Rosalma (Rosa) Zubizarreta-Ada

Rosalma (Rosa) Zubizarreta-Ada, Ph.D. is a scholar-practitioner whose doctoral research explores group facilitation and collaborative meaning-making in mini-publics. A practitioner of organization development, her professional background includes clinical social work and multicultural education. Rosa’s research interests encompass deep listening and communicative empathy, relational epistemologies, regenerative design of eco-socio-technical systems, and working creatively with differences.

Rosa completed her doctoral work at Fielding Graduate University in the spring of 2023. Her dissertation focuses on group facilitators as “researchers-in-action” and learning from their practice narratives. For the last two decades, Rosa has collaborated with the Co-Intelligence Institute, a small non-profit that promotes democratic innovations in activist circles and beyond. There she has contributed to The Tao of Democracy and to the Wise Democracy Pattern Language. Rosa’s manual From Conflict to Creative Collaboration has contributed to the spread of Dynamic Facilitation in German-speaking countries, where this approach to sense-making and co-design is used in business, non-profit and participatory public policy contexts.