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ARINA's International Board of Directors

Sara Nora Ross, USA, President

Russ Volckmann, USA, Treasurer

Jan Inglis, Canada, Secretary

Thomas Jordan, Sweden

Mike McDermott, Australia and Swaziland

Jonathan Reams, Norway, Canada, and USA

 


Briefly...


Jan Inglis

Hello, I am Jan Inglis. I live in Nelson, British Columbia and due to technology, I am able to live in this lovely small community in the Kootenay Mountains in Western Canada and yet work anywhere.

I, like many ARINA’s board members, have accumulated a variety of skills and life experiences. My search for understanding how change occurs and what makes people evolve into healthier ways of being, has taken me through the medical field as an occupational therapist, into body work, into the creative therapies and into being a practitioner of body focused psychotherapy and for 12 years as a teacher of a  3 year certification program for post graduate therapists. Intertwined through that period, was a search for understanding of how we as cultures can evolve and of how we could be so caught into our own destructiveness. So I did my time in peace movements and environmental activism, community development and popular theatre.  And it always frustrated me that the work with individuals in inner healing and the work in cultural healing were such worlds apart.  The people in the inner spiritual work field didn’t seem to see that local or global sustainability issues were affecting them and the people at the community development meetings didn’t seem to see that their inner emotional spiritual beliefs were affecting them. So year by year I kept looking for ways to have these fields inform one another and find ways of creating an integrative approach to social change. This culminated in the creation of the Integrative Learning Institute and its curriculum for social change agents, the  Cultural Coaches Training Program. ( www.integrativelearninginstitute.com )

A keyword that attracted me to ARINA was social change. Another keyword is presence and authenticity….I feel that the ARINA board and those who are attracted to work with us, need to do this work, not just “out there” but “in here” and have the commitment to transparency and integrity, as best as we know how to do that.


Thomas Jordan

Ph.D.and associate professor.  I am a trainer, consultant, researcher and in the fields of conflict resolution, communication, adult development and organizational development. I divide my time between the Department of Work Science at the Göteborg university, Sweden, and consulting and process facilitation in such areas as conflict management, coaching, research design and organizational development. I have carried out a number of research projects based on adult development theory on meaning-making in defense and security policies and workplace conflicts/collaboration cultures. I offer workshops and seminars on conflict management, adult development psychology and visionlogic for organizational consultants, leaders and various types of professionals. I share my writing and research at www.perspectus.se/tjordan.

I am involved with ARINA because it is platform that makes valuable knowledge and skills available to people who need to develop their competence for working effectively with social change. ARINA strives to introduce wisdom into political and social processes at various scales, by skill development in the fields of systemic complexity, self-awareness, meta-paradigmatical awareness and holocentric values.


 

Mike McDermott

M.A. I grew up on the seashore of Adelaide, South Australia, and have traveled extensively since, with extended work in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. My commitment to land-related issues came into sharp focus since 1993 when sent by Australian Aid to Swaziland to assist in land-related matters, particularly in terms of fringe urban settlements. The Minister of Housing had me prepare an issues paper for the National Development Strategy, then I subsequently did further work on that Strategy, the National Physical Development Plan, the National Environment Action Plan, and many other land-related initiatives. I have worked as the facilitator/adviser for Swaziland's National Land Policy, and on addressing land reform and property rights issues both locally and regionally, and in Vanuatu to help the introduction of land-related legislation and policy there. My work focus remains on the role of property rights, especially landed property rights, in facilitating human development.


 Jonathan Reams

Ph.D. I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. I teach a course on organizational counseling, coaching and leadership, as well as some general counseling. My research interests are in the areas of leadership, integral theory and the evolution of consciousness.

 I am also Editor-in Chief of Integral Review, A Transdisciplinary and Transcultural Journal for New Thought, Praxis and Research.  http://integral-review.org My work with Integral Review has been a highly rewarding venue for supporting and engaging in inquiry involving a wide range of perceptions on the human condition and how consciousness shapes it.

My background began in agriculture, eventually turned to trucking, and more recently involved consulting. Between farming and consulting, I returned to university after a twelve year break, while also raising a family, running a trucking business, and building a log house. I’ve also been involved in various volunteer community activities in the fields of education, economic development and civic leadership. A passion for understanding human nature has guided much of my experience, and eventually led to a doctorate in Leadership Studies, with my dissertation on The Consciousness of Transpersonal Leadership.

My current work has focused on developing leadership capacities for students as well as a wide range of clients. This has included developing and delivering curriculum, consulting, coaching, facilitation, research, writing, and teaching. In addition to this work, I have presented at a number of international conferences on topics such as leadership, consciousness, transformative learning, spirituality, and science and religion dialogue.


Sara Nora Ross

Ph.D. My history includes over 20 years of program design and implementation in a range of venues. Those included youth and adults, with aims at personal, spiritual, and civic development. In parallel, I spent 27 years in accountancy, as a CPA and in public, private, and governmental fields. Areas of particular interest and expertise were systems and management advisory services, and forecasting. For a dozen years I had association with Kettering Foundation. Several of those were as its primary researcher in its community politics program area, where I developed action research approaches that made substantive contributions to the foundation's research. This included its first longitudinal, comparative study of communities. I have been an independent scholar and action researcher for the last 15 years, with an emphasis on complex public issues, democratization, and developmental psychology. Founding ARINA was a natural outgrowth of this history because it gave me eyes to see what we need for fostering social change that did not yet exist.

My history can be imaged as three rivers of passion that flowed, widened, and deepened over the decades until they met and intermixed in a rich delta, then merged with the ocean. I can name the rivers as my personal journey of development, psychology, and politics. (By politics, I refer to our public ways of relating, not the narrow partisan concept.) In the delta, I integrated them, seeing the relations of micro personal processes writ large in macro socio-political process, and the psychologies operating within them. I can characterize the flow into the ocean as the recognition of processes, patterns, and new ways of employing accumulated insights. And so, my current orientation and a chief purpose for founding ARINA is to help my own and others’ further insights and capacities to grow, in service of this planet's pressing needs. My vision for ARINA is that together we more effectively research, learn, and integrate how to be the most effective possible agents of individual and social change and development.

I serve on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Public Participation and Integral Review, and on the Management Review Board of the Integral Leadership Review. My professional affiliations include the Society for Research in Adult Development (governing board and program committee), Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences (secretary and editor of newsletter), and I was a co-founder of the Society for Terrorism Research. I am an associate author in Bill Torbert & Associates Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership (2004, Berrett-Koehler), and co-editor of a special triple issue in World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution.

 


Russ Volckmann

Ph.D. After receiving my PhD at Berkeley in political science, doing my dissertation as a Fulbright Scholar in India, I studied humanistic psychology at Sonoma State University. I practiced as an organization development consultant for 22 years with government agencies, non-profit organizations and various industries, including health care, computer technology, utilities, manufacturing and services. Since 1997 I have focused on executive coaching and have trained executives as well aspiring business coaches in coaching skills. I coach CEOs and CxOs in a variety of industries, as well as business owners and independent professionals.

 My major interest these days is in integral leadership development. The work I do with executives and teams, as well as my writing and publishing, is focused on this area where theory and practice merge. I believe that we need to shift our paradigm of leadership and that an integral lens offers a powerful approach for doing this. We can develop individual leaders—and that is important—and we must develop leadership as a dynamic process in all of our institutions if we are to meet the challenges in the world of today and tomorrow.

My involvement with ARINA is an opportunity to work with others in bringing transdisciplinary perspectives to the study and development of integral leadership theory and leadership development in various types of organizations, communities and cultures.,

 

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