Biography of Lorenn Walker

View Lorenn Walker's CV
(Adobe Acrobat 60K PDF)

Lorenn Walker is a Hawai'i public health educator, trainer and coach whose work focuses on building peace and increasing human performance. 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 at 16, was a teen parent, and seriously injured in an assault, but put herself through law school in her 20s, and later earned a masters degree in public health at age 42. 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 40 to do both grueling races, called The Double, in the same week. Lorenn has placed in her age group at the Xterra World Championships for 12 years and 2010 marks her 13th year doing the race. 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 defended state agencies and employees including the welfare and prison systems. She also prosecuted people and organizations for fraud. From 1994 to 1999 she defended indigent children and adults charged with crimes and child abuse in family court. In 1998 and 1999 she was the President of the Child & Family Advocacy Section of the Hawai'i 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 a Montessori Teaching Certificate from St. Nicholas Montessori Teacher Training Centre, London, by correspondence; 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, teaching communication courses since 2000. She has also taught ethics, business, labor, and criminal law courses.

She frequently speaks on health issues and conflict management, and has been interviewed by newspapers, television and radio numerous times. She lives with her husband on the North Shore of O'ahu, a mile and a half down the beach from her daughter, son-in-law, and three young grandchildren.

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