools across the United States, equipping students, teachers, and administrators to use dialogic tools in their classrooms, schools, and districts to build open, inclusive, resilient educational cultures.
Nadiya has helped individual educators incorporate the principles of the Dialogic Classroom into their syllabi and instructional toolsets, supported school-wide culture initiatives, and designed intensive dialogues around divisive subjects such as partisan elections, the role of guns, race in education, and more. Most recently, Nadiya has served as the lead program design partner for the Starts With Us 3Cs Initiative.
After many years working in diverse educational contexts, from boarding schools to curriculum development to K-8 classroom teaching, Nadiya spent a decade designing and leading religious youth programming in South Korea. She brings to her work 13 years of experience practicing as a Buddhist monastic, during which time she worked with Zen Buddhist communities in South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Poland, Lithuania, Czech Republic, and the United States.
Since leaving her ordination, Nadiya received her M.Div from Harvard Divinity School in 2018 with focus in the field of Conflict Resolution as it relates to the unique challenges of ideologically based communities and organizations. She has taught interest-based negotiation to Harvard Law School students through the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program-and to professionals and executives through the Harvard Program on Negotiation. A mediator in the Massachusetts courts, she has been a trainer and coach for the Harvard Mediation Program.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Nisha Mongia is a member of the Board of Directors for Essential Partners as well as the executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She leads the administrative departments at Radcliffe and ensures that these central functions support the Institute's three programs-the Fellowship Program, the Schlesinger Library, and Academic Ventures.
Prior to joining Radcliffe as the director of human resources in 2009, Mongia served as the senior director of global human resources at Oxfam America, the manager of human resources at the Rhode Island School of Design, and on the staff of the NBC news affiliate office in Washington, DC. She also served as a labor relations attorney for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where she was appointed to the Governor's Subcommittee on Domestic Violence.
Mongia earned a BA from the University of Rochester, cum laude, in religious studies and history, and a JD from The George Washington University School of Law, where she participated in the Moot Court competition. A specialist in labor and employment law, she is admitted to practice in Massachusetts.
Job Titles:
- Founding Associate Emeritus
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Treasurer of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Project Partner / Liberia
[Essential Partners'] technique is used to explore contentious or divisive issues. So looking at renewable energy we thought this was an ideal opportunity to explore all the complexities of that issue. I found it a really useful method, and although this is the first time we've used it I am sure we'll be using it again.
Job Titles:
- Founding Associate Emerita
Job Titles:
- Associate and Research Project Manager