As the Director of The Institute for Global Leadership, Virginia
Swain provides
leadership, team building, coaching, and dispute resolution services
in Worcester, Massachusetts and New York City. These services are
offered in person, by email, telephone, or teleconferencing. She
helps leaders and teams develop their own philosophy of life through
writing a mission statement for a global work ethic and encourage
competency development for responsible action in a global economy.
We
are members of the Global Compact, the Academic Council of the United
Nations, and many other networks of cross-sectional leaders and
teams..
Learn about Virginia Swain...
Learn More about Virginia Swain...
Selected
Consultations, Training and Presentations...
Selected
Organizational Development and Training Accomplishments...
Virginia
has published many articles on global leadership, peacebuilding,
and development, as well as a new book, entitled A
Mantle of Roses: A Woman's Journey Home to Peace. In
an excerpt from the Introduction, she writes: “I am an ordinary
woman with extraordinary experiences. My story begins in 1979 when
I felt a leading I couldn't ignore... Because I have a certainty
of what I am being led to do with my life, I understand now how
I can make a difference in the world.”
Read Strategies Review of the book in the February 2008 Strategies Newsletter, published in Sweden by Jonas Himmelstand.
Awards
Virginia
Swain, Director, has been awarded The Third Goal Service Award from
the Boston area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. This award
is given to those individuals who, through continued service to
their communities, have exemplified the Third Goal of the Peace
Corps, to promote a better understanding of other people on the
part of the American people by promoting intercultural awareness
and understanding. The nominee must have served in the Peace Corps
and live in New England.
The award reads:
Virginia
Swain, who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Liberia from 1964
to 1966, is Founder and Director of The Institute for Global Leadership.
A consultant, mediator and trainer, Virginia has made it her lifelong
commitment to support a just, sustainable, intercultural and multiethnic
global peace.
As
an adjunct faculty member at Lesley University, Salve Regina University,
and Clark University, Virginia has taught courses in global management,
negotiation, mediation, and leadership. She co-founded the
Center for Global Community and World Law, which supports the goals
of the UN Charter through research, education and publications. And
she served on the executive committee of the Coalition for a Strong
United Nations, which offers public education in partnership with
the John F. Kennedy Library.
Virginia
has also extended her reach beyond the United States. For example, she co-facilitated
workshops at the Global Forum conference at the 1992 UN Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro, and at the 1995 UN Social Development Summit
in Copenhagen. She was also involved in preparations for the
1996 Beijing Women's Conference.
Current
multiethnic peace training programs she is involved with include:
-
Teaching peer mediation and conflict skills to emerging leaders
from 30 cultures, including immigrants from war zones and child
soldiers, in Worcester, with funding from the Massachusetts Attorney
General’s Office.
-
Training existing leaders at the United Nations in a Reconciliation
Leadership Certificate Program. She partners with
the Under Secretary-general for Least Developed Countries, former
Ambassador from Bangladesh, Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, to co-sponsor
a five-module Reconciliation Leadership Certificate Program.
The pilot for this five-course program at the United Nations,
"Designing and Implementing Interventions for Global Change," brought
seventy-five participants from fifteen countries in the first
year.
