
Rita Marie Johnson
Founder
Educator, author, speaker, and award-winning innovator Rita Marie Johnson has been sharing her method worldwide for over 15 years. She discovered a synergy between empathy and insight that maximizes social-emotional intelligence, eliminates unnecessary suffering and leads to life-enriching choices. This epiphany resulted in the Connection Practice, which works for people of all ages and from all walks of life.
The Connection Practice won the Ashoka Changemakers Innovation Award: Building a More Ethical Society, chosen from 79 projects in 32 countries. In 2015, Rita Marie wrote Completely Connected: Uniting Our Empathy and Insight for Extraordinary Results, an Amazon bestseller in Conflict Resolution and in Communication and Social Skills, which has been endorsed by Eileen Rockefeller and President Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. In 2016, the book won a Nautilus Award in the Psychology category. Now the Connection Practice is used by individuals, schools, faith-based communities, non-profits and businesses and is spreading around the world.
For a short bio, click here. For a detailed bio, click here. She lives in Gilroy, California. For more on our founder.

Leigh Files
Chairman
Leigh Files, the board’s Chairman, has been a board member since 2014. She has retired as program manager at Texas Instruments Incorporated and is also on the board of directors for the Dallas Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse. She lives in Texas.

Shari Holland
Secretary
Shari Holland is a founding board member and the Parliamentarian and current Secretary of the Board. She has a master’s in Public Administration and lives in Missouri.