OUR COACHES

Peri Chickering

Peri has a diverse range of skills and experience, including executive leadership, coaching, teaching, training and program development, and administration. For several decades much of her time was spent in the third sector, engaging in NGO start-ups and development. As a professional mountaineer, wilderness guide, and experiential educator, she used both the outdoors and the indoors as classrooms, and traveled to many parts of the world creating and running 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. Part of this work included 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.

After years of traveling the globe, Peri’s career took a more local route, serving as the Executive Director of Thorne Ecological Institute and then as an associate professor in the Master of Nonprofit Management program at Regis University. As part of her work at Regis she coordinated the Colorado Trust Fellowship, an initiative focused on building leadership throughout the non-profit sector of Colorado.  In addition, she created several new classes including a Service Oriented Field Experience bringing graduate students to South Africa.

Currently, Peri’s work is primarily focused in the private and government sectors as a consultant, coach, and leadership educator. Peri holds a Master’s Degree in Human Development and a Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Systems from the Fielding Institute.