Bonnie - Teacher, union leader, consultant
As a special educator, teacher association president and education consultant I use collaborative approaches to work for positive outcomes for all stakeholders. While a special educator in Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland for over 3 decades, I believed that to be most successful in my work with students, the voice of front-line educators is important in system policies, as well as negotiations about wages, hours and working conditions. As president of the Montgomery County Education Association, representing 11,000 certificated employees, I worked with other union/association leaders and the school system administrators to create a framework for collaborative, interest-based approaches to find new solutions to old problems. Now, as an elected official, I continue to use collaborative processes to develop policies and resolve difficult issues to meet the needs of diverse stakeholders in the service of constituents.
These experiences required the following skills:
- Project management
- Negotiation
- Consensus building
- Facilitation
- Strategic planning
Upon retirement from MCPS I began consulting with groups to reach consensus on difficult issues; I worked with a team at the NEA Foundation to implement the Institute for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. My team worked with union/association representatives and school district administrators in 27 districts in both bargaining and non-bargaining states to create frameworks for collaborative work. I also have experience in using interest-based processes to address complex multi-party issues in the health care area.
[email protected]
Chris - School Board member, community activist
Chris Barclay is an education advocate, management professional, and working artist-photographer, with a notable public service record. For 10 years, he served as the District 4 representative on the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) Board of Education. During his tenure Chris served as Board chair twice and chaired the Fiscal Management committee and Strategic Planning committees. At the state level Chris is an Executive team member of the Maryland Alliance for Racial Equity in Education. His areas of expertise are:
- Strategic Leadership
- Board Governance
- Organizational Leadership
- Process Improvement
Barclay’s community leadership roles have included the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, the NAACP Parents’ Council and serving on the Board of Directors for the Takoma Foundation, LearnServe International and Arts on the Block. He is a member of Leadership Montgomery’s Core Class of 2014 and currently serves as Operations Director for a youth arts organization.
[email protected]
David - Union organizer, executive director
David Rodich has been a labor leader, national organizing director, trainer and chief negotiator with over forty-four years of experience, including serving as the Executive Director of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500, where his leadership helped better than double the size of the union, and where, representing support staff, he partnered SEIU with the Montgomery County Public School System, the teachers’ union and administrators union to help build a nationally recognized collaborative labor relations model.
David served four years as National Director of Public Employee Organizing for SEIU, and then four years as Director of Local Union Organizing, contributing to SEIU’s claim to be the fastest growing union in North America. As a union leader, his experience includes:
- Negotiating dozens of collective bargaining agreements in both the public and private sectors, utilizing both traditional and interest-based skills.
- Helping to lead efforts to enact a collective bargaining law for subsidized childcare providers.
- Helping win bargaining rights for 80% of the adjunct faculty at colleges and universities in Washington, DC region, and negotiating first contracts.
David also has extensive experience as an organizational and leadership development consultant to the AFL-CIO working with unions in the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the middle east.
[email protected]
Rich - Educator, Trainer, Facilitator
Rich Nelson is a consultant, facilitator, and trainer who has worked with educational, non-profit, religious, and business organizations throughout the United States. He has worked successfully with groups of fewer than ten members in rural areas to multi-thousand-member organizations in metropolitan areas, in settings with detailed public employee negotiation statutes to situations with no formal bargaining structures. His expertise includes:
- Negotiations
- Facilitation
- Organizational and leadership development
- Strategic planning
- Communications
Rich began his professional career as a classroom teacher in Minnesota. He worked with affiliates of the National Education Association for 30 years. For the past 20 years he has worked as an independent consultant and facilitator. He was a primary developer and lead writer of the Interest Based Facilitator Training Program, a joint project of the National Education Association and the North American Association of Educational Negotiators.
Stan - Management representative, facilitator
As a labor relations director, attorney, consultant, facilitator, trainer and mediator, I work with employers and employee organizations to create or maintain successful interactions that serve long and short term interests. I work to understand the vision and aspirations of the organizations and their leaders and collaboratively assist them to create and execute approaches to attain their desired outcomes. Areas of expertise include:
- Negotiations
- Facilitation
- Dispute resolution
- Process design
- Labor and employment law and litigation
A sample of organizations served include: Cities of Detroit and Denver; public school districts including Montgomery County, Maryland; Douglas County and Littleton, Colorado; Lee County, Florida; health care, McLaren Regional Medical Center, Michigan.
I served as the co-leader of the joint NAEN•NEA Interest Based Strategies Project. I have helped several organizations to resolve deep conflicts (including a 73-day strike) and build processes and relationships that have fostered effective negotiations and problem-solving for more than twenty years. I earned my bachelor's degree at the University of Detroit and my law degree from Wayne State University.
[email protected]