The Institute for Basic Change A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization
Founder and Executive Director Biography
Dan Prusaitis M.Ed., started work as a lathe operator in his family's small manufacturing shop at the age of nine. He worked through college as a juvenile detention officer in Indiana, and during the summers in homeless shelters and halfway houses in Chicago's Uptown. Years of work after college as a counselor in psychiatric hospitals and with homeless clients were complemented by work all around the country organizing against nuclear weapons, against intervention in Central America, and in support of environmental preservation.
For twenty years he has intensively studied and developed techniques of relationship skills, eliminating prejudice, leadership, emotional healing, and healing work for families. The avenues of study and practice of these topics include two Master's programs, twenty years of peer counseling, eighteen years in social work positions, various therapies, and 40-50 books per year by the most brilliant practitioners, theorists, educators, researchers, fiction and poetry writers in the world.
This study and training was of enormous benefit in nine excellent years of teaching secondary Spanish on the West Side of Chicago. Spanish was the only academic subject in these schools that had students from all levels fully mainstreamed. At Collins High School he was head of the World Language Department.
Currently Dan is raising his daughter, running the Institute for Basic Change, and finishing an MSW in child and family therapy. His young daughter, with whom he spends every Tuesday and Friday, is the reason he left public school teaching.
He is determinedly studying Swahili in order to train, listen to and inspire people in Kenya and Tanzania, where eventually the work of the IBC will be expanded. Niko tayari kuenda kesho! Uko tayari kuenda?
