About the author
Bonnie Fraser is the author of Connection: A Self-Care Approach to Resolving Conflict. She is also a a retired college professor, a writer, a student of Life, a peace activist, a Quaker, a kite flyer, and a crone. She loves the Grand Canyon, dark chocolate, strong coffee, snow on trees, fresh tomatoes, and used bookstores.
Bonnie grew up in the mountains of Colorado. After graduating from Maryville College in Tennessee, she did a variety of social service jobs – from teaching literacy in Liberia, West Africa, and teaching junior high English in Wisconsin, to being a dorm mother at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, and working in several residential centers for juvenile delinquents.
In 1983, Bonnie got a Masters in Counseling degree from Arizona State University with additional training in Gestalt Counseling. As a counselor, she helped families struggling with communication issues, people in addiction recovery, and housewives returning to the work force. While in Arizona, she taught classes in several community colleges. In 1996, she moved to Burlington, Vermont and taught Interpersonal Communication, Conflict Management, and Intro to Sociology, at Champlain College.
She was introduced to NVC in 2003 and found it electric. She immediately went to the next workshop led by Marshall Rosenberg, then to three weeklong Intensive trainings in New York and numerous weekend workshops. When she took the material to her Conflict Management class, the students found this program intriguing. Their experiments with these concepts and their papers led to this book.
As well as teaching this material at Champlain College and leading ongoing weekly study groups, Bonnie has led workshops for several church groups, a Shambhala Buddhist center, a domestic violence shelter, a women’s retreat, and some traditional businesses. This book, Connection, has been taught by others at several colleges and prisons, and used in a number of NVC study groups.
After retirement, she returned to Arizona in 2009, and gathered together the material for the first edition of a full-length book.
Bonnie’s life mission is to do her part to make the world more peaceful by helping people increase their self-awareness and self-care, find their connection with each other, and create interactions where everyone’s needs matter to everyone. Various spiritual traditions have inspired her journey. In keeping with this goal, Bonnie is offering free access on this website to many exercises from the book for anyone to use. She is also supporting the spread of NVC worldwide by offering a coupon to offset the cost of mailing out of the country. You can find her on YouTube at ExploreConnection and on Instagram Teacher-of Connection-via- NVC. These outlets make introductory NVC material available anywhere students can access the internet.
If you wish to contact Bonnie, here is the easy way to do so. If you want to receive a notice every month or so about new additions to this website, write MAILING LIST in your message. If you change your mind, let me know and your name will be deleted from the mailing list.