About Rob Corcoran
Rob is a trainer, facilitator, writer, and racial healing practitioner. He has led trustbuilding workshops among diverse and polarized groups across North America, Europe, South Africa, Brazil, India and Australia. He served as national director for Initiatives of Change USA and founded its internationally recognized program Hope in the Cities in Richmond Va.
Rob’s book Trustbuilding: An Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation, and Responsibility has been described as a “visionary, compelling account of healing and change.”
Services & Consulations
Rob is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops, dialogues, and training on community trustbuilding.
Speaking
- Building trust among diverse and polarized communities
- Healing the wounds of racism and working for equity
- Engaging the “other” and finding unexpected allies
- Connecting personal and social change
- Nurturing spiritual resources for social activists
Training workshops, facilitated dialogue & retreats
- Trustbuilding skills: narrative change, honest conversation, personal authenticity
- Designing & facilitating honest conversation among polarized groups
- Building sustainable, diverse teams
- Experiencing racial healing circles
- Practicing the Quiet Time as a resource for personal and social change
- Using data and narrative to inspire & mobilize
- Developing tools for Muslim-Christian dialogue
Endorsements
Rob Corcoran is a frontline soldier in the peacemaking battalion of racial healers and community trustbuilders...He has created a model for helping to heal both historic and immediate trauma. His model has been adapted across the globe and has proven that it is possible change behaviors, hearts and minds.
Gail Christopher, D.N., N.D.
Author and Social Change Agent, Board Chair, Trust for America’s Health
Anchored by a caring and powerful sense of purpose, Rob is one of the most inspiring and effective people I have met who exercises leadership in the field of racial healing and reconciliation.
Hugh O’Doherty
Kennedy School of Leadership, Harvard
In twenty-five years with The Faith & Politics Institute and Congressman John Lewis, I came to know a wide range of individuals and organizations working for racial healing and equity. Very few exhibited an understanding that lasting progress requires learning to reckon creatively with both history and historical memory. Rob Corcoran’s work in Richmond is a stellar exception.
Rev. Doug Tanner
Founder and former chief executive, The Faith & Politics Institute
Rob teaches us how to build trust, find common ground and create democratic communities where everyone works together to build a better future.
Valerie Lemmie
Chair, National Civic League
Rob Corcoran has shown the necessity—and, just as important, the possibility—of telling a community’s history honestly and inclusively without indulging in a mere exercise of guilt or blame.
Edward L. Ayers
President Emeritus, University of Richmond
Trustbuilding: An Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation, and Responsibility
The story of how Richmond, Virginia, home to a former slave market, capitol of the Confederacy, and leading proponent of Massive Resistance, has become a seedbed for interracial dialogue and trustbuilding with national and international implications.
