OUR FACILITATORS

Barbara Schaetti, PhD

Whidbey Island, Washington, U.S.A.

• PL Founder
• Presencing
• Intercultural competence
• Reinventing organizations
• Thriving communities

PL work
Barbara F. Schaetti, PhD, is one of the three Founding Partners of the Personal Leadership practice and of the Personal Leadership Seminars organization. From the beginning, she has taken a particularly strong lead in developing the systems and processes that support the management of the organization, as well as in the training, development, and recognition review of PL Facilitators.

Barbara has a long history facilitating PL learning events. She has introduced PL across North America, Europe, and Asia, in secondary and higher education, in nonprofit organizations, and in the field of international cooperation. She has also been the driving force in developing PLSeminars’ virtual learning platform.

Other work
Barbara began her professional career in community-based dispute resolution, restorative systems, and cultural-change training. By the late 1980s, her consulting practice focused on helping expatriate communities successfully engage both geographic and intercultural transitions. She pioneered the idea of school-based transition resource teams and institutionalized transition programs, and consulted on the development of the program that remains the leading exemplar of this work among K-12 international schools worldwide. As her final project for this facet of her career, she consulted on the Global Perspectives Domain of the International Model for School Counseling Programs.

Barbara is a member of the Intercultural Communication Institute’s core faculty, teaching in the Master of Arts in Intercultural Relations and the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication.

She is the author or co-author of numerous articles and book chapters on topics ranging from international mobility and identity development to intercultural competence. She is the lead author of Making a World of Difference: Personal Leadership, and other published materials in the Personal Leadership library.

Barbara currently sits on the board of the Whidbey Institute, where she is working closely with staff on the organization’s transition into self-management and distributed authority.

Personal background
Barbara is a second-generation, dual-national global nomad. Both her Swiss father and USAmerican mother were born in India, and lived international childhoods. Barbara herself lived in 10 countries on four continents by the age of 18, and moved internationally 12 times by age 22.

As an adult, Barbara established a home base in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. She has recently moved to a semi-rural island community in the Puget Sound, eliminated almost all air travel from her life, and is learning, as Wendell Berry puts it, to “make common cause with place.”

Academic
Barbara holds an MA in Whole Systems Design with a concentration on Multicultural Dispute Resolution from Antioch University Seattle; and a PhD in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a concentration on Intercultural Identity Development from the Union Institute and University.

Other interests
Barbara is a writer. She likes to grow vegetables, swim in mountain rivers, read good fiction while hanging in a hammock, and participate in meaningful conversations.