Instructor, All paths team

Rev. Dr. Eric Kowalczyk

Reverend Doctor Eric Kowalczyk, D.Min., has dedicated his career to helping leaders and organizations communicate with integrity and impact – especially political campaigns and municipalities as well as both local and state law enforcement agencies. He has spent the last six years working with and leading teams of experts who help identify and execute end-to-end communications and crisis management strategies for a wide range of governments, law firms, municipal agencies, political campaigns, other organizations, and initiatives. Eric’s passion is working to address issues of disparate treatment in minority and disadvantaged communities.

He is the author of The Politics of Crisis: An Insider’s Perspective to Prevent Public Policy Disasters. Eric has developed a national reputation as a dynamic and engaging public speaker. Specializing in crisis communication and leadership strategies, he draws on his vast experience – in real-world, academic, and training environments – to bring a new modality of communicating with moral integrity to varied professional audiences.

Eric is a veteran of the Baltimore Police Department. As a Captain in the department and Director of Media Relations, he helped the agency as well as Baltimore’s mayor and other leaders confront and navigate the communications issues during the Freddie Gray riots and communicate to its hundreds of thousands of constituencies at the local level, in the glare of a national spotlight. While simultaneously facilitating local, national, and international media, Eric focused on transparency and accountability to connect with an already mistrusting public and implemented a crisis communications strategy and plan that was widely praised by media across the county as responsive and understanding of community concerns.

In addition to Eric’s role as a public speaker and educator, he works intimately with clients to address their most acute challenges in areas such as leadership strategy, critical incident mitigation, strategy development for crisis resolution, crisis communications, public affairs, municipal communications, internal/external communications strategy, and media relations/training.

Eric has consulted with a U.S. presidential, gubernatorial, senate, house, and mayoral campaigns. He is a member of several national professional associations and has a vast network of government and law enforcement contacts throughout the U.S.

He has trained more than 2,000 communications specialists in 41 states and 75 cities across the United States. Eric has presented at numerous national conferences, including the 2021 Parliament of the World’s Religions, and he is a 2016 TEDx Beacon Street speaker. He is on the Executive Board of the Southern California Committee for a Parliament of the World’s Religions and the Advisory Board for the Cobb Institute. Eric is an interfaith minister and holds a post-graduate degree in Divinity.