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Miki Kashtan

CNVC Certified Trainer

Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, exploring the application of the principles and tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to social transformation. She dreams of local and global systems based on care for the needs of all life. In her work with individuals, she focuses on supporting movement towards rapid empowerment in service of the whole. In her work with organizations, she focuses on creating and supporting collaborative systems and processes. In her work with multi-stakeholder groups, she focuses on transcending polarization and advocating for solutions that work for everyone. Inner freedom, nonviolence, dialogue, collaboration, interdependence, leadership, conscious use of power, and a commitment to structural change are the lenses through which she looks at every moment and interaction. Some of her deepest sources of inspiration are many feminist theoreticians, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Marshall Rosenberg, Mary Parker Follett, radical economics, and the commons movement. Miki strives to bring together theory and practice, spiritual commitment and conceptual clarity, radical vision and practical applications, heart and mind, self and other, personal change and social transformation.

Miki is the seed founder of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) Community and now focuses all her energy here. She is also the author of The Highest Common Denominator: Using Convergent Facilitation to Create Breakthrough Solutions (2021), Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working together to Create a Nonviolent Future (2015), Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness: Transcending the Legacy of Separation in Our Individual Livesand The Little Book of Courageous Living (both 2014). Miki writes all the time, mostly at The Fearless Heart where she blogs and shares learning packets about the NGL framework and other resources. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Tikkun, Waging Nonviolence, Peace and Conflict, Shareable, and elsewhere.

Miki is an Israeli native with significant roots in Mexico and New York City, she lived in California for three decades before choosing to vagabond in search of learning about liberation and community. She is currently based in Catalunya and is part of a home pod and in the slow process of setting up an NGL community on land. She is inspired by the role of visionary leadership in shaping a livable future, and works toward that vision by living, applying, and sharing the principles and practices of Nonviolent Communication as they are expressed within the NGL framework. Miki holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley.

nglcommunity.org

Live Courses with Miki Kashtan

Responding to the Call of Our Times

Miki Kashtan

  • Discover what is yours to do in response to our growing global crises
  • Weave nonviolence more deeply into how you live and lead
  • Receive ongoing support within and beyond the course in how to be effective and alive while doing what’s yours to do
  • Increase your capacity to face and mourn current reality as a source of greater choice and energy
  • Be a part of transforming the legacy of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness into a livable future
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Library resources with Miki Kashtan

What is Mine to Do?

Miki Kashtan

How DO we live our lives? What is an effective response to what is happening in the world? Listen in as Miki dialogs with a participant asking, "What is mine to do?", and honors the dissonance we feel when working to change.
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Making NVC Relevant to a World in Crisis

Miki Kashtan

2020 has added three major global crises to our long and painful list of ongoing challenges:

  • Public health crisis emerging from the Coronavirus infecting humans;
  • Governance crisis manifesting especially in global protests against police brutality and governments more generally; and
  • Economic crisis unfolding from responses to the pandemic.

And as a result, many of us who share NVC with others have been feeling a growing unease about our roles. I have heard from quite a few who want to go beyond using NVC primarily as a personal growth tool within the market economy, and often don't know how to do so. This course is designed to respond to this need by supporting anyone who shares NVC with others – regardless of experience or certification – in opening to the way systemic perspectives deepen and transform how we bring NVC to people, communities, and organizations.

Details...

Convergent Facilitation

Miki Kashtan

If you’ve ever dreaded attending a meeting – or watched in dismay as your group collapses into conflict – know that a methodology known as Convergent Facilitation offers you possible solutions.

It’s based on one simple experience: that people come together at the level of their underlying principles, needs, aspirations, and dreams, not at the level of their surface positions.

Convergent Facilitation is a highly efficient decision-making process developed by Miki Kashtan from the principles of Nonviolent Communication. It enables you to look beneath the surface and find the essence of what’s important to different stakeholders, and bring it together into one set of principles that lead to proposals and ultimately decisions. As a result, it readily produces solutions and decisions that everyone can embrace.

Details...

It's Not Just Me

Miki Kashtan

Ever since the Women's Movement of the 60s and 70s, we have known that "the personal is the political" – that individual suffering and challenges often have their source in the social systems within which we live.

How can we mobilize this insight in support of our own and others' healing?

Join Miki Kashtan for this course designed to shed light on how the social context into which we are born affects our experience, and what we can do about it at the individual level within the paradigm of nonviolence. 

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Nonviolent Facilitation as a Path to the Future

Miki Kashtan

What does nonviolence have to do with group facilitation?

Miki Kashtan believes that nonviolence is a way of being and living that orients us in all our thoughts, words and deeds toward the integration of truth, love and courage. All nonviolent individual and collective actions are aimed at preserving what serves life and challenging what does not. Facilitation is one clear path for bringing nonviolence to the world!

How can we act now, as facilitators, as if the world of our dreams, the Beloved Community, is already in place?

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Downloadable Courses with Miki Kashtan

It's Not Just Me

Miki Kashtan

How can we mobilize this insight in support of our own and others' healing? These recordings will shed light on how the social context into which we are born affects our experience, and what we can do about it at the individual level within the paradigm of nonviolence.

Details...

Nonviolent Facilitation as a Path to the Future

Miki Kashtan

  • Access, follow and train your intuition: how to know without knowing;
  • Navigate difficult situations with care for all through an active awareness of your own power, as well as other sources of power in the room;
  • Remain aware of who speaks and who doesn’t, of those whose pain is invisible – and what you can do about it;
  • Walk towards someone presenting a challenge to a group you are facilitating, while continuing to hold care for the entire group, and more.
Details...

Convergent Facilitation

Miki Kashtan

If you’ve ever dreaded attending a meeting – or watched in dismay as your group collapses into conflict – know that a methodology known as Convergent Facilitation offers you possible solutions. It’s based on one simple experience: that people come together at the level of their underlying principles, needs, aspirations, and dreams, not at the level of their surface positions.

Convergent Facilitation is a highly efficient decision-making process developed by Miki Kashtan from the principles of Nonviolent Communication. It enables you to look beneath the surface and find the essence of what’s important to different stakeholders, and bring it together into one set of principles that lead to proposals and ultimately decisions. As a result, it readily produces solutions and decisions that everyone can embrace.

Details...

Making NVC Relevant to a World in Crisis

Miki Kashtan

  • Learn how to transform NVC into a tool for systemic awareness and healing
  • Examine the influence of difference, and uncover pathways that strengthen its capacity
  • Learn to receive and offer feedback on impact in situations fraught with power differences
  • Explore specific ways in which NVC systemically supports the full flowering of humanity
  • Delve into the dynamics of cultural differences, and discover how NVC can systemically contribute to a liberation perspective
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Principle-Based Teaching

Miki Kashtan

Bring your teaching of NVC to a new level in these intensive course recordings that focus on shifting the intention of your teaching from how to why while embodying the principles and practice of NVC every step of the way - from planning to delivery.

Details...
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