
Rita Marie Johnson
Founder, CEO, Author
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. Her implementation of the Connection Practice brought her the Ashoka Changemakers Innovation Award: Building a More Ethical Society, chosen from 79 projects in 32 countries.
In 2004, Rita Marie began offering the Connection Practice in Costa Rican public schools. Now over 1500 teachers have been trained, impacting approximately 40,000 students each year. Annual evaluations revealed that bullying, intolerance, conflicts, violence and misconduct reports had decreased. Rita Marie also initiated a bill in Costa Rica’s legislative assembly in 2006 to establish a Ministry for Peace and it passed in 2009.