James M. Campbell

As one of the pioneers who helped define and develop the professional field of process facilitation, James M. Campbell has practiced and taught facilitation skills at the university level since 2004.

He has designed and facilitated group process work in North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America for local community groups, international corporations, United Nations agencies, and in the NGO sector, including groups such as CARE International in the Balkans.

He was a planning consultant with the administration of ICTY (the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia).

Jim’s undergraduate teaching and his writing of this book based on his university courses is the capstone of a lifetime of work in the developing field of facilitation across four continents around the world.

Jim extended the International Association of Facilitators’ outreach in Europe and Middle East region starting in 1996. He has served on the IAF’s Global Board and was the European Regional Representative during the four years when the IAF’s European membership grew from around seventy-five to almost five hundred. He has contributed to IAF’s publications.

As a staff member of The Ecumenical Institute and the Institute of Cultural Affairs, Jim was instrumental in facilitating EI/ICA’s work with local community leadership in comprehensive socioeconomic reformulation, beginning with the Fifth City Human Development Project on Chicago’s West Side and extending the Fifth City Model to work with rural and urban communities in Kenya and Brazil.

Jim is a key contributor in developing the Technology of Participation (ToP)®, ICA’s proprietary structured facilitation methods for group work that draws upon more than a half century of experience in facilitating group processes, forging community consensus, developing locally based community organizations, and teaching imaginal education and group process methods in fifty nations around the world.

A native of western Pennsylvania, USA, Jim is a graduate of Pennsylvania’s Edinboro University. He joined the staff of The Ecumenical Institute after teaching high school in Iquique, Chile for three years.

After his recent retirement as the director of the ICA’s Brussels office, Jim returned to Latin America where he lives with a Columbian family and pursues writing, consulting, training, and teaching. His memoir, A Journey of Beginnings, is forthcoming from Amazon.