Berkley Center

Andrea Blanch, PhD, is President of the Center for Religious Tolerance, a non-profit organization promoting the ideals of peace and religious tolerance. She is also a founding member of the Abrahamic Reunion, a group of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze religious and lay leaders in the Holy Land who work for peace. A former state mental health commissioner, Blanch has published numerous professional articles, book chapters, and edited volumes on serious mental illness and trauma, conflict management and systems change, and women’s mental health. She was founding director of the Collaborative for Conflict Management in Mental Health at USF and the National Trauma Consortium. Currently she works locally and internationally to promote women in leadership and to help groups and organizations resolve conflict, heal embedded social and historical trauma, and create conditions for sustainable peace. Blanch was a 2009 Yale Fellow in the Women, Religion, and Globalization program.