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E: er.jeffrey [at] pacsia.com.au

Dr Erica Rose Jeffrey | Director

Erica Rose Jeffrey believes in the power of movement connected to positive social change.

She is an experienced facilitator, peace educator and artist. She conducts Peace Moves workshops for developing conflict transformation and communication skills through the use of movement and facilitates Creative Responses Process feedback sessions for artists and communities.

The first dancer to be selected as Rotary World Peace Fellow, Erica Rose has completed a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland, with a focus on partnering conflict resolution with dance education, integrated arts and embodied facilitation. She recently completed research in Mindanao, the Philippines connecting dance, empathy and peace.

Originally from Montana, she has worked as a performer, choreographer, educator and arts leader in the United States and internationally. Involved in multiple communities, Erica Rose has taught for the San Francisco Ballet program in public schools, Luna Dance Institute and directed Marin Dance Theatre’s Let’s All Dance! Outreach program. She was instrumental in launching the Parkinson’s Dance Project, Marin County’s first Dance for Parkinson’s program. In addition to performing, she co-directed the dance company COUNTERPOINTE. In Australia, she initiated the first nationwide Dance for Parkinson’s Disease program and is currently supporting Queensland Ballet in their Dance for Parkinson’s Program.

Erica Rose has been involved in the Community Cafés Dialogues as a facilitator and organizer since early 2012, supporting projects throughout Brisbane in multiple communities. She is enthusiastic about dialogue in all its forms, spoken and artistic.

E: serge.loode [at] pacsia.com.au

Dr Serge Loode | Director

Dr Serge Loode combines academic teaching and research experience with a deep understanding of conflict resolution and peacebuilding practice. Originally from Germany, Serge worked as a civil law lawyer before developing his conflict resolution and peacebuilding practice.

At university Serge teaches academic courses in Mediation, Negotiation and Theories of Conflict Resolution. He is also a mediator with the South Queensland Dispute Resolution Centre at the Department of Justice and Attorney-General.

Serge is a highly experienced facilitator, conflict coach, conflict resolution trainer and assessor, as well as a nationally accredited mediator under the National Mediator Accreditation System (NMAS). Serge conducts workshops for understanding conflict, negotiation & mediation skills, group facilitation, intercultural conflict resolution and leadership and teamwork. He also facilitates dialogue and strategic planning workshops. He is well known for innovative and interactive teaching and training methodologies including the use of role play simulations, reflective practice, online resources and collaborative discussion boards.

Serge mediates workplace, child protection and neighbourhood disputes and designs processes for large-scale community conflicts. He has worked with a variety of clients, including local and state government, police, military, businesses, primary and secondary schools and community groups. In 2013 he facilitated an 8-months dialogue and planning process involving Australian South Sea Islanders and Aboriginal and Settler Peoples of Scenic Rim in South East Queensland which led to the 2013 commemoration of the arrival of the first South Sea Islanders on plantations in Queensland.

Internationally Serge has worked on conflict resolution, peacebuilding and development issues with people from the Philippines, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Bhutan, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Kenya and South Sudan. Since 2017 he has led PaCSIA’s work in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea which has supported the internationally recognised referendum on Bougainville’s future political status of 2019, and which has reached over 75,000 Bougainvilleans through the use of facilitated public dialogue.

E: anne.brown [at] pacsia.com.au

Dr M Anne Brown | Director

Associate Professor Anne Brown has depth and breadth of experience working on questions of peace and conflict and of governance and state formation particularly as they relate to peace. Much of this focus has concerned societal, community, or varying cultural understandings and sources of peace and security and their interactions with state-based forms of order. Anne has worked extensively with different aspects of these questions through research, teaching and practice.

Her work is shaped by a number of long-standing interests. These include the intersections of practice and theory; the challenges of working across cultural and other forms of difference; and a methodological orientation that emphasizes mutual acknowledgement, respectful exchange, and dialogue. Anne’s research programs are often policy-oriented and include significant applied elements, working with communities or district level leadership.

Anne has worked as an academic researcher and teacher for almost three decades, mainly at the University of Queensland (teaching across Peace and Conflict Studies) and at RMIT University in Melbourne (teaching in the Masters of Development), and earlier at Griffith University and Australian Catholic University. Conflicts and questions of governance in the Philippines have featured as case studies in courses in Political Violence and Terrorism, and in Peacebuilding.
For approximately a decade before her work in universities, Anne was a diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with a posting in China.

As well as the posting in China and language training in Taiwan, Anne has worked in Vanuatu, Timor-Leste, Ghana, Liberia and Bougainville.

E: tanja.hagedorn [at] pacsia.com.au

Ms Tanja Hagedorn | Director

Tanja Hagedorn is a senior professional with 25 years of experience in health, youth development, community & volunteer engagement in the USA, South Africa, and Australia. She is a skilled facilitator and mediator, committed to building inclusive processes in community settings with a special interest in inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue.  She currently is the Queensland Coordinator for Together for Humanity, facilitating diversity education through reflection, interaction and collaboration in schools and community organisations.

As the director of a spiritual growth program at Riverlife Baptist Church she developedprograms for children and Youth, recruited, trained, and supported volunteer teams and advocated for people with additional needs.

Prior to moving to Australia with her family in 2007, Tanja practiced as an Occupational Therapist in the USA and South Africa for over 10 years.

Tanja loves traveling, reading historical fiction, and spending time with her husband and three children.  When she has a moment to herself you can find her sweating in her local community boxing gym.

E: polly.walker [at] pacsia.com.au

Dr Polly O Walker | Consultant

Polly O. Walker is Assoc. Professor Emeritus, Peace and Conflict Studies and former Director of the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. Her work includes the comparative analysis of Indigenous and Western peacemaking, with a focus on the role of ritual and ceremony in peacebuilding. She is currently engaged in consulting through PeaceWalker, her LLC in New Mexico.

She has a doctoral degree in conflict transformation from the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, University of Queensland. Her PhD thesis incorporated a comparative analysis of North American and Australian Indigenous peacemaking with Western conflict resolution theory and practice. This allowed her to develop a conceptual framework for conflict transformation between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australians.

Polly has also worked in peacebuilding and development issues with the Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs in Vanuatu and with the National Peace Council in the Solomon Islands. Within Australia, she has worked with a range of communities, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, a Philippines development and peacebuilding organisation, and people of refugee and migrant backgrounds.

She is co-editor of Acting Together, an anthology on ceremony, ritual, theatre and peacebuilding and she works with an international network of theatre artists and directors through a network of performance peacebuilders. Polly is a Senior Fellow of IMPACT (Imagining together a Platform for Arts, Culture and Conflict Transformation) a global not for profit designed to enhance the ecosystem of arts and culture-based approaches to building a just peace.

Polly is of Cherokee and Anglo descent and serves as the chair of the Indigenous Education Institute. She grew up on the traditional lands of the Mescalero Apache and is a passionate supporter of the reintroduction of the Mexican Grey Wolf to their homelands in New Mexico and Arizona.

E: volker.boege [at] pacsia.com.au

Dr Volker Boege | Consultant

Volker is a peace researcher and historian, with a PhD from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Volker’s two main streams of work today are on post-conflict peacebuilding and state formation; and on climate, conflict and peace. His regional focus is on the Pacific. Over the last years, Volker has worked on research projects which address peacebuilding and state formation in Pacific Island Countries and West Africa, exploring the hybridisation of political orders and the resilience of local communities and their (‘non-Western’, ‘customary’ or ‘traditional’) conflict transformation and governance capacities, thus challenging the mainstream ‘fragility’ discourse. His current work on climate change, peace and conflict in the Pacific includes a project on ‘climate change, land, migration, identity and conflict’ with the Toda Peace Institute, Tokyo.

From the early 1980s through to the mid-2000s, Volker worked with a number of peace research institutions in Germany and Switzerland. He moved to Australia and started work with the University of Queensland in the area of peace and conflict studies in 2005. In 2012, he was a co-founder of PaCSIA, and in the following years he was involved in various of PaCSIA’s peacebuilding projects in Bougainville (Papua New Guinea). He was a Co-Director of PaCSIA until January 2022 and now is a PaCSIA consultant. Flowing from his work in Bougainville, he maintains an interest in the issues of mining and conflict, with particular emphasis on company – community relations. In 2018, he joined the Toda Peace Institute as a Senior Research Fellow, in charge of Toda’s climate change and conflict workstream. Volker has been working in the field of peace and conflict studies for almost five decades. He participated in various international research projects and programmes. He has work experience in Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Botswana, Namibia, Ghana, Liberia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Bougainville (with Bougainville and its people close to his heart). Volker published numerous journal articles, book chapters, reports, conference papers and books in peace research and contemporary history.

E: david.kozar [at] pacsia.com.au

Mr David Kozar | Consultant

David is one of Australia’s leading international development specialists with over 20 years of experience working in conflict affected countries.
David began his development and peacebuilding work in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina following the violent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia where he worked with children orphaned by the war. Since then, he has continued to make a significant positive impact on the lives of young children through the provision of peacebuilding and leadership programs to more than 20,000 children in conflict-affected areas throughout the Balkans.
In 2009, David was selected as a Rotary Peace Fellow which allowed him to complete a Master of International Studies majoring in Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Queensland where he was able to combine theories of non-violence and peacebuilding with his lived experience. Since completing his Master of International Studies, David has also completed a Master of International and Community Development at Deakin University and Advanced Project Management Certificate from Stanford University.

More recently, David has designed and delivered over 50 international aid projects funded under the auspices of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Aid Program with a total value of more than $26 million, including the Bougainville Senior Leaders Training Program. Through these programs he has contributed to sustainable economic growth, peacebuilding, poverty reduction, the improvement of gender, equity and social inclusion all whilst strengthening people-to-people connections.
In 2020, David co-founded the Queensland International Development Network to create an inclusive space for professional networking where everyone feels welcome to engage in development activities.
David was awarded the ‘President’s Call to Service Award’ from President Barack Obama for his work in conflict affected countries, providing not only eminent achievement of the highest order but having done so providing more than 4,000 hours of extraordinary service in a voluntary capacity.
His international development expertise is often drawn upon by counterpart government agencies for the development of human capacity building and institutional strengthening program design and delivery.

E: casey.crocket [at] pacsia.com.au

Ms Casey Crocket | Consultant

Casey Crocket is a nationally accredited mediator (NMAS), conflict coach, facilitator and victim-offender mediator. She currently works in community justice with the Queensland Department of Justice and Attorney General. Originally from Michigan, Casey spent the first six years of her career working as a teacher of English for non-English speaking youths in Japan, Spain and Texas.

Her interests include utilizing conflict resolution as a part of cultural education and connecting people from different cultures to build mutual understanding. Casey came to Australia on a Rotary Peace Fellowship to study Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Queensland and has been involved with the Community Café Dialogues since 2013.

E: leanne.simon [at] pacsia.com.au

Ms Leanne Simon | Consultant

Leanne Simon is a peacebuilding practitioner with a background in documentary and participatory filmmaking. Her focus is on the use of story-sharing as a means to promote post-traumatic growth and community resiliency. She has worked with families and communities in the US, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Australia and Fiji on both local and international conflict issues they face.

Her videography work with migrant farmworkers in the United States was included in the Latin American film festival and received the Petrow-Freeman documentary film award for further production. Footage she produced in collaboration with Witness for Peace and the communities they serve in Colombia and Mexico was presented to US embassies, as well as to financial stakeholders, to enact legislative and corporate changes to improve conditions in those areas.

In addition to her filmmaking work, Leanne is a social justice educator who works with children and youth to empower them to become change makers in their own homes, schools, and communities. These workshops focus on creative approaches to peacebuilding and help children as young as age four make the connections between personal choices and social ramifications.

Dr Tania Miletic | Associate

Dr Tania Miletic is a peace and conflict studies academic and practitioner with a longstanding commitment to violence prevention and cultural and structural peacebuilding in Australia and across the Asia Pacific region.

Tania is the Assistant Director of the University of Melbourne’s Initiative for Peacebuilding. She has been engaged as s a peacebuilding consultant and facilitator to a range of university, government and non-government organisations and stakeholders in the areas of peacebuilding, political affairs and community engagement. She is committed to working collaboratively to influence positive change through research, policy development and support to peacebuilders across a range of contexts and settings in her local Australian context, South East Asia and China.

 

Tania has enjoyed teaching on graduate courses in conflict resolution, research methods, gender and community development at Universities in China, Cambodia and Victoria for over a decade. Tania is Faculty on the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies’ (CPCS) Applied Conflict Transformation Studies (ACTS) PhD program, a unique hybrid academic-practitioner program throughout Asia.

Tania holds a Masters in Public Administration (Rotary Peace Fellowship) from ICU, Tokyo and a PhD in Political Science (Peace and Conflict studies) from UQ. Tania first trained as a psychologist and still consults on trauma-informed peacebuilding, collective approaches to social healing and wellbeing.  She was recently the Policy consultant to the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture and the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria.

Tania loves to cook and believes in the power of sharing food and stories to nourish understanding and connection. She is the founder and Director of Peace-Meal Peacebuilding Initiatives.

Ms Shiv Martin | Associate

Shiv is a nationally accredited mediator, practicing lawyer, statutory decision maker and certified vocational trainer. She has engaged in complex dispute resolution in the government and legal sectors for over 10 years. She currently conducts panel mediations and conciliations for state and federal government agencies. As a trainer, Shiv has a unique and diverse set of expertise in Law, Management, Vocational Education and Mediation.

Shiv is currently an Assistant Information Commissioner,
Queensland. In this role she makes statutory decisions on the
information and privacy rights of individuals, corporations and government entities. She manages teams and projects in public service dispute resolution. She is a leading trainer for the Resolution Institute where she develops and delivers Masterclasses for public servants. Shiv also runs her own practice, Conflict Services and conducts private mediations and facilitations.

 

As a Conference Registrar for the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Shiv conducted conferences and conciliations in a broad array of public sector disputes including tax, worker’s compensation and disability support (NDIS matters) and social services complaints. She is recognised by the AAT as a specialist practitioner in the NDIS division.

As an experienced community mediator, Shiv has a keen interest and skill in conducting cross-cultural and intergenerational mediations. She is an active member of the South Queensland Dispute Resolution Centre where she continues to train, coach and assess aspiring mediators for NMAS Accreditation.

Shiv’s greatest area of strength and passion is training and coaching in dispute resolution. She has taught students of the University of Queensland and Newcastle University. She has also trained many public service decision makers in negotiation skills and strategy. In additional to training, Shiv advises organisations on designing and implementing appropriate policies, systems and practices around effective conflict resolution and complaints handling.

Ms Melanie Schroder | Associate

Melanie has 30 years’ experience working across government, education and the non for profit sector with a focus on mental health, suicide intervention/prevention and conflict resolution/mediation and is a certified vocational trainer. Melanie has post graduate qualifications in conflict resolution, counselling and law.

Melanie is one of the Directors of CALM Consulting t/a Suicide Programs which develops and delivers evidence and lived experience-based training around suicide awareness, intervention and prevention. She is also a highly experienced facilitator, conflict resolution trainer, coach, and assessor, and is a nationally accredited mediator under the National Mediator Accreditation System (NMAS) as well as a registered Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner. Melanie works with several organisations and universities, teaching and coaching in mediation and conciliation. Her practice includes private clients, with a focus on relationship restoration, as well as doing mediations and Family Group Conferences for the Department of Child Safety.

Melanie combines her passion and interest in the fields of mental wellbeing, suicide prevention and conflict resolution to working with people around the impact of conflict on themselves as well as relationships and communities.  Her drivers are ensuring people are recognised for their unique journeys and experiences, societal and gendered pressures and cultural values. Melanie aims to create spaces where people can work towards a deeper understanding of themselves and others, meaningful dialogue and respectful communication.

Dr Joseph Hongoh | Associate

Joseph has interests in the politics of conflict management and resolution in post-colonial settings. Specific areas include: state-society telations in conflict management and resolution, state-building as conflict management, politics of development, community-based approaches to managing conflict relations between local and external interveners in peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. His PhD thesis focused on Governance and Conflict Management in complex post-colonial settings, with East Africa as his case study. He also holds a Sessional Lecturer’s position at the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, where he teaches conflict resolution.

Geographically, Joseph has extensive work experience in the Great Lakes region and Horn of Africa. Here he has undertaken assignments in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Rwanda. He has also been involved in short-term initiatives in Zambia and Somalia. Outside of Africa, Joseph has worked in the Philippines and in Australia.

Before coming to Australia in 2009 to pursue a Rotary Peace Fellowship, Joseph spent 7 years working in local, national and regional programs in peacebuilding and conflict resolution in Africa. He worked with the Great Lakes Parliamentary Forum on Peace that provided space for Members of Parliament to strengthen linkages with their communities and other stakeholders in areas of peacebuilding and democratic governance. In the Philippines, he worked with the Office of the Presidential Advisor on the Peace Process (OPAPP) engaged in monitoring and evaluation of peacebulding programs undertaken by the Peace Institutions Development Office (PIDO).

In Australia, Joseph has combined his academic engagement with community work. He has significantly contributed to the organisational capacity of African communities in Queensland and implemented the award-winning Diverse Brisbane Project for Brisbane City Council.

Dr Mark Love | Associate

Mark Love is an anthropologist with a strong emphasis on applied research and practice, with over 10 years experience working in the Pacific region (Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Australia).

Mark’s research and practice has focused on: development effectiveness and project evaluation; customary and community governance (especially how they inform development outcomes); social impact analysis; environmental management (political ecology); social mapping; cultural heritage (tangible and intangible); ‘dialogic approaches’ to community development and cross-cultural engagement; social inclusion (in particular finding alternative and more effective pathways to enhancing women’s and young people’s participation in decision making that effects their lives); the politics and economics of mobility and remittances; local-level socio-economic strategies and sustainable livelihoods; how micro (local)and macro (regional/global) historical processes inform the present (especially development outcomes); and, research methods.

Mark’s work in the Solomon Islands primarily focused on evaluating several marine conservation initiatives in the Western Province, capturing and analysing local livelihood and community governance processes, and undertaking assessments of alternative livelihood initiatives in the area.

In Vanuatu, in addition to his work on the Vanuatu Kastom Governance Partnership and the Christensen Fund/Anglican Church ‘Language, Family and Relationships’ project, Mark’s dissertation research included evaluations of the impacts of the women’s micro-finance group VANWODs and several marine conservation and alternative livelihood programmes in two select regions of the country.