Presenter Bio - Rhonda I. Fitzgerald

Rhonda Fitzgerald is Executive Director of the Sustained Dialogue Institute (SDI), where she oversees the reach of the Sustained Dialogue model to new communities, campuses, workplaces, and countries. Under her leadership she expanded the SD Campus Network by engaging its alumni base, now numbering more than 7,000. Rhonda joined SDI in 2008 and worked alongside SD founder Dr. Harold Saunders for eight years until his passing, learning the formal five-stage SD methodology directly from the practitioner who developed it through decades of Track Two diplomacy.

A trained mediator and facilitator of restorative justice and intergroup dialogue, Rhonda has logged more than 10,000 hours facilitating dialogue in conflict using the formal SD five-stage process. The topics have included race, class, ethnic divides, disability, religion, and resource and land conflicts. Her partners have ranged from hospitals and government agencies to nonprofits and international peacebuilding organizations. She has supported SD efforts internationally in Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia in partnership with the Life and Peace Institute.

Rhonda’s work with higher education spans training faculty, advising senior administrators, and supporting student facilitators on campuses across the country. She has a particular interest in how dialogue functions as a pedagogical model inside the classroom, not as a program offered alongside academic life. This webinar reflects that focus, examining how faculty across disciplines can adopt dialogic moves in the courses they already teach, regardless of subject.

Rhonda is an alumna of Princeton University, where she was introduced to dialogue and deep listening as a first-year participant in an SD group on race. That experience was the first time she encountered conversations that built trust and collaboration across ethnic divides, and it shaped the trajectory of her career.