BayNVC
BayNVC    -    Bay Area Nonviolent Communication

BayNVC Trainers



Annie Symens-Bucher is a collaborative trainer with Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (Bay NVC). A graduate of Bay NVC's Leadership Program in 2005, Annie is in her third year of teaching nonviolent communication to couples and parents. She has been a peace activist for thirty years, and is the co-founder of Nevada Desert Experience (NDE), an organization focused since 1982 on ending nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. She worked for more than twenty years as the co-director of the Franciscan Justice, Peace & Integrity of Creation Office, and is currently the personal assistant to Joanna Macy, eco-philosopher and scholar of Buddhism. Annie and her husband, Terry, are the parents of five children. The vision of Anne through Bay Area Nonviolent Communication is to create a world where everyone's needs matter and people have the skills to make peace.


Cathy Bucher is a graduate of Bay NVC's Committed Practitioners Program. She is a teacher of eighteen years and has a Masters degree in Education, with an emphasis on Special Education. Cathy enjoys teaching NVC through workshops and private sessions in her hometown of Davis, CA and is excited to collaborate with Bay NVC.

She is enriched by this work because it helps her create the kind of world she wants to share with her sons, Max and Nate, and her sweetheart, David.


Edmundo Norte is the Director of Education for the Mexican American Community Services Agency, the largest social services agency serving the Latina/o community in California's Silicon Valley. He has taught courses and presents seminars in the California State University system in Educational Leadership and multiculturalism. He is a national consultant on issues of diversity, equity, and transformative leadership, and conducts training in "A Human Development Approach to Transforming Power, Perceptions, and Society". In 2003 he began integrating Nonviolent Communication in his work on equity and multiculturalism, and he has completed the BayNVC North American Leadership Program. His work now integrates critical consciousness with compassionate interpersonal connection in educational and social transformation. While his formal education is rooted in developmental psychology, his professional career includes teaching at every level of public education, from Kinder to grad school. He holds a master's degree from Harvard University and has nearly completed his doctoral work there in the department of Human Development and Psychology. His greatest challenge and learning experience continues to be the developmentally responsible parenting of his two children - an ongoing labor of love.


Grace Maina has been teaching Nonviolent Communication (NVC) since 2005. She has studied NVC for six years and been in a spiritual practice aligned with NVC for thirteen years. She has been an assistant trainer with Inbal and Miki Kashtan (co-founders of BayNVC), is a collaborative trainer at BayNVC, California and is a graduate of the BayNVC Leadership Program. She holds empathy groups and specializes in individual empathy coaching, parent coaching as well as mediations. Grace has degrees from University of California in Berkeley and the City University of New York. She is a parent and currently lives in Oakland, California. For more information, please see www.empathyandgrace.com.

"The empathy session [with Grace] provided so much clarity for me... there is something very powerful about being heard...for the first time I could actually hear myself and just by being listened to and magically a healing took place." -- Koren Clark, spiritual practitioner


Inbal Kashtan, certified CNVC trainer, is co-founder of BayNVC and the Parenting Project Coordinator for the Center for Nonviolent Communication. Inbal teaches parenting workshops and classes and speaks at parenting-related conferences around the country, in addition to co-leading BayNVC's leadership program and other NVC workshops and retreats. She is the author of Parenting from Your Heart: Sharing the Gifts of Compassion, Connection, and Choice, and has had articles published in parenting publications around the country, including in Mothering.

Inbal's passion for sharing NVC with parents stems from her vision of a cascade of personal and social transformation that begins with a change in parenting practices. Her greatest teacher for the past several years has been her son, who has been mentoring her on what it means to live nonviolently.

Inbal also has ongoing interest in supporting the development of current and future NVC leaders, and in the application of NVC in other social change arenas. She holds a master's degree in Jewish studies from the Graduate Theological Union.


John Kinyon is a leading trainer of the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) and a co-founder of BayNVC. He specializes in mediation and Nonviolent Communication as spiritual practice and has offered training and facilitation to thousands of people around the world, including conflict resolution training to Afghan tribal elders along the Pakistani border in 2002. John works closely with founder Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D., and is regularly invited to be a staff trainer with him at 9-day international intensive trainings. John has a background in clinical psychology and has started three businesses. He also incorporates a long study of spiritual practice and principles of nonviolence into his work, including study and practice of the work of Carl Rogers, Gandhi, Eckhart Tolle, Duane Elgin, Ken Wilber, David Whyte, Byron Katie, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Parmahansa Yogananda of Self-Realization Fellowship. John lives with his wife and three children in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information about John and his work visit www.johnkinyon.com.


Karl Steyaert is a passionate about sharing NVC and building communities infused with NVC consciousness and principles of autonomy, interdependence and authenticity. In addition to five years of studying and sharing NVC, Karl also has an academic background teaching about sustainable systems, as well as training in community building, integral theory, aikido, and Buddhist meditation. From 2002 until 2005, he lived and taught at the Findhorn Foundation Community - an ecovillage and holistic learning center in northeastern Scotland - where he directed the Findhorn Community Semester (FCS), a sustainability-focused interdisciplinary college study program.   


Katherine Simon, Ph.D. -- A former high school English and drama teacher, Kathy Simon taught student teachers at Stanford University and co-directed the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national school-reform organization. Kathy is the author of Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply About Real Life and Their School Work, which won the American Educational Research Association's award for "outstanding book in curriculum." Kathy's partner, Inbal Kashtan, is one of the founders of BayNVC, and Kathy has been teaching NVC since 2005, with a focus on NVC for couples, parents, and teachers.


Lynda Smith is a graduate of BayNVC's Leadership Program and has been teaching NVC throughout the Bay Area in classes and workshops since 2004. She also works with individuals and couples in private sessions and offers one-on-one empathic support to inmates at San Quentin. She is a former newspaper editor (San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Miami Herald) and a former Waldorf School class teacher.


Meganwind Eoyang came to the study of Nonviolent Communication from a very different world. She grew up fighting in gang wars on the south side of Chicago, and then studied and taught martial arts to increase her sense of safety in a dangerous world. Her longing for sweet, deep connection with fellow humans arose after first finding safety and meaning in nature. Taoism, paganism, and later the Native American good red road gathered her Chinese, European, and North American spiritual roots. She was excited to discover that Nonviolent Communication offered clear steps for practicing the compassion, self love, and love for others which these (and other spiritual traditions) invite us to live. She is an associate trainer with Bay Area Nonviolent Communication in Oakland, CA.


Miki Kashtan, certified NVC trainer, is co-founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication and the North America Leadership Program. Miki conducts organizational trainings, consults with private and public sector organizations, leads practice groups, and teaches NVC at workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the country. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from University of California at Berkeley.

Miki is inspired by the contribution that NVC can make to social change movements and values sharing these skills with leaders and activists. She also particularly enjoys working with and coaching people interested in learning to teach NVC.


Nancy Kahn is a staff trainer with BayNVC, and has been a trainer for the BayNVC Leadership Program. Her passion is bringing NVC to diverse settings, to communities of color, to youth and to under-represented groups. She focuses on working with schools, community-based organizations, local groups, families and couples by leading organizational trainings, classes, holding private sessions and co-leading residential trainings. She is currently a masters candidate in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley and resides in Daly City.


Roxanne Manning came to the United States from Trinidad when she was seven years old. She currently co-leads the BayNVC North American Leadership Program, from which she graduated in 2005, and facilitates practice groups for couples and parents. She has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, lives in Santa Clara County and offers private sessions for couples and individuals. Roxy is especially interested in working with people from currently underserved populations such as people of color and people with limited access to material resources.


Oren Sofer has been teaching Compassionate Communication (NVC) since 2006. He has studied and practiced Vipassana meditation since 1997 and holds a degree in Comparative Religion from Columbia University. Currently, Oren is training as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner for healing trauma, and works with individuals, couples, groups and organizations as a communication trainer and counselor. Oren is also a trained mediator, musician and poet, and serves as the Operations and Finance Director for the Mind Body Awareness Project.


Sigal Shoham was introduced to NVC in 2003, and began teaching in 2006, while completing the BayNVC Leadership Program. She facilitates BayNVC's introductory evenings, foundations courses, practice groups, organizational trainings as well as assists at retreats. In addition, Sigal is a mediator at San Francisco Small Claims court. She hopes to share to share the transformation, fun, self-awareness and support that NVC has has brought to her life, and brings her passion and NVC skills to her career as an actor and playwright as well.

Sigal brings freshness, clarity and a fearless authenticity to her work. On more than one occasion, I have seen her steer a sleepy group into an engaged aliveness. Her sense of fun is deeply contagious. -- The Very Rev'd Maria DeCarvalho, Former Dean, The Cathedral of St. John, Providence, RI

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