We begun posting better meeting ideas, success stories, and profiles of our roster. Now hear a 90-second introduction to The Bluestone Group:

The Community Mediation Center in Harrisonburg, VA, is proud to introduce the Bluestone Group, a network of professional facilitators who are adept at working with businesses and groups to make meetings effective, efficient, creative, and participatory.

BluestoneGroup.org will catalog innovative meeting techniques.  Content will be provided by authors from the Bluestone Group.  Over time, this website will become a resource for people and organizations interested in exploring ways to make their organizations thrive with successful events.

The Bluestone Group is also at your service for planning creative, effective, and efficient meetings, retreats, and planning processes for businesses, organizations, teams, and communities.

Timothy J. Ruebke

Timothy J. Ruebke
Facilitator, Host, Mediator, Moderator, Guide, Event Planner, Listener

Tim’s facilitation experience includes local government, university, and neighborhood relations; nonprofit and for-profit strategic planning; workplace conflict resolution; one-day or two-day retreats; large group dialogues, debates, and forums; team-building; and more.  Tim is currently the Executive Director at the Community Mediation Center in Harrisonburg, VA.  Currently certified to mentor-mediate civil and family circuit court cases, Tim has worked at CMC since 1992 and has completed 1400 cases in general, family, criminal, and complex organizational /multi-party issues.  He is also a certified trainer and has taught ADR courses for James Madison University and Eastern Mennonite University as an adjunct faculty member.  He is an advanced practitioner member of the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) and a previous board member of the Virginia Mediation Network (VMN) and of the Restorative Justice Association of Virginia (RJAV). Tim has a BS in Social Work and an MA in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University.

Kai

Kai Degner
Kai serves as the Director of Organizational Communication at the Community Mediation Center in Harrisonburg, VA, which houses the Bluestone Group.  He currently serves as mayor and city council-member in Harrisonburg, VA.

He brings experience with community dialogues and forums, debates, strategic planning facilitation, retreat and conference design, moderating/emceeing, and using innovative self-organization methods.  He was on the steering committee for the 2006 National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation. He is founder of The OrangeBand Initiative, an event begun at James Madison University to promote civil discourse about issues that matter.  He has coordinated over 300 community dialogues and forums, including one on C-SPAN.

Kai is skilled in applying a combination of innovative meeting and conference techniques designed to allow for rich participation, creative exploration, and effective decision-making.  These include Open Space Technology, World Cafe, Dynamic Facilitation, and more.  He has an undergraduate degree in Integrated Science and Technology and a Masters in Business Administration from James Madison University.