Revitalize – to bring new life or vigor. Ed Tomey uses that word a lot, whether he's talking about teaching at Antioch New England Graduate School or his work with the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation or how he loves to read a poem out loud in a way that no one, not even the poet, expects.

Tomey has taught organization and management at Antioch New England Graduate School since 1981 and consulted to businesses, non-profit organizations and government since 1974. He's always aiming, he says, to help students or clients look at things in a new way.

"What I do is about helping people or organizations envision where they want to go," says Tomey, "then look at what needs to happen to get there. I ask a lot of questions about what's important to them and what they value. I don't tell them what to do but help them create a picture of their goal and how to achieve it, and what gets in the way and how to get around those barriers.

"It's about choice," he adds. "Most people haven't truly made choices in their lives. And if we don't decide what we want to see happen, that leaves it open for someone else to be in charge. We have so much in us that wants to please, to go along with what's in front of us, that we sometimes self seal ourselves – agree to something before we know what we really want or what's possible."

Tomey, 65, uses his own life as an example. He didn't really make choices early on about college or a career, he says.

"I just took the choices in front of me," he says. "I didn't know about making choices."

Tomey grew up in a working-class section of Bridgeport, Conn., called the Hollow. With his Lebanese background, he fit into the varied ethnic mix of African Americans, Cubans, Polish, Portuguese, Jews and Italians. His parents, both of whom had only a ninth grade education, ran a grocery store.

"It was hard to get out of that neighborhood," he says. "Nobody thought of college."

His mother, however, wanted to get him off the streets and arranged for him to attend the Watkinson School in Hartford, a prep school for Episcopal boys from the inner city. There, the worlds of literature and college opened up to him. One of his favorite teachers was Mr. Gleason, who taught literature.

"He made literature exciting," says Tomey. "He read stuff aloud and brought it to life. He had a lot of life energy; it was hard not to pay attention to him. That was where I began to fall in love with literature."

No one had gone to college in Tomey's family, but his roommate at Watkinson had gone to Colby. Tomey decided to apply there, too.

During college, Tomey made $15 a night in what he calls "sleazy nightclubs" as a house singer – the one who entertains between the floor show and the main singer. Perhaps it was preparation for community theatre, which he became heavily involved with after college. He also organized a reading club that read at service clubs and women's teas, and he sang with small bands.

Tomey's choice of a major – English literature – wasn't really a choice, he says. "That's all I knew," he says, "but it turned out to be the right choice." He also joined ROTC (Reserved Officers' Training Corps), for the first two years because it was required, but later largely because one of his heroes, the lead jazz singer in a singing group, was involved.

It was only after graduating from college and being in the Air Force for several years that Tomey began several transitions in his life that involved conscious choices. He describes some moments of "major revitalization" in his life.

He had served as a public relations officer in the Air Force for seven years when he was transferred to the Pentagon. This was in the early 1960s, when the U.S. was building up its forces in Vietnam, unbeknownst to the American people.

"I believed that I had been telling the truth to the American people," he says, "but I realized, when I got to the Pentagon, I was not telling the truth."

A friend of his edited film that came from Vietnam and "knew what went on the cutting room floor and what got released."

Tomey decided he could not stay in the Air Force under these conditions. He resigned his commission and went to work as a public relations director for an Avco Corporation subsidiary based in Washington, D.C. He had another revelation when a human development organization came in to work with the company.

"They were trying to get us to talk from a values place about what we wanted," says Tomey. "I realized I had been speaking for others for so long, I wasn't sure of my own thoughts and opinions. I decided I needed to find my own voice."

Tomey moved on to Abt Associates in Boston, an international consulting firm, where he was vice president of training and personnel systems. There, he got his first taste of consulting, which eventually led to forming his own firm in 1974.

The year before, Tomey had experienced another life change. After 11 years of marriage, he and his wife had divorced. He had quit his corporate job with Abt and began teaching graduate courses at the Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School of Government. Eventually, he earned his graduate degree in organization behavior from Harvard. He found himself being drawn more and more to teaching.

"I loved the vibrancy of teaching," Tomey says, "but I didn't know how much fun and how meaningful teaching could be until I came to Antioch."

A chance meeting a few years later with Lew Feldstein, then president of Antioch, led to Tomey's moving to the Monadnock region and joining the organization and management faculty full-time. He was a member of the faculty from 1981 until 1999; he chaired the department for seven of those years. Today, although officially retired, he continues to teach one course each term.

Of his teaching, Tomey says he is "a person who helps students take theory and turn it into practice.

"I could teach by having students read the text and write papers," he says, "but that doesn't change behaviors. I don't ask them to regurgitate but to apply what they learn to their current work situation. We role play taking risks because with high risk comes the real potential for learning."

Karen Wheeler, a former student, describes Tomey as "one of the best professors I've ever had.

"He is encouraging and positive," she says, "and is instrumental in getting you to think about the things that will help you get to your goals. He has a wonderful spirit. It is a gift for anyone to have the opportunity to get to know him or have him in a class."

Feldstein, who is now president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, also has words of praise for Tomey. Tomey continues to work with Feldstein as a consultant to the Charitable Foundation and the two of them are involved in the Corporate Fund, a major effort to improve non-profit management in the state.

"On a professional level, Ed has built a reputation as one of the most trusted and skilled consultants and facilitators," says Feldstein. "You can hire consultants who will help you run a meeting but it feels sort of like a hired gun, like they take you through a process. With Ed, you always have the sense that he's 100 percent in the room with you, that he has done his homework and knows what the issues are for your organization, that he's using a process he has tailored specifically to your needs."

"At the end of a day of consulting or teaching," says Tomey, "I may never have sat down once. I'm exhausted but not tired. I'm revitalized. That's what I want for my students and clients – to feel revitalized.

"I was in a play once where we had a great opening night. The second night, the director told us that tonight's audience was different and we couldn't assume it would laugh or cry in the same places. "You've never done this show before," he said, "because you haven't done it with this audience."

"Whether I'm consulting or teaching, it's the interaction. If I do it the same way all the time, there's no more learning and it loses its vitality. I never want to lose that vitality."

Over the years, Tomey and Feldstein have become good friends.

"Ed is not a light friend," says Feldstein. "He asks a lot of the friendship in the best sense of the word. When he looks at you, there's no veil in front of his eyes. He's looking right into you and he wants to talk substance."

Tomey had remarried while still in Boston and, for a few years, he and his wife, Maich Gardner, had a commuter marriage. She had three children from her previous marriage and, in 1977, they had a son.

"At the age of 40, I had my first biological child," says Tomey. "It was just amazing; it's a whole new way to think about life. I had wanted to have children but I had given up, put it away, because it was too hurtful."

Gardner and the children eventually moved to Keene, where she heads the group of about 20 volunteer doulas at Cheshire Medical Center. A doula accompanies a woman through the labor, childbirth and postpartum experience.

As in all areas of his life, Tomey has looked consciously at marriage and fatherhood.

"One of my revitalizations was in unlearning some of the ways I'd learned about being male," says Tomey. "Maich helped me by taking the lead. She was very strong in her feminist thinking. I had a lot to learn but I was an available and willing partner."

The two of them fashioned their own unique system for raising children and running a household. They had what Tomey calls an "on and off system.

"We each had a week on and week off," he explains. "If we were on, we took the kids to their appointments, did the shopping and cooking – basically ran the house. The person not on could do evening meetings that week or travel."

Tomey also became good friends with Gardner's former husband and they developed a way of co-fathering the three older children.

"Peter died suddenly in 1993," says Tomey, "and I miss him. We had a great system of fathering the kids and suddenly I was doing it myself."

Tomey calls his way of looking at relationships a process of "advocacy and inquiry. It is not a selfish perspective," he says, "but a self perspective. You take action on behalf of yourself but you also need to find out what the other person needs and wants. You are available to be influenced by others but you don't give your self away."

In Tomey's consulting work, he has made sure that at least 50 percent of his clients are non-profit organizations, working with such groups as New Hampshire Business Partners for Early Living; New Futures, Inc., which works with young people around drugs and tobaccos; Monadnock Family Services; and Governor Jean Shaheen's Kid's Cabinet, a group of state department heads who consider policy and program issues for kids.

He also devotes much time to non-profit organizations such as Monadnock United Way (MUW) and the New Hampshire Writers Project.

"It's part of my commitment to community," he says.

Kathi Snow, executive director of MUW, describes Tomey as "an impressive leader who is good at engaging people and leading them through the process. He does all the things a good leader does but goes beyond that," she says. "He brings kindness and sensitivity and a willingness to be open."

Perhaps these days are another time of revitalization for Tomey. The kids are all grown and he and Gardner are in the process of building a new home in Keene. He is trying to cut back on his consulting work to have more time for writing; he has a non-fiction book and a novel in the works. And he is becoming known for his dramatic readings of poetry. Recently, he read a poem publicly by Cynthia Huntington and, several years ago, read a poem by Jane Kenyon at her memorial services. One of his dreams is to make poetry more accessible, perhaps by doing his dramatic readings in the schools or elsewhere.

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