Mitch Miyagawa is a multi-faceted facilitator, project lead, event producer, and artist, based on Vancouver Island, on Canada's pacific coast. His work crosses many areas and fields, including health, education, arts & culture, and inclusion/diversity. Along with his NVC facilitation, he is a seasoned team leader, community builder, and entrepreneur, who applies an open and appreciative leadership style to motivate diverse teams to reach common goals in settings ranging from festivals (100+ volunteers) and campus events (30+ student leaders) to retreats (50+ participants) and online forums (300+ community members). 

Mitch's work in many areas is rooted in his beliefs in the power of respectful listening/ embodied connection, power sharing/ exchange, artistic expression/collaboration, the wisdom of the natural world, and the beauty, mystery, and energy of the human spirit.

Recently, he has been breaking new ground with his land project, a 2-ha property on a small rural island, where he and his former wife and friend Angela Walkley (also an NVC Trainer) raised their two sons. He and Angela have developed an innovative co-ownership model with a professional team that is creating a model for further co-ownership, in direct response to the local and global crisis in affordable housing and community fragmentation.

Mitch was mentored into his role as an NVC Trainer 10 years ago by Penny Wassman, who studied with Marshall Rosenberg directly. Part of the "post-Rosenberg" NVC community, he has offered workshops and retreats around western Canada and internationally at the New York Intensive and 2018 Texas IIT. Since then, Mitch has applied his NVC skills and approaches to artistic and community work, where he is well-known for his relational, caring, and inspiring leadership style - as well as his fun and playful approach!

Mitch's current interests in NVC revolve around embodiment, movement, and new work he has been creating, "Eros and NVC" - focusing on cultivating aliveness and the erotic as a source of inner wisdom and power, a la Audre Lorde: "The erotic is a lens through which we can scrutinize all aspects of our existence... the nurturer or nursemaid of our deepest knowledge."

Mitch is a loving father of two sons, Tomio and Sam. He and Angela "consciously uncoupled" in 2021. His father's family was from Japan, and his family was interned during WWII. More of Mitch's family story can be seen in the documentary he made in 2013, called A Sorry State, about state racism and government apologies, for which Mitch won the Writers Guild of Canada Documentary Award. Previously, Mitch lived for 15 years in Canada's North, in Whitehorse, Yukon, where he practiced as a writer and filmmaker.