Tarek Maassarani (he/they) has been learning, practicing, and living Nonviolent Communication (NVC) since 2006, professionally integrating its spirit into every space he enters — from courtrooms, classrooms, and family camps, to community circles, boardrooms, and cooperative households. Tarek weaves its principles into an extraordinary breadth of contexts: parenting, lawyering, restorative justice, peacebuilding, mediation, dialogue, and deliberative democracy. He has trained educators, attorneys, peacekeeping forces, youth workers, and community members across the globe, from Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine to Burundi, Argentina, and Alabama. Now certified by the Center for Nonviolent Communication, Tarek offers a unique combination of depth, range, and commitment to social change across cultures and languages.
Tarek immigrated to the US at a young age, a product of German and Lebanese family from atheist, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions - and the parent of two sons. After graduate school, he investigated federal interference into climate science, practiced public interest and international human rights law, and taught and published in the human rights field. He has since taught Nonviolent Communication, conflict, identity, restorative justice, and peacebuilding courses at Georgetown University, Georgetown Law, American University, George Washington University, Eastern Mennonite University, UC Law San Francisco, and the University of Maryland.
Over the past decade, Tarek has engaged in youth empowerment, peacebuilding, restorative justice, and social justice work, both in his adopted home, Washington, DC, and in communities abroad. This has taken many forms: nonviolent action and advocacy; initiating, designing, and managing complex multi-stakeholder projects; facilitating group dialogue, accountability, and reconciliation processes; and providing training, consulting, networking, and on-the-ground support to those working on the front lines of conflict and injustice. He served as a master trainer and facilitator for the US Institute of Peace, facilitating conflict resolution workshops for US 101st Airborne soldiers and African peacekeeping forces across eight countries, co-designing facilitation courses for foreign service officers, and leading dialogue and resilience programs in Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. As director of the Salam Institute for Peace and Justice, he managed a portfolio of international peacebuilding projects across Muslim communities and religious schools, from interfaith dialogue in Sri Lanka to civic education in Chad and public health approaches to violence interruption in the West Bank.
Tarek co-founded Restorative DC, which grew into a significant presence in the DC restorative justice ecosystem — training over 1,000 educators, running a juvenile diversion program, and advising the DC Office of the Attorney General in establishing its own in-house restorative justice program. He co-founded or co-directed similar diversion programs in Clark County, Nevada, and the Charlottesville, Virginia area, and currently coaches practitioners nationally through the National Center on Restorative Justice. Tarek has partnered with DC area survivors‘ organizations to expand restorative options in cases of sexual harm; built local capacity for community resilience in West Africa; facilitated racial equity and reconciliation in religious and social justice communities; supported the SHIFT-Futures Framework — a next-generation Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative that emerged in response to October 7, 2023, organized the East Coast Nonviolent Global Liberation retreat, and contributed to NVC Rising for Life’s global trainings and conventions. His engagement with digital peacebuilding has grown steadily — both as a practical modality and as a field worth developing in its own right.
Tarek‘s NVC work has extended into unexpected terrain. A peer-reviewed study published in Ambio (2024), co-authored with conservation researchers, reflects on a nine-week participatory program Tarek co-facilitated with farmers in community-managed wildlife conservancies in Namibia’s Zambezi region, integrating NVC with systems thinking to address human-wildlife conflict. Documented attitude and behavior changes held three years later — a reminder that NVC consciousness, embedded in participatory processes, can travel well beyond conventional settings. Alongside all of this, Tarek is running for political office and has led two sustainability- and resilience-focused construction technology startup — a testament to his conviction that building a more just world is, quite literally, also about building differently.
Tarek also brings significant experience in family NVC contexts, having organized and staffed family NVC camps nearly every summer for over a decade, joined by his own sons. He is a longtime facilitator for the American Friends Service Committee‘s Help Increase the Peace program, running multi-day leadership and conflict resolution workshops for students, educators, returning citizens, and youth workers in DC and the Dominican Republic.
For organizers, Tarek offers experience designing and leading trainings, workshops, and multi-session programs tailored to specific communities and goals. His background in law, human rights, and international affairs means he can engage institutional audiences — legal professionals, NGO staff, educators, policymakers — with credibility and nuance, while also speaking the language of grassroots organizers and community members. He is comfortable with complexity, fluent in the intersection of personal transformation and systemic change, and genuinely motivated by the question of how NVC can serve not just individual relationships but the larger arc of social and political healing. For participants, he brings the same quality of presence to an introductory workshop as to high-stakes facilitation — grounded in his own ongoing practice, shaped by years of cross-cultural work, and committed to the kind of inner work that makes outer transformation possible. He brings warmth without bypassing difficulty, structure without rigidity, and a genuine curiosity about each person’s experience and needs. Tarek is equally at home with individuals new to NVC and with seasoned practitioners, and is skilled at adapting NVC frameworks, in synergy with other models, to serve people across widely varying cultural, professional, and political contexts.