Richard Ruster, Ph.D., is co-founder and core faculty member of Hummingbird Living School, as well as a member of the Hummingbird Community since 1998. As a faculty member of the Hummingbird Living School, Richard designs and develops curricula as well as offers workshops and courses in Co-Creative Community, The Human Dream, and the New Economics and Monetary Systems.

Richard is the founding Executive Director of the Center for the Human Dream, which will have a grand opening in the summer of 2009. The Center offers a vision supported by understandings, processes and skills that assist individuals, communities and humanity to intentionally cultivate a healthy, loving and fulfilling world.

In 2007-8, Richard was part of a small team who brought the Gaia Education Ecovillage Design Education course to the United States for the first time. He was the lead teacher for the economic dimension. This curriculum is endorsed by the United Nations as part of their Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014. Richard is certified by Gaia Education in Ecovillage Design.

During the 1980's Richard was on the core team that developed Boulder Graduate School (BGS), where he co-developed its core curriculum, taught counseling skills and was founding chairperson for the Holistic Health and Wellness Department. In 1990, BGS merged with Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado, bringing to Naropa its primary program of Transpersonal Counseling, which immediately became Naropa's largest and most successful program.

Richard has been a holistic and transpersonal counselor and wellness coach since 1979, as well as a management consultant and executive coach. During the 1990's he was staff psychotherapist and wellness coach at Colorado Health Professionals, a holistic medical clinic, in Boulder, Colorado.

Richard's doctorate is in holistic psychology and whole systems science. His studies, combined with his professional and community experience, have matured into his life work offered through the Center for the Human Dream and Hummingbird Living School. He is author of The Homing Process: A Unifying Theory of Evolving Systems (1989), and is currently writing a book, The Human Dream.