Hina Pendle, Ph.D. is the founder of Us Partners. She has over 35 years of experience working with organizations to create environments that are effective, equitable, and sustainable and that foster a community of engaged individuals who are compassionate, cooperative, and generous toward themselves and others.
A master facilitator, trainer, organizational development expert, and seeker of truth and empowerment for all, Hina sees organizations as dynamic, whole systems that are continuously shifting in order to balance internal capabilities with market, customer, and community demands. She brings her experiences in training, project management, community engagement, and facilitating group experiences–including powerful “community conversations”–to create dynamic personal and organizational change and cultures of ongoing evolution.
She is passionate about bringing her work to mission-driven organizations, including progressive businesses of all sizes, nonprofits, cooperatives, intentional communities, and “New Economy” initiatives and workplaces which are vital hubs for exploring theories and processes based on equality, truthfulness, and caring.
Early in her career, Hina began asking herself bigger questions. She studied philosophy, psychology, and art therapy as an undergraduate and later received her Ph.D. in Organizational Development and Transformation. Her first roles were in the fast-paced Garment District of New York City, where her workplaces were chaotic, disorganized, and inefficient, and she was able to use her natural organizational ability to correct systems within her charge and beyond.
As she began exploring the personal and social transformation movements happening around her, she asked herself: Who am I? Why am I happy and functional one day and sad and shut down another? Do I perpetuate love or fear? Empowerment or force? Why do we go from juggling life’s balls to dropping them? She saw the wisdom of combining skills for self-awareness with practical knowledge in the workplace and recognized that true change happens personally, interpersonally, and collectively through expanding awareness.
Hina’s work has been powerfully shaped by her personal history as a child of Holocaust survivors. She was born in a displaced persons camp in Italy and though many of her relatives survived Auschwitz, it wasn’t until she was a teenager and young adult that she began to understand how her family’s experience was guiding her to inspire greater consciousness in everyone around her and to always live out the true meaning of “never again.” Her family history, and the new generations of her own children and grandchildren, continue to deeply inspire her work toward awakening the healing power of love and empathy and why the embrace of others is critical for the thriving of humankind. She lives with her wife in the San Francisco Bay Area.