ARIELLA TILSEN
CATALYST. CONFLICT RESOLVER. ALLIANCE BUILDER.
Ariella is a change consultant, conflict resolver, trainer, and leadership coach who works across sectors, cultures, and generations. She helps communities, organizations, and individuals tap into what makes them most dynamic, even in their conflicts, then helps them focus on what they most want to grow or change. She has worked extensively with organizations of all sizes, including multinational companies, state and local governments, international NGOs, and organizations in health care, philanthropy, social justice, the arts, and community service. She has consulted with a wide spectrum of leaders, from elected officials to corporate executives to community leaders.
Ariella is known for helping people to simultaneously build enduring professional relationships and create real-world solutions. She guides leaders and groups to look beyond taken-for-granted practices and assumptions so they can achieve the results they most desire. This often includes helping nonprofits become more entrepreneurial—and more successful in fulfilling their missions. It often also includes a focus on collaborative practices, public-private-people partnerships, conflict resolution, and multicultural development. Her practices reflect a deep commitment to large-scale social change, intercultural communication, mindful leadership, and community engagement. Much of her work focuses on bringing out the expertise, wisdom, and skills already present in organizations and their people, and in applying these to co-create realistic and effective solutions. Her experience in working with the stories, identities, and realities that make each organization or community what it is—rather than imposing a framework from the outside—has served as a catalyst for solving seemingly unsolvable problems.
Ariella has a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership from St. Catherine University. She completed the intensive training program at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Center for Mindfulness in Health, Medicine and Society at the
School of Medicine, University of Massachusetts. She is also an Art of Hosting practitioner.
Ariella has presented nationally and internationally on relational, narrative and collaborative practices, transformational and global leadership, conflict resolution, multicultural communication, organizational and community change, post-conflict transformation, and leading mindfully.
Ariella is also the founder and principal of Stories Move Mountains, in which she uses her business expertise to help communities identify their existing skills and wisdom reclaim the best of who they are, and move into their preferred future with more confidence and vitality.
