Louise Flavahan serves as the Dialogue and Debate Director at the SNF Agora Institute. In this role, Flavahan directs the university debate initiative, a program that models the habits and virtues of reasoned debate across different perspectives, as well as how to move forward productively from those differences. Flavahan is also developing ways to instill the values and methods of deliberative dialogue more broadly across the university’s student community.
Flavahan brings over a decade of experience working at the intersection of communications, policy, and research to her role at SNF Agora, with particular expertise in facilitation and program design focused on advancing evidence-based policy and program solutions for complex societal problems. She describes her job now as working to make complicated issues easier to understand and easier to talk about.
Prior to joining the SNF Agora Institute, Flavahan served as the Senior Public Policy Analyst to Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (Ret.) at Johns Hopkins University. She was the Senator’s top adviser on a broad range of policy issues and managed the Senator’s content strategy, including communications and speechwriting. She was also a key liaison throughout the philanthropic and policymaking communities of Baltimore and Washington, DC.
Louise also formerly directed the Forum on Global Violence Prevention at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC. Designed as an ongoing platform for engagement and dialogue across all fields of violence prevention, the Forum brought together experts from around the world to advance policy, practice, and program across multiple forms of violence.
Louise’s work has been published in academic journals and the Baltimore Sun. She holds a J.D. and Masters in Public Health from Case Western Reserve University, and completed her undergraduate studies at the Ohio State University.