Ron Kraybill pioneered the first restorative justice mediation cases in the United States in Elkhart, Indiana, 1977 and served for ten years as founding director of the Mennonite Conciliation Service, 1979-1988.
Kraybill spent 6 years in South Africa (1989-1995) as Director of Training at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town. During this time he was jointly appointed by the major political parties of South Africa to serve as Training Advisor to the South African National Peace Accord 1991-1994, and led a large number of workshops for negotiators in the national peace process.
In 1995, with John Paul Lederach and others, Kraybill founded a Master in Conflict Transformation programs in the US at Eastern Mennonite University, where he held a professorship until 2007.
In 2006 he established Riverhouse ePress (www.RiverhouseEpress.com), which markets his culturally flexible Style Mattersconflict style inventory to universities, trainers and consultants throughout the world.
In 2007 Kraybill returned to active peacebuilding practice abroad, serving as Quaker International Representative in the Middle East based in Jerusalem. In 2009 he was appointed Peace and Development Advisor for the UNDP in Lesotho and coordinated a four year facilitation effort of the Heads of Churches there that resulted in the first “free, fair, and peaceful” election since Independence. From 2013-2014 he served as Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Development for the United Nations in the Philippines.
Since 2015 he lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and manages Riverhouse ePress. He has made several trips to Mynanmar to train facilitators in the national peace process there.
Kraybill holds a Masters of Divinity from Harvard University and a PhD from the University of Cape Town in Religion and Society, and wrote his thesis on efforts to end the civil war in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the 1970s by Catholics, Quakers, and Moral ReArmament.
He has extensive experience in facilitation, consulting, and training roles in interpersonal, group, organizational, regional, and national settings. He holds particular expertise in working with teams and organizations stuck in patterns of poor communication or difficulty with decision making.
In addition to writing many academic essays and training manuals for negotiators and facilitators, Kraybill has developed Style Matters: The Kraybill Conflict Style Inventory, a tool found at www.stylematters.net that is widely used to train leaders and laypeople for conflict management in interpersonal and organizational settings. His book “Cool Tools for Hot Topics” (Good Books) is a widely-used resource for facilitators planning dialogue on difficult issues.
He blogs at www.KraybillTable.com.
Email: ron.kraybill@gmail.com
Web: www.stylematters.net
