Staff Bio

Melanie Knapp is a Project 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 expertise in collaboration, facilitation, mediation, training, and consensus-building. Melanie works with agencies, Tribes, nonprofits, community organizations, and businesses, on a wide range of issues including freshwater, public lands, and transportation assessments and projects. She also manages the National Center’s training program and serves as a trainer in courses covering environmental collaboration and conflict resolution 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 as a sole instructor an undergraduate course at the University of Oregon on conservation and restoration in the Pacific Northwest, 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 M.S. degrees from the University of Oregon in Conflict and Dispute Resolution and in Environmental Studies with concentrations in Critical Intercultural Communication and Planning, Public Policy and Management, along with graduate level certificates in Women’s & Gender Studies and Nonprofit Management. She also holds a B.S. degree in Biology and a Liberal Arts and Management certificate from Indiana University, and has completed over 200 hours of stand-alone training in facilitation, mediation, water conflict management and transformation, collaborative governance, and nonviolent communication.