How a lifelong commitment to education, human development, and systems change is helping people navigate stress, strengthen relationships, and build more resilient communities
Throughout her career, Meri McCoy-Thompson has been drawn to one central question:
What helps people and communities thrive?
Her search for answers has taken her across education, healthcare, international development, nonprofit leadership, and social-emotional learning. Along the way, she came to recognize an essential but often overlooked element of systems change: the human beings within the system.
Today, as Executive Director of Dovetail Learning and co-author of The Heart of Resilience, Meri helps individuals and organizations understand what happens under stress and develop practical skills for responding with greater awareness, connection, and choice.
Her work reflects a simple but powerful belief: when people understand themselves better and relate to one another more effectively, they become better equipped to solve the larger challenges facing their families, organizations, and communities.
A Lifelong Interest in Systems Change
Meri’s interest in systems began during her undergraduate years at Stanford University.
She created an interdisciplinary major examining the connections among environmental, political, economic, and sociological systems. This systems perspective would become a guiding thread throughout her career.
Meri later earned a master’s degree from Tufts University and went on to work across education, public health, nonprofit leadership, and international development.
She served on the faculty at Georgetown University and as Project Director for the original Bright Futures initiative, developed in partnership with the American Academy of Pediatrics. The initiative helped establish a comprehensive approach to supporting the health and development of children and families.
Meri also held leadership roles with international and social-impact organizations. As Executive Director of Human Needs Project, she supported work addressing essential needs in Kenya. Later, as Director of Strategic Partners for Gratitude Network, she helped nonprofit leaders strengthen and scale organizations serving children and youth around the world.
These experiences reinforced her understanding that lasting change requires more than a strong program or policy. It also requires people who can communicate, collaborate, and remain grounded under pressure.
Helping Children Build Social and Emotional Skills
Dovetail Learning initially focused on bringing social-emotional learning to elementary school children.
Its TOOLBOX™ program gave children a shared language and practical tools for managing emotions, building relationships, and making thoughtful choices. The program eventually reached approximately 240,000 children and 12,000 educators across 38 states.
The organization’s success demonstrated the value of teaching children practical skills they could use in school, at home, and throughout their lives.
But it also revealed an important gap.
Children do not develop in isolation. They are influenced by the adults around them—parents, caregivers, educators, coaches, healthcare professionals, and community leaders.
Many of those adults were being asked to help children regulate emotions and navigate challenges without having received the same opportunities to develop those skills themselves.
Dovetail recognized that strengthening children’s resilience also required strengthening the adults who support them.
Reinventing the Organization Around Adult Resilience
In 2019, Dovetail Learning began an important organizational reinvention.
The organization expanded its focus from social-emotional learning for children to resilience development for adults, teams, and organizations. This work led to the creation of the We Are Resilient™ approach.
The new framework combines insights from psychology, social science, systems thinking, mindfulness, and decades of experience in education and human development. It gives people a practical way to understand how stress influences their thoughts, emotions, relationships, and decisions.
Dovetail launched the approach in February 2020—just as the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way people lived and worked.
Organizations that had expected to participate in the new training were suddenly confronting immediate crises. In-person learning stopped, schools and workplaces closed, and families faced unprecedented uncertainty.
Dovetail Learning had to reinvent its methods almost immediately.
The organization moved its training online, created new resources, and adapted its programs to meet the rapidly changing needs of educators, leaders, helping professionals, and families.
That experience embodied one of the central lessons of Meri’s work: resilience is not about rigidly holding on to a plan. It is about remaining connected to a purpose while being willing to change the path forward.
A Practical Understanding of Resilience
Meri believes resilience is often misunderstood.
It is sometimes associated with toughness, self-sufficiency, or the ability to endure hardship without showing vulnerability. The We Are Resilient™ approach offers a different understanding.
Resilience is the human capacity to adapt and respond effectively to challenges. It is not a rare quality possessed by a special few. Everyone has resilience, and everyone can strengthen it.
One important part of Dovetail’s work involves helping people recognize their Protective Patterns—the automatic responses that can emerge under stress.
Some people attack or defend. Others avoid, distrust, become hypervigilant, or take excessive responsibility for everyone around them. These patterns are not treated as personal failings. They are understood as responses that developed to help people feel safe or maintain connection.
By recognizing these patterns, people can create more space between what happens to them and how they respond.
Dovetail describes this process through three Mindsets: Curiosity, Choice, and Courage. Participants also practice skills for Centering themselves, Connecting authentically with others, and Collaborating to create healthier groups and cultures.
The goal is not perfection. It is helping people respond to difficult moments with greater awareness and intention.
Publishing The Heart of Resilience
In 2024, Meri and longtime collaborator Chuck Fisher published The Heart of Resilience: Nurturing Your Inner Strength for a Joyful Life.
The book translates Dovetail Learning’s framework into an accessible resource for individuals, families, educators, leaders, and helping professionals.
Through stories, reflection, and practical exercises, the book explores how people can recognize their patterns, strengthen their inner resources, improve their relationships, and respond more effectively to life’s challenges.
For Meri, publishing the book was another way to make resilience learning available beyond formal workshops and organizational programs.
Building Capacity Through Coaches and Leaders
Dovetail Learning now works with schools, nonprofits, workplaces, healthcare organizations, and community groups and has trained thousands of people across the country.
Its programs range from introductory workshops to the 30-hour We Are Resilient™ Coach Certification. More than 200 people have completed the certification, building their capacity to model resilience skills and support others within their organizations and communities.
Dovetail’s approach emphasizes practice rather than presentation alone. Participants do not simply learn about resilience as an abstract concept. They reflect on their own responses, practice specific skills, and consider how those skills can become part of everyday conversations, meetings, relationships, and organizational culture.
Meri’s work also emphasizes that resilience is more than an individual responsibility. Dovetail identifies five interconnected Types of Resilience: Reactive, Personal, Relational, Group, and Cultural.
This broader perspective helps organizations examine not only how individuals respond to stress, but also how workplace expectations, group dynamics, and cultural patterns influence well-being and performance.
Extending the Work Internationally
Meri’s commitment to global learning continues through Dovetail’s international partnerships.
In 2026, Dovetail Learning provided its We Are Resilient™ Coach Certification to Ukrainian psychologists and helping professionals affiliated with PORUCH, an initiative supporting children, youth, and families affected by war and displacement.
Participants brought the learning into their work with children, parents, colleagues, and communities while also using the practices to support their own well-being.
For Meri, the partnership demonstrated the importance of approaching international work with humility and collaboration. Dovetail brought its resilience framework, while the Ukrainian participants brought deep professional expertise, cultural knowledge, and lived experience.
Together, they explored how resilience skills could be adapted and applied within the realities of war, displacement, and ongoing uncertainty.
Making Resilience Part of Everyday Life
Meri also brings resilience principles to everyday dilemmas through Ms. Resilient and Curious Christie, an advice column she writes with Kristie Cannady.
The column uses curiosity, compassion, practical skills, and humor to respond to questions about relationships, boundaries, workplace challenges, parenting, trust, and personal growth.
Through the column, Meri and Kristie demonstrate that resilience is not reserved for major crises. It is practiced in ordinary moments: a difficult conversation, an uncomfortable decision, an apology, a boundary, or the willingness to ask for help.
Connection as a Source of Strength
Although Meri’s professional life has taken her around the world, family and close relationships remain central to her life and her understanding of resilience.
She and her husband, Steve, have made Pleasanton their home for nearly three decades and raised two children there. Their family has continued to grow as both of their adult children have married.
These relationships reinforce one of the most important principles underlying Meri’s work: people do not become resilient entirely on their own.
Resilience grows through connection. It is strengthened when people feel seen, supported, and able to meet challenges alongside others.
Looking Ahead
Meri believes the need for resilience has never been greater.
Families, workplaces, schools, and communities are navigating rapid change, uncertainty, burnout, conflict, and growing disconnection. These challenges cannot be addressed solely through stronger policies, programs, or technologies.
They also require investment in the people who make those systems work.
Through Dovetail Learning, Meri continues to help people strengthen the human capacities underneath effective organizations and healthy communities: self-awareness, emotional regulation, authentic connection, compassion, courage, and collaboration.
Her journey demonstrates that reinvention does not mean abandoning what came before. Often, it means carrying forward what has been learned, releasing what no longer serves, and finding a more effective way to fulfill the original purpose.
For Meri, that purpose remains clear:
Helping people access their inner strength, build healthier relationships, and work together to create a more kind, connected, and resilient world.
Learn more about Dovetail Learning’s training, resources, and work at DovetailLearning.org
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