Dr. Rosalma Zubizarreta-Ada

Rosalma (Rosa) Zubizarreta-Ada was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in the U.S. where her Peruvian father and Cuban mother immigrated. Her educational and professional background includes organization development with community organizations, multicultural education, and clinical social work. Since 2000, Rosa has been practicing as a consultant and group facilitator, teaching group facilitation, and researching how facilitators work with conflictual situations.      Rosa's manual on Dynamic Facilitation, "From Conflict to Creative Collaboration" is included in the larger book she co-edited with Matthias zur Bonsen, "Dynamic Facilitation: Die erfolgreiche Moderationsmethode für schwierige und verfahrene Situationen" [The successful moderation method for difficult and muddled situations. Rosa's evolving approach to group work, which she calls "Co-creating Desired Futures", or CDF for short, is also informed by Paulo Freire's transformative pedagogy, Eugene Gendlin's Focusing work, and Saul Eisen's work in Developing Human Systems.

Rosa completed a PhD in 2023, with a dissertation on the work of the Bürgerrate facilitators in Vorarlberg, Austria. These deliberative mini-publics began in 2006 and have been institutionalized in the Vorarlberg State Constitution. She was a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School, for the academic year 2023-2024, and then began a fellowship with RIFS from September of 2024 through December of 2025.