Linda Troop:

Executive Director

"When I retired from teaching with Wabash City Schools in 2014, I never expected to take up a second career in the nonprofit world, but here I am the Executive Director for ECR. It all happened little by little or 'step by step, inch by inch' as Abbott and Costello would say. I had first been trained as a mediator in the mid-90’s by Bob Gross, a past ECR mediator and trainer extraordinaire, and I had long been interested in applying those skills after retirement.

When people knew of my interest in mediating, they also talked me into becoming a member of the ECR Board of Directors under the leadership of Jim Shively, who began to give me more and more responsibility for projects like designing branding materials for ECR and spearheading a complete overhaul, redesign, and modernization of the ECR webpage. Next Jim asked me to administer the ECR Facebook page, and eventually he requested my help with strategic planning for the organization.

When Jim resigned in the Fall of 2020, he hoped that nominating me to be Chair of the Board of Directors would help the organization to survive. Then COVID hit and it became very clear that without a director to manage the organization, ECR was going to go out of existence. So, in 2021-22, I volunteered to be the Interim Director as well as the Board Chair. There was precedence for that because Jim had done the same before me. In 2023, the Board gave me the paid position of Executive Director.

That is the whole sordid history of my rise to management in this agency. I have learned so much from directing this organization, and I had to be a very quick study because being a high school English teacher for 40 years in no way prepared me for the daily work of managing a nonprofit agency, especially during a pandemic. However, I love the work—both the mediating and the managing.

In this era of incivility and intolerance that often leads to violence, I believe that ECR offers the community a lifesaving service—we model the peaceful resolution of conflict. Because what we offer is so necessary to a happy and healthy life, I seek every day to make this organization more vital to the community and more sustainable into the future."