life story exchange
shareVOICES
"Emma helps people heal and grow through transformational
life-story exchange circles. Her work blends conflict transformation, creative expression and writing, and reflective dialogue.
It's not therapy. It's a different path to healing and connection."
Sometimes, just writing about your life can quiet your discomforts;
often, sharing about your life can inform you of your own triumphs; and inevitably, hearing about another's life can resolve something in you and remind you of your shared humanity.
Facilitator & Her Story
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ShareVOICES founder Emma Reinhardt has been facilitating transformative inner-self and cross-community dialogue since 2000. Emma specializes in work surrounding life transitions, internal and community conflict, aging, loss, and trauma. She has worked extensively with communities of women in conflict, students with trauma backgrounds, medical professionals in contexts of abuse, and with communities persevering through isolation and aging. Emma is celebrated for her ability to create safe spaces where participants feel known and heard, are able to discover and recover internal strength, and become empowered to grow healthier relationships with themselves and with others.
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In 2004, after working with several human rights organizations, Emma founded ShareVOICES's precursor, HERvoices, to facilitate life-story exchange between communities in conflict. Through HERvoices, Emma collected personal testimonials from hundreds of women around the world and shared them with thousands in mixed audiences. Several of her articles have been published in The Boston Globe, The World & I and Peace Prints, for example, and her work has been honored by others, including Glamour magazine, SindhWatch, and The Center for Nonviolent Solutions. In 2010, Emma was invited to bring HERvoices to Pine Manor College where she taught the HERvoices life-story collection and exchange methodology to students and staff. For a decade, Emma worked with and learned from her students, most of whom were from under-resourced school systems and troubled homes. At Pine Manor, Emma designed therapeutic circle techniques that became the base for ShareVOICES's launch in 2021.
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Emma received her BA in English from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1998. She earned her MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Magee College, University of Ulster, N. Ireland, following field research in both N. Ireland and Northeast Kenya. Emma holds a Certificate in Domestic Mediation from the Center for Dispute Settlement, Washington, DC; and a Certificate in International Mediation from INCORE, the United Nations University, Londonderry, N. Ireland. She studied extensively under the late Dekha Ibrahim Abdi of Wajir, Kenya, founder of the Wajir Peace and Development Committee, and Wajir Peace University.
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”Emma’s gentle style, and effective guidance
helped me to reflect with more honesty, and
feel open to sharing with my peers in our circle.
I wrote and spoke about vulnerabilities from my life …
and then felt supported, understood … and freer.
I feel able now to be closer to the people around me.”
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Emma lives in Brookline, Massachusettes
with her husband and three children.
