PEOPLE

Merrick Hoben

Merrick Hoben is Director of CBI’s Washington D.C. Regional Office where he provides assessment, facilitation, training, coaching, and dispute system design services to public and private clients worldwide. Merrick also co-leads CBI’s Corporate-Community Engagement Practice Area.  His core competence is helping organizations, companies, and diverse groups apply negotiation and consensus building tools toward more creative, effective, and efficient stakeholder engagement and decision-making. Internationally, he has worked with numerous multilateral development agencies, global NGOs, governments, major companies, and other national partners to institutionalize collaborative approaches to planning, resource, and project management. Merrick is also a Practitioner Associate at the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, and Faculty Associate at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. He is fluent in Spanish

SHANTI GAIA

Shanti has worked with Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, the founder of the MetaIntegral Associates, focusing on teaching the MetaImpact framework through courses called “Designing Wisdom Economies” and on working towards the creation of multicapital value accounting software. He has spent a decade living at two different ecovillages that were also nonprofit education centers, spending a significant amount of his time in leadership roles at those organizations.

He spent three years on the board of the Sirius, Inc. nonprofit, including approximately two years as treasurer. He also spent a couple of years on the statewide steering board for the Massachusetts 350.org network. Over the length of his career, he has founded or worked for over half a dozen environmental nonprofit organizations.

Overall, he has worked in the nonprofit sector for most of his career. He also has expansive training and practice in ecological conscious raising work, having trained directly with Joanna Macy and others in Experiential Deep Ecology, along with training in similar work by the Pachamama alliance.