Susan Livingston

"Member of Humanity; Citizen of Earth"

A peace and environmental activist with two sons and five grandsons, Susan is passionate about playing, producing, writing, and listening to music; writing, editing, and teaching language arts and crafts; organizing people and events; and travel. She loves her country but not her nation, and her spirituality is at once cosmic and earth-bound. People love her cooking and her stories. Her current goal is to certify as a trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication. About her peace activism, she says, “When we get our Department of Peace, I want to be the Undersecretary of Peace Education!”

Susan has been active in the performing arts since grade school and in the peace and environmental movements since the beginning of the ‘70s. Her academic background is in developmental, environmental, and experimental psychology with graduate research in perceptual and cognitive psychology and developmental psycholinguistics; her teaching certificate is in her minor, biology.

After living in ten states and two foreign countries, she has recently returned to her beloved Appalachian Mountains. She grew up in New Orleans where she married a childhood sweetheart, had her two children, and earned her Bachelors Degree. She went to graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (“Go Blue!”) and earned her teaching certificate there before moving to Chicago to launch a second marriage and her teaching career. That ended with two years at an international boarding school in Denmark that closed when it lost its private sponsorship. “I got spoiled," she says when asked why she doesn’t teach any more. Her second career was as the sold proprietor of an Earth-friendly, barter oriented business. She plans a third career as an NVC trainer; she would like to work with school systems to bring NVC to the classroom and with social service agencies that help parents who are having difficulty raising their children.