Board and Key Supporters

Jim Rough, Co-founder and President
Jim is a social innovator and Director of the Center for Wise Democracy. He is a speaker, seminar leader and author of the book, “Society’s Breakthrough! Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People.”(2002). As a business consultant Jim developed “Dynamic Facilitation” and “The Wisdom Council Process.”

He teaches seminars on these tools all over the world so individuals, organizations and politics can benefit. His formal education includes an AB degree in physics from Occidental College, plus Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering and Business from Columbia University.

Markus Goetsch, Artistic Director
Markus learned the craft of Dynamic Facilitation ‘in residence’ with Jim and Jean Rough in Port Townsend. He has conducted many interviews on film with core practitioners in the field, as well as collaborative film projects with Martin Rausch to further illuminate the application of this model. He studied communication design and film production, working in television and later in film production. A documentary project on the Wisdom Council Process in Vorarlberg got him in touch with Dynamic Facilitation. A couple of years later he joined Jim and Jean Rough to study the social innovations of Dynamic Facilitation, Choice Creating and the Wisdom Council Process. Markus teaches Dynamic Facilitation and works as a Content Creator, Mediator and Organizational Developer out of Bregenz and Vienna, Austria. Markus is a founding member of the Dynamic Facilitation Munich Group and also serves on the Advisory board for Wise Democracy Santa Cruz County in California.

Born in Vienna, resident in Vorarlberg, Austria

Corrina McFarlane, Wisdom Councils Program Director
Dynamic Facilitation facilitator and program director of Wise Democracy Santa Cruz County, California. Corrina is a human potential counselor, certified in conflict resolution. She has served in the probation department of her community on the Restorative Justice board for first time offenders.
She was a podcaster for the award-winning World Without Oil Alternate Reality Game, and was a long-time moderator for the presenters at the annual Ecological Farming Conference at Asilomar, Pacific Grove, California. Corrina is president of the Great Questions Foundation, a founding member of WomenRise for Global Peace, and serves on the 1,000 Hummingbirds Women’s Council. The common thread is honing how we access and engender inspiration and reciprocity from divergent perspectives for shifts and breakthroughs as a People and as a species.
Corrina was born in the British Isles and has resided in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, for the past 30 years.

Johanna Lor Rain Parry, Wisdom Councils Development Director
Johanna is a long-time environmental/social change activist who has worked successfully for landscape protection, traditional indigenous lands recovery, sustainable housing promotion, and elder support. She has assisted multiple nonprofit organizations to achieve their specific missions.

Today she has come to believe that the Wise Democracy approach of Dynamic Facilitation of small local groups to generate powerful solutions to monster problems “offers a way through” for "we the people" to regain our democratic control over our localities, our states and our global countries.

Johanna is the founder of the organization Natural Villages, and co-founder of Womenrise for Global Peace. She still serves the 1000 hummingbirds women's council. She was born in Redwood City, Ca, and currently resides with one of her three sons, in Washington state.

Robert Holden, Facilitator
Robert is an Ecologist who formerly worked in Climate Science, he spent a decade living in the Swedish Arctic where he spent time studying forest boundaries, permafrost and organic soils. His career eventually took him to the North Pole.

Robert left climate science to figure out how to have impact on the climate problem beyond gathering data. He became a men's coach and eventually joined Center for Wise Democracy after being trained by Jim as a facilitator.

Robert now lives in Grass Valley, California where he is committed to starting a wisdom council for the town, with a view to beginning another down the road in Sacramento.

Essential Wisdom Program Advisors

Nancy Borge-Riis,
Nancy has deep roots with Jim and Jean Rough and shares their penchant for transformative models and practices, originally through the Guild for Psychological Studies. The Essential Wisdom series was her cue to step in to help shepherd a national citizens Wisdom Council for the United States. Nancy is a Marriage & Family Therapist - practicing in Mckinleyville, California.

Jim Lee
Jim is a retired sales and marketing executive, but his real passion is good public policy. He believes that the Wisdom Council Process is the essential missing ingredient (the “secret sauce”, as Jim Rough says) in formulating sound policies.

Jim serves on the Boards of Fix Democracy First and JUUST Washington. He organized the Global Climate Rally in Spokane, opposition to the TransPacific Partnership, and the oil train ban that was ultimately adopted by the Washington State Legislature.

Jim is a third generation Eastern Washingtonian, and currently lives in Spokane.

John Mc Namara
John is a business owner near Munich. He is a societal activist having organized seminars and speaking engagements on Dynamic Facilitation and the Wisdom Council Process. He is a founding member of the Center of Excellence for Dynamic Facilitation based in Munich and an enthusiastic member of the Center for Wise Democracy.

CWD essential “sounding boards” over time and space

Martin Rausch
As a filmmaker, Martin, over many years, has created a range of Dynamic Facilitation & Wisdom Council shorts and animations, including collaboratively with Markus Goetsch, especially focused on making the model more accessible to a broader public.

Martin: “A large part of humanity is becoming more and more aware that we have an influence on the ecology of the earth and that the life of future generations is even being called into question. While researching a documentary film project, I noticed that the great civilizations in world history have failed in dealing with complexity and that their own actions have brought about their ecological or social collapse. The question therefore arose for me, what we can learn and do in order to be able to think, learn and act together regardless of our differences and origins - starting in the families up to the globally active organizations.”

Born in Bern, Switzerland and raised in South Africa, the USA and Switzerland;
Resident in Thun, Switzerland

Ned Crosby
A fellow social innovator, Ned is the originator of the Citizens Jury Process and the Citizen Initiative Review. In 2011 the Oregon state legislature adopted into law the Citizen’ Initiative Review which uses the Citizens Jury process to evaluate initiatives and publish the results in the official voters guide.

Larry Morrell
Chief Operating Grandpa. Lucid sounding board for Jim through Seasons of weekly coffee meetups. Deep roots in organizational development; strategies and skills for creating effective organizations acquired from over 30 years in various semiconductor capacities.

Larry on Dynamic Facilitation:
"It's a tabula rasa, a blank slate; it works every time... not sometimes sorta maybe...If you run the model it works every time."

CWD champions & foundational figures

DeAnna Martin
Emeritus: DeAnna served on the Board from its earliest inception. In 2002, Jim and Jean Rough, with DeAnna Martin, co-founded the Center for Wise Democracy to encourage experiments with the Wisdom Council (the same year in which Jim published his book Society's Breakthrough! Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People).

DeAnna on ‘Dynamic Facilitation and Group Energy’

“To me what sets Dynamic Facilitation apart is the quality of dialogue it elicits by engaging people as their authentic, positional, and opinionated selves where they are in the moment.

The process requires this of participants and it's amazing to watch the layers peel away as people diverge and converge around seemingly impossible to solve problems - trusting that the only breakthrough we're going to have has to emerge as something greater than the sum of what's gathered in the room -- something radically different and unexpected from wherever we started. I do conflict resolution work and mediation and in these types of facilitation, while they have the potential to be transformational, require participants to stretch a bit. If they could just listen better, or empathize the right way - we try and force them to do this through the structured process, or asking them to try, or modeling it. The rules of these games try to force transformation and take a lot of work!.

Other processes try to tap into people's natural and self-organizing creativity as well, but the quality of dialogue is dependent on the dialogue skills of the people present... The great thing about Dynamic Facilitation is that people can be who they are and, just through the kind of reflection that's done in dynamic facilitation, can begin to see themselves combined with the authenticity of others in the room in this playful and curious way. Dynamic Facilitation says, "There's no way we can have a breakthrough unless you be your opinionated and belief-stricken self." By precisely allowing you not to change, you change despite yourself through the power of reflection.”

Don Miller PhD
Emeritus: Don served on the Board of the Center for Wise Democracy from 2006. He is a retired professor, author, consultant, and facilitator in Dynamic Facilitation. He worked 10 years as an internal consultant with Xerox and IBM and taught for 25 years at Virginia Commonwealth University in the School of Business.

Kay Vogt
Emeritus: Kay Vogt is a family business advisor, dynamic facilitator and licensed psychologist. After serving as a manager for AT&T she went back to school to earn a doctorate degree with a focus on Community. An original board member of the Center for Wise Democracy, she has witnessed the unparalleled power of the Wisdom Council to empower ordinary citizens to take their rightful place in the governance process.

Dan Rough
Dan has been practicing and teaching Dynamic Facilitation since the 1990s. He facilitates meetings in corporate settings. In 1994 he initiated the first Wisdom Council ever as a high school project.

Jean Rough, Co-founder
Jean co-founded the Center for Wise Democracy. She died June 22, 2019. See her memorial page

“The Wisdom Council is the future of democracy.”

Sen. Les Ihara, Senate Majority Leader, State of Hawaii

“As someone who spent 15 years in climate science, staring into the abyss, Jim is the only person I have found who in my mind has correctly identified the problem - and he also has a solution that makes sense. Our climate crisis is 100% a symptom of our deeper underlying societal problems, and 100% the logical outcome of the system we have. I believe you have the solution that will save us. This addresses the root cause, which is clearly what we need. We have climate solutions, we simply have a system under which they can not be implemented.”

Robert Holden, climate scientist