Meet An Olive Branch
Meet An Olive Branch
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Rev. Kyoki Roberts, Founder (deceased 2023)
Rev. Kyoki Roberts, Founder (deceased 2023)
Reverend Kyoki Roberts was the founding teacher and Head Priest of the Zen Center of Pittsburgh's Deep Spring Temple, a Soto Zen Buddhist temple (1999). She stepped down in 2016 and returned to Omaha, Nebraska where she died in December 2023.
She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Animal Science/Biochemistry from Colorado State University. She was a mediator and trainer for the State of Nebraska and Interchurch Ministries of Nebraska and was certified in church, business, farmer/creditor, family, interpersonal, transformative, community, restorative justice, and multi-cultural mediations.
Rev. Kyoki pursued Soto Zen Buddhist training in Nebraska, Minnesota, California, and Japan. She was certified to teach by the Soto Shu of Japan.
She served as vice-chair of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association as well as the chair of the Ethics Committee and was the lead author of the SZBA Ethics and Code of Conduct document.
Rev. Kyoki founded An Olive Branch in 2011, combining her deep spiritual practice with her ethics and mediation passions.
Dr. Barbara Gray
Dr. Barbara Gray
Dr. Barbara Gray is a founding member of An Olive Branch, serves on the Executive Team, and is a mediator for An Olive Branch. She is an Emerita Professor of Organizational Sociology at Pennsylvania State University and has 40 years of experience studying, intervening in and writing about conflict, negotiation, and collaboration. She also holds lay entrustment as a Soto Zen teacher.
Barbara has conducted mediation, team building, facilitation and conflict assessment for over 30 business, government, educational, non-profit and religious organizations including facilitating an e-conference on biodiversity for the European Union.
She has provided negotiation and conflict management training to a variety of public and private sector organizations worldwide including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Federal Highway Administration, US Steel Corp., Mellon Bank, Greenpeace International, Boer & Croon Executive Managers (the Netherlands), The MacArthur Foundation, Hershey Hospital and at several non-US universities in Hong Kong, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ecuador as well as Penn State.
She has published over 100 articles and 4 books, including Collaborating for our future: Multistakeholder partnerships for solving complex problems (Oxford U. Press, 2018) and has received two-lifetime achievement awards for her research on conflict and collaboration.
Leslie Hospodar
Leslie Hospodar
Ms. Leslie Hospodar is certified mediator and a founding and Executive Team member of An Olive Branch.
She is a long-time Soto Zen Practitioner, served as President of the Board of Directors of the Zen Center of Pittsburgh and as an Advisory Board Member.
Ms. Hospodar’s professional career as an IT Project Manager focused on process improvement and team building in healthcare information technology as a director and as a consultant.
Leslie has attained Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and has managed successful teams drawing on her 30+ years of facilitation and training expertise.
Dr. Katheryn Wiedman
Dr. Katheryn Wiedman
Dr. Katheryn D. Wiedman is a founding member of An Olive Branch, serves on the Executive Team, and is our lead governance and facilitation consultant. She is President of CenterPoint Institute, a consulting firm providing capacity building services to nonprofit organizations and foundations since 1988.
As a consultant, facilitator, and thinking partner, Wiedman developed a client list of over 160 nonprofit organizations. Wiedman’s areas of professional expertise include strategic planning, facilitation, research, board development, project management, and volunteerism.
She has facilitated 32 strategic planning processes and eight other capacity building projects; planned and executed 21 national and international conferences; and conducted and reported on 23 studies and research projects.
Wiedman (formerly Heidrich) authored a book and several articles that were published in professional and scholarly journals.
In addition to training over 40 boards of directors, she developed training curricula for boards and nominating committees for two national nonprofit organizations. She is a BoardSource Certified Governance Trainer.
Katheryn earned the Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois; her research focused on market segmentation of volunteers based on their values and lifestyles.
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