Clarify your life.
Whether you are a person seeking answers to life’s questions or a corporate team resisting change while managing new challenges, I help you develop personal, interpersonal, team/group and global competencies. I coach emerging and seasoned professionals and leaders, giving you the capacity to make wise decisions and take effective action amid complex and rapidly changing conditions. I am certified in the Leadership Agility 360.
How I can help you
I am an ordinary woman with extraordinary experiences. Once I was an overworked corporate executive who felt fairly stable and secure in my rise up the career ladder. But after a series of tragic events — including a decision not to see my brother on what turned out to be the eve of his death — I felt a calling I couldn’t ignore — to find wholeness, balance, and peace for myself, and then for others. It’s become my life’s work.
Truly understanding who I am means I can help you be who you are.
Grounded in my mission and purpose, I help you claim your own mission and purpose on a personal, interpersonal, team/group and global level, and see how surprisingly interrelated they are. Always bringing the spiritual to the practical, I developed a new kind of leadership – Reconciliation Leadership – which both draws on the resources of my business experience and is sensitive and responsive to our divided society.
Consulting and training since 1986, I promote community building, communication, leadership and spiritual renewal. In 1991, I became a citizen diplomat and United Nations Non-Governmental Organization representative. Since my 1992 UN presentation on Reconciliation Leadership, integrating the spiritual into the practical work of peacemaking, I have facilitated global UN workshops and utilized my Peace-building Process of Reconciliation to Develop Political Will™ with people suffering from human rights abuses.
After being in New York during the earth-shattering devastation of September 11, 2001, I founded The Institute for Global Leadership to help leaders and teams through change, challenges and crises, recognizing all human beings and institutions, in their uniqueness, need this capacity for transformation.
Amid the rising global conflicts and workplace stresses, I decided our world needed some positive stories of human goodness and service to others, so in 2007, I created my successful television program, “Imagine Worcester and the World.” I also prepare couples for marriage and officiate at interfaith weddings.
My life’s work resonates with the wise words of the Commission on Global Governance:
“The world needs leaders made strong by vision, sustained by ethics and revealed by political courage that looks to the longer term and future generations for whom the present is held in trust.”
Virginia Swain’s professional biography
Virginia Swain
Social entrepreneur, spiritual care and wellness counselor, facilitator, leadership trainer, author, educator, mediator and master coach — in everything she does, Virginia Swain, MA, draws on her diverse background and experiences, including certified leadership agility coaching, senior management in human resources, marketing and public relations in both corporate and nonprofit organizations, as well as 25 years of training and coaching emerging and seasoned leaders at the United Nations in New York and on five continents. For a longer biography, here. Download Virginia’s CV here.
Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, she founded the Institute for Global Leadership to provide training and coaching for leaders and teams to adapt to the changed dynamics of our post-September 11th world. Together with her husband, Joseph Baratta, Ph.D., she is also the co-founder of the Center for Global Community and World Law.
An adjunct faculty member at Clark University, Baypath College, Quinsigamond Community College, Lesley University and Salve Regina University, Virginia has taught courses on career development, leadership, cross-cultural conflict transformation, change management, and managing in a global economy, and developed a customized leadership curriculum implemented in the United Nations, Reconciliation Leadership.
She highlights human goodness and service to others in her television show, “Imagine Worcester and the World,” which debuted in 2007 and is now updated as “Imagine Worcester in America;” in her books, A Mantle of Roses: A Woman’s Journey Home to Peace (Xlibris, 2004), and My Soul’s Journey to Redefine Leadership: A New Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of 9/11 (Xlibris, 2016) and in her blogs.
Virginia was given the Third Goal Award by the Boston Area Returned Peace Corps in 2003 for “bringing the world back home at the United Nations and Worcester, MA”
Virginia earned an organization development master’s degree from Lesley University in Community Building in Organizations and has advanced certifications from the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University in Ethnic Identity Consultation, Skills for the Religious Peacebuilder, and Consulting in Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation. She also holds certificates in professional holistic counseling, mediation, spiritual direction, Reiki Advanced Energy Healing, Myers-Briggs team building, and parent effectiveness coaching. As an interfaith marriage officiant, Virginia prepares couples for marriage. Virginia is a member of the American Counseling Association, Global Compact, National Coalition of Deliberation and Dialogue, Spiritual Directors International and Academy for Leaders, Courage and Renewal.
Virginia’s first book, A Mantle of Roses: A Woman’s Journey Home to Peace 
“I am an ordinary woman with extraordinary experiences. My story begins in 1979 when I felt a leading I couldn’t ignore… Because I have a certainty of what I am being led to do with my life, I understand now how I can make a difference in the world.”
Read a Strategies Review
“We have much to learn from each other about how we have traveled-and
sometimes travailed-through our life journeys. Virginia Swain’s story of
her own development through time as a peacemaker and a compassionate human
being will be inspiring and helpful to many. Her sense of calling is very
strong and rightly guided. I have been very interested in how Virginia’s
innovative approach to leadership and peacebuilding in highly stressful
conflict has risen from her life journey. The Reconciliation Leadership(tm)
Certificate Program and the Global Mediation and Reconcilation Service(tm)
are important contributions to the International Decade for a Culture of
Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World (2001-2010).”
Elise Boulding, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Dartmouth College, Former
Secretary-General, International Peace Research Association, Nobel Prize
Nominee and Quaker Peacemaker
Virginia’s second book, My Soul’s Journey to Redefine Leadership: A Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of 9/11 (Xlibris 2017)
“My soul journey takes her from the devastating loss of her brother to moments of peace, visions of a new future, and after a harrowing day in New York City on September 11, a vivid dream of a phoenix rising from the city’s ashes, calling me to a new definition of leadership — one of empowerment, reconciliation and peace.”