Biography of Lorenn Walker

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Lorenn Walker is a Hawai'i public health educator and trainer whose work focuses on building peace and increasing human performance and learning. She designs, implements, researches, writes about and publishes on a variety of innovative programs for reconciliation, violence prevention, and resiliency promotion, especially for disenfranchised groups such as foster and homeless youth, victims of crime, and incarcerated people.

Lorenn develops educational programs using restorative justice, solution-focused brief therapy and cooperative learning approaches. In addition to researching and writing about her creative programs, she is a hands-on practitioner who also implements them. Her unique background enables her to reach out to both victims and perpetrators of crime, and to anyone facing hardship.

Lorenn lived on her own when she was 14 years old, dropped out of high school at 15, was adjudicated as a juvenile offender, was a teen parent, and seriously injured in an assault, but put herself through law school, and later earned a masters degree in public health.

A life-long surfer, former champion windsurfer, triathlete, wife, mother of three children, and grandmother to three, Lorenn is living proof of how to transform conflict into resiliency and how to age with strength.

In 1999, at the age of 47, Lorenn was the Hawai'i State Woman's Windsurfing Champion. In 2002 and 2003 she competed in the Kona Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Within a week of the Kona races, she competed in the Xterra World Championships, a rugged off-road mountain bike triathlon on Maui. She is the first woman over forty to do both grueling races, called The Double, in the same week. Lorenn has earned first or second place in her age group at the Xterra World Championships for the last nine years. 2008 marks her 10th year to do the Xterra Championships. She has been sponsored for athletic performances for many years.

Lorenn is a "recovering litigator." From 1984 to 1994 she was a Hawai'i state deputy attorney general and was general counsel for the state public welfare system and defended prison cases. From 1994 to 1999 she represented children's rights and indigent adults charged with crimes in f amily court. In 1998 and 1999 she was the President of the Child and Family Advocacy Section of the Hawaii State Bar Association.

In her late teens and early twenties she was a Montessori preschool and kindergarten teacher in Santa Cruz, California. She became the school director when she was 22 years old. In 1975 she moved to Hawai'i where her grandparents and father lived in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1971 Lorenn earned her Montessori Teaching Certificate from St. Nicholas Montessori Teacher Training Centre, London; in 1980 a bachelor's degree in communication from the University of Hawai'i, Manoa; in 1983 a juris doctorate degree from Northeastern University School of Law, Boston; in 1996 a masters degree in health education from the University of Hawai'i School of Public Health, Manoa.

Lorenn has been an adjunct professor for the University of Hawai'i since 1994, currently teaches communication courses. She has also taught ethics, business, labor, and criminal law courses.

She frequently speaks on health issues and conflict resolution, and has been interviewed by newspapers, television and radio numerous times. She currently lives with her husband on the beach on the North Shore of O'ahu.

To contact Lorenn, please call (808) 637-2385 or send a message using her on-site contact form.