Melanie Knapp is a Program Manager and the Training Program Manager for the Morris K. Udall and Stewart L. Udall Foundation’s (Udall Foundation) John S. McCain III National Center for Environmental Conflict Resolution (National Center). She has over 12 years of experience in collaboration, facilitation, mediation, training, and consensus-building. Melanie works with agencies, Tribes, nonprofits, community organizations, individuals, and businesses on a wide range of environmental and public policy issues including freshwater and oceans, wildfire resilience, forest and land management, and collaborative conservation and planning. She also manages the National Center’s training program and has trained hundreds of participants on environmental collaboration and conflict resolution, covering topics such as process design, situation assessments, collaborative communication, and interest-based negotiation.

Prior to her time at the Udall Foundation, Melanie worked with various collaborative groups and as a researcher and instructor. She has worked on environmental social science and biological research teams studying various issues including wildfire resilience, forest policy, restoration, ecology, and microbiology. She also worked as part of a 12-organization partnership to develop a farm on a riparian property with a conservation easement and active restoration at a regional land trust in Oregon. While completing her graduate work, she developed and taught an undergraduate course on conservation and restoration in the Pacific Northwest at the University of Oregon and supported the National Policy Consensus Center Equity & Diversity in Public Policy team and an Oregon Solutions-facilitated group focused on landscape-scale restoration of Federal forest lands.

Melanie holds two master’s degrees from the University of Oregon in Conflict and Dispute Resolution and in Environmental Studies with concentrations in 1) Critical Intercultural Communication and 2) Planning, Public Policy and Management, along with graduate level certificates in Women’s & Gender Studies and Nonprofit Management. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Liberal Arts and Management certificate from Indiana University and has completed over 250 hours of stand-alone training in facilitation, mediation, water conflict management and transformation, collaborative governance, instructional design, and nonviolent communication.