Sharon Tracy is executive director of Quabbin Mediation (QM), a nonprofit organization she founded in 1995, providing services in schools, communities and courts. In 2006, she and QM training director Susan Wallace created two unique and innovative programs: Veterans Mediation (veterans, Guard and Reserves, active military teach mediation to their peers) and Training Active Bystanders (TAB).

The Training Active Bystanders program today is the work of many thousands of vital allies and partners in Massachusetts and beyond to Canada and the UK. We built a practical, versatile program responsive to the needs of people of all ages in nearly every setting as trainers are from the communities in which they teach.

Sharon was raised in the US Army and is from a multi-generational military family. She graduated with a degree in journalism and legal studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She brings to TAB her experience in the Clamshell Alliance, teaching trainers to teach tens of thousands throughout New England in nonviolent direct action in half a year. She published and wrote for professional journals, newspapers and magazines on regional activism, environmental sustainability, and child development. She is expert at writing proposals for grants that provide funding to drive forward programs that support positive social change.

The underpinning of all her work is exemplified by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King in his speech of April 4, 1967: “My conviction [is] that social change comes most meaningfully from nonviolent action….we must move past indecision to action…[responding to] the fierce urgency of now.”