Peggy Smith has over four decades of teaching experience and is at the forefront of bringing empathic thinking and communicating to her region in the Northeastern U.S. She was a teacher in public and alternative schools for 32 years before devoting her full-time energies to this endeavor. She offers trainings in a wide variety of venues. She is happy to offer a free NVC curriculum called Courageous Communication. http://opencommunication.org/curriculum.html While the curriculum was developed with people coming out of incarceration, it will be useful for practice groups, self-study or introducing NVC to groups.
Peggy is a co-founder of the Maine NVC Network and led their educational newsletter team. These are archived http://mainenvcnetwork.org/newsletter-archives.htm . Each contains an NVC teaching article with practice. Peggy has done international NVC work through Seeds of Peace International Camp , working with educators from the Middle East and South Asia both in Maine and in the region.
A student of Mindfulness since 1991, Peggy was ordained as a teacher by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. She has a passion for helping everyone develop their innate capacity for empathy by integrating mindfulness into how we think and communicate.
During her 32 years as a teacher in elementary and middle schools, Peggy worked with a number of conflict resolution approaches. With Nonviolent Communication, she was excited by both its simplicity and its profound power to quickly help people re-connect to their compassionate inner-self.