Talk It Out Radio is a how-to/what-to-do program dedicated to sharing mindfulness and nonviolent communication (NVC) by providing skills for effective and meaningful communication. Our hosts are NVC and Buddhist practitioners—Marlena Willis, Nancy Kahn and Timothy Regan. We welcome guests and callers to practice empathy, awareness, and effective communication. Our intention is to provide skills, knowledge, and resources that empower listeners to effectively connect across differences to create understanding, so that we can all work together to create a world that works for life.
Nancy Kahn, International Consultant with Diversitybbox, has over 17 years’ experience teaching Nonviolent Communication, locally and internationally, and participating in social justice projects. She is a co-founder of the BayNVC Diversity Project in 2000. Nancy brings a rich combination of skill in Nonviolent Communication, along with a background in nonprofit management and social work experience to her consulting practice. She previously founded and served for ten years as Executive Director of Mission Dignity, a youth-led Peer Education and College Resource Center in San Francisco’s Mission District.
She is dedicated to raising awareness around differences, with an eye on both the subtle and overt ways we participate in systems of oppression and privilege. Nancy has spent her lifetime examining the complexity of her own racial and cultural identities.
Nancy’s passion is anchored in her continued development of an integrative process of teaching Nonviolent Communication (NVC) across differences (race, gender, class, culture, power and privilege). She concentrates her efforts on coaching individuals and families, and providing consulting services that include training, coaching, mediation and facilitation to a wide variety of social service agencies, nonprofit organizations, schools and universities, community-based groups, health care agencies, companies, and staff with a local law enforcement agency. For over ten years, Nancy has been a core member of the facilitation team of the NVC Diversity Retreat, newly named the Nonviolent Social Justice Leadership Retreat. She has served as a core trainer on the facilitation team for the NY NVC Intensive for five years of the event’s existence.
Timothy Regan is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a Certified Trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication. He has been coaching individuals and groups for over 15 years as a Healthy Lifestyle Counselor in a large medical clinic, where he helps people find their motivation, create healing and change, and choose a healthy life. In private practice, where he most comes alive, he provides integrated training and services in many aspects of peacemaking, informed by deep study of Nonviolent Communication, interpersonal neurobiology, permaculture, ceremony, and music.
Marlena Willis brings depth, insight, and compassion that come from years of spiritual and emotional work as well as the inside knowledge of how to heal trauma. She has a passion for authenticity, for bringing acceptance and love to those places that we least accept and love and helping ordinary, everyday people find their power. Her experience includes years of intensive insight meditation practice, Rosen Method Bodywork, Nonviolent Communication (which she teaches at the East Bay Meditation Center and over the phone to people with chronic illness and disability). She also was involved in early diversity work in the Buddhist community and has had an interest for most of her life in making the tools of individual change accessible to all and bringing these tools into our work for social change so as to be more effective in what we do.
Lisa Dettmer is a marxist lesbian feminist Buddhist and a long-time activist working to prevent police violence, for LGBT and feminist liberation, and to create a vision of a nonviolent world. Co-founder and producer of KPFA’s Women’s Magazine and co-host and producer for Talk It Out Radio.