Biography of Lorenn Walker

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Lorenn Walker is a Hawai'i-based public health educator and trainer whose work focuses on building peace by increasing human performance and learning. She uses a public health approach for helping people deal with their problems and finding ways to meet their needs for healthy and happier lives.

She designs, implements, researches, and publishes on innovative interventions 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 evaluating 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 anyone facing hardship including people who have suffered serious trauma, and both victims and perpetrators of crime.

Lorenn lived on her own when she was 14 years old; dropped out of high school at 15; was adjudicated as a juvenile offender & spent a short time in jail at 16; was a teen parent; and seriously injured in an assault in her early 20s, and managed to put herself through law school by the time she was 31 and later earned a masters degree in public health.

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

In 1999, at the age of 47, Lorenn was the Hawai'i State Woman's Windsurfing Champion. When she was 50 & 51 she competed in the Kona Ironman Triathlon World Championships. Within a week of both Kona races, she competed in the Xterra World Championships, a rugged off-road mountain bike triathlon on Maui. She is the first woman over 40 to do both grueling races, called The Double, in the same week. Lorenn has placed in the top three finishers of her age group at the Xterra World Championships (one year beating all the men in the age group too) for the last ten years. 2009 marks her 11th 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 lawsuits. After seeing first hand that an adversarial approach to solving social problems usually only makes things worse, she began studying public health. She switched fields from law to public health a few years later and earned her masters degree in public health in 1996. Since then she has developed and applied a variety of public health approaches to problem solving.

From 1994 to 1999 she represented children's rights and indigent adults charged with crimes in family court. In 1998 and 1999 she was the President of the Child and Family Advocacy Section of the Hawai'i State Bar Association.

From 1996 to the present Lorenn has used a public health approach in designing, implementing, and evaluating alternative interventions to social problems. Twenty-five of her papers describing the results of her work have been published since 1999.

In 2003 she met the late Insoo Kim Berg, a master therapist and teacher. Berg became Lorenn's mentor and trained her in solution-focused brief therapy and how to train others in this approach. Solution-focused brief therapy along with restorative justice and the other approaches that Lorenn uses in her work embody public health principals for assisting troubled people meet their needs. < /p>

Prior to college, in her late teens and early twenties, Lorenn worked as a Montessori preschool and kindergarten teacher the former Children's House 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 at the age of 19, 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 also holds certificates in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy from the University of Wisconsin.

Lorenn has been an adjunct professor for the University of Hawai'i since 1994, currently teaching 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 North Shore of O'ahu, down the beach from her daughter's family including her three grandchildren whom she plays with regularly.

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