Peri Chickering

Peri is a Dialogos Senior Associate and former associate professor in the Master of Nonprofit Management program at Regis University. For close to twenty years, she spent much of her time as a professional mountaineer, wilderness guide, and experiential educator. With the outdoors as the classroom, she traveled to many parts the world creating and leading wilderness based leadership experiences for individuals and groups.

Peri worked in the former Soviet Union and several Eastern Block countries during the years of transition out of the Cold War as well as in South Africa through the final years of Apartheid. Much of this worked centered around creating multicultural leadership development programs for both youth and adults, including bringing the first group of Soviet youth into South Africa and the first tri-lateral exchange between Soviet, Hungarian, and Americans in the United States. As an outgrowth of these pursuits, she went on to raise the funds, train and develop local staff, and start new leadership schools in several countries including Brazil, Bulgaria, and South Africa.

Peri has a diverse range of skills and competence, including leadership and administration, NGO start-up and development, and cross-cultural dialogue and exchange. During her tenure at Regis, she coordinated the Colorado Trust Fellowship, an initiative focused on building leadership throughout the non-profit sector of Colorado. She created several new classes including a Service Oriented Field Experience bringing graduate students to South Africa. She also worked with faculty teams to redesign classroom curriculum into effective online course offerings.

She holds a Master’s Degree in Human Development and a Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Systems from the Fielding Institute, and spends much of her time these days facilitating experiences that teach individuals how to lead and live from a place of balance, congruence, and sustainability.