Quick Bio
With over 20 years of experience in adult education, Filtod Walker is a chaplain, mindfulness group and retreat leader. and master teacher who specializes in teaching mindfulness and communication skills to corporate, non-profit, and individual clients. Filtod wrote his master's thesis on how to teach emotional intelligence skills in the classroom setting and he has been a Vipassana (Insight) meditation practitioner since 1997. With specialized training for teaching mindfulness in the correctional system, he is a secular teacher that blends more traditionally spiritual subject matter in his mindfulness, communication, and meditation skills classes.
Filtod has spoken at conferences on mindfulness, emotional intelligence, stress management, cognitive distortions, instructional design, employee/volunteer correction, understanding cultural awareness, and learned helplessness in adult education.
He currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana.
With over 20 years of experience in adult education, Filtod Walker is a chaplain, mindfulness group and retreat leader. and master teacher who specializes in teaching mindfulness and communication skills to corporate, non-profit, and individual clients. Filtod wrote his master's thesis on how to teach emotional intelligence skills in the classroom setting and he has been a Vipassana (Insight) meditation practitioner since 1997. With specialized training for teaching mindfulness in the correctional system, he is a secular teacher that blends more traditionally spiritual subject matter in his mindfulness, communication, and meditation skills classes.
Filtod has spoken at conferences on mindfulness, emotional intelligence, stress management, cognitive distortions, instructional design, employee/volunteer correction, understanding cultural awareness, and learned helplessness in adult education.
He currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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Professional Work
Prior to working on his own, Filtod began his career as an administrative assistant, worked his way onto the help desk, then into external consulting, and then became a solutions architect at McGladrey, the fifth largest accounting firm in the U.S. While there, he created a new internal line of business called Internal IT Consulting and reported directly to the regional CFO. The business model he created took the traditional IT consulting experience and flipped it to face internal clients. Employees could then receive the same experience they would receive through an outside vendor through an internal team of experts. At the same time, Filtod moved from volunteering as an English instructor at Gads Hill Center to becoming a staff-member at Literacy Chicago where he conducted Adult Literacy and English Language Learning classes. His teaching and corporate careers happened in parallel. After 15 years of doing dual careers, Filtod realized he couldn't continue to do both and do them both well. He chose education over software design, launched out to teach on his own, and went back to school for his master's degree. While completing his thesis on how to teach emotional intelligence skills, the value of his years of mindfulness education and practice became evident. It made sense to begin using mindfulness as the base skill to teach all the other skills and he redesigned his classes to come from the more awareness-based perspective.
To do work in prisons, Filtod took coursework through the Prison Mindfulness Institute to learn how to transfer his skills and teach in the correctional system. His work is now partly standing in front of a classroom training teachers and leaders in their fields and partly sitting on a cushion leading groups in how to expand their mindfulness practice. The day retreats Filtod teaches are popular with many students because they blend mindfulness with communication and emotional intelligence skills. Students are able to see how what they are learning on the cushion can be used very practically in their every day life. Before moving to California, Filtod's home base was the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago where he taught mindfulness retreats and classes and also worked at Howard Area Community Center teaching English Language Acquisition, Digital Literacy, and the Free Fridays series for people in the neighborhood to learn Microsoft Office skills. Filtod also worked for many years as an adjunct instructor at Literacy Works where he taught Adult Literacy and English Language Learning educational skills. He loved his time in Rogers Park and was truly a neighborhood-based mindfulness teacher. 
Filtod is shown here training a new round of Adult Literacy VOCAL Volunteers.
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Volunteer Work
In the past, Filtod volunteered with the Center on Halsted (COH) as a crisis and coming out helpline peer counselor. After being attacked on a train, he could find no good self-defense options available for the LGBT community and contacted COH to see what could be done. At the time, the only self-defense options for men were karate, taekwondo, or similar classes in which self-defense skills could take years to learn. The usual self-defense agencies that trained defense in under a month and mostly for women at the time wouldn't train men. They were afraid they would be training potential attackers. In response, the anti-violence director from COH recruited two local self-defense instructors willing to take on the project and asked Filtod onto the team for fundraising and marketing help. That four-person group brought the first LGBT self-defense classes to Chicago and it's something Filtod is still proud to have helped create. While at the National Runaway Safeline, Filtod counseled runaways, helped them find overnight shelter, mediated discussions with their parents so they could return home, and helped them deal with thoughts of suicide. While at Chicago House, Filtod worked as a companion at their AIDS hospice until the first lifesaving HIV drugs became available. While in college, Filtod worked as a resident supervisor with the Heart House Homeless Shelter which primarily provided housing and support for women and children leaving abusive homes.
At the Lakeview Pantry, Filtod served as the board fundraising chair and was responsible for coordinating the board fundraising activities and leading committee volunteers. Filtod also served for many years on the Illinois Conference of Volunteer Administration (ICOVA) Planning and Speaker Recruitment Committees and recently served on the National LGBTQ Task Force Creating Change Conference Host Committee as the program committee chair for its conference in Chicago. Personal Projects
Filtod is a visual artist and former organizer of a creative artist salon group where musicians, artists, writers, and every day people joined together to share their more experimental work. For several years, he also organized a banned book club where people could meet and discuss the novels that are being challenged or banned from schools. He also formerly organized meetup groups for personal growth literature, LGBTQ history, and meditation. |