mind, body and life skills for at-risk youth

Staff & Instructors

INSTRUCTORS
Anahata Labaw , Leilani Nisperos, Vinny Ferraro, Will Kabat-Zinn, Jon Oda, Jonathan Weinstock, Sam Himelstein, Amutabi Haines, Amani Carey-Simms, Kekoa Won (not all pictured above)

STAFF
Chris McKenna – Executive Director: Chris has spent over a decade working with diverse communities suffering from high incidents of trauma and violence. From 2006-2009, he was Outreach Director of the Center for Justice and Accountability, an NGO launched out of Amnesty International that provides legal and psychosocial services to victims of torture, genocide and war crimes from over 20 countries. He was also the Executive Director of Tibet Justice Center, an NGO which does international advocacy on Tibetan human rights, religious freedom and environmental issues for His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, and a campaigner on WITNESS’s “Books Not Bars” initiative, working with grassroots prison reform groups to challenge youth incarceration policies in the U.S. He has a fifteen-year history with mindfulness meditation and has taught mindfulness practices to refugees with post-traumatic stress disorder and other severe mental health conditions. He is on the Advisory Council of “Honoring the Path of the Warrior” – a project of the San Francisco Zen Center which teaches mindfulness and somatic awareness techniques to U.S. soldiers returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chris also serves on the Executive Committee of the Tibetan Association of Northern California, focusing on the effort to acquire a community center for Tibetan refugees living in the Bay Area. He received his B.A. in Religion and Asian Studies from Columbia University. He’s had the good fortune to study with several excellent teachers in the Zen, Daoist and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions.

Vinny Ferraro – Teacher Training Director: Vinny is a long-time mindfulness meditation practitioner, meditation instructor, and a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk, gang-involved and incarcerated youth. The child of incarcerated parents, Vinny was in the probation system by the age of 10 and went on to spend the majority of his teenage life hustling and living on the streets. In 1987, after recovering from drug addiction, he began leading youth groups in drug rehabilitation centers, juvenile halls, schools and half-way houses through the Hospitals and Institutions Program of Narcotics Anonymous. Vinny continued this work for nearly a decade before transitioning to a more intensive focus on mindfulness-based rehabilitation and emotional awareness work. In 2001, he began teaching for the Challenge Day organization, a nationally-recognized transformational change organization that helps adolescents overcome internalized and external oppression, cultivate emotional well-being, and create healthier communities. He eventually becoming Challenge Day’s Director of Training, leading workshops in four different countries to over 100,000 youth. In addition with is work with youth, Vinny has extensive experience training probation officers, teachers, and community leaders who work with at-risk youth how to utilize mindfulness-based practices to deal with their own stress, anxiety, and secondary trauma. Vinny leads meditation retreats for adults nation-wide and is a graduate of Spirit Rock Mediation Center’s Community Dharma Leader’s Program. He has received national media coverage for his work with at-risk youth; he is the subject of the MTV series If You Really Knew Me.

Sam Himelstein – Program Manager: Sam is an advanced candidate for a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, CA. His clinical focus is on working with at-risk and incarcerated youth in both individual and group psychotherapy settings. He is currently finishing his pre-doctoral licensing hours at a juvenile detention camp in San Mateo County where he facilitates awareness-based drug and alcohol groups and sees youth for individual psychotherapy. Sam has worked for MBA for three years as a meditation instructor in Alameda, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties. Prior to his involvement with MBA, Sam worked in diverse settings including wilderness therapy programs for at-risk youth, suicide prevention centers, and prior psychotherapy internships with post-incarcerated adult drug abusers, homeless populations, and war veterans. His most recent accomplishment is his PhD dissertation, which investigated MBA’s current curriculum and is entitled, “A Mixed Methods Study of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention on Incarcerated Youth.”

Gabriel Kram – Director of Consulting Services: Gabriel brings 14 years of mindfulness meditation, 10 years of yoga practice, and 7 years of participation in indigenous ceremony to his role as Director of Consulting Services. During his tenure as MBA Executive Director, Gabriel created a Memorandum of Understanding with San Mateo County Probation Department formalizing collaboration to support enhanced service offerings for incarcerated/post-incarcerated youth, and created a coalition of Alameda County public partners, including Probation, Behavioral Health, and Healthcare Services Agency to support therapeutic continuum of care for youth incarcerated in Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center. In 2008, he authored and oversaw the development of a strategic plan for a comprehensive Mindfulness-Based Rehabilitation Initiative in Alameda County that was advanced to final round consideration by the Local Funding Partnerships of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He also oversaw the creation of MBA’s Research Advisory Council, whose purpose is to oversee the development and implementation of evaluation as MBA seeks inclusion of its programming in evidence-based registries.

Curriculum Conference- June 2008

From Left to Right:
Gabriel Kram, Previous MBA Executive Director
Jon Oda, Senior Instructor
Ivy Ang, MBA Board
Stuart Sovatsky, MBA Board
Vinny Ferraro, Teacher Training Director
Fleet Maull, Founder Prison Dharma Network
Will Kabat-Zinn, Senior Instructor
Isaiah Seret, MBA Board Chair
George Mumford, Former Meditation Coach LA Lakers, Chicago Bulls
Kevin Ang, Visual Recorder
Jonathan Weinstock, Senior Instructor
NOT PICTURED:
Dr. Kyra Bobinet, MBA Board
Rodulio Sarmiento, Youth Participant

Board of Directors

Connor Aiken has been professionally involved in the fitness, dance, and health field for 25 years. He is a personal trainer and advanced Pilates instructor, working with clients to help them move beyond self-imposed limitations and discover within themselves new possibilities for strength and freedom through movement.. He serves on the Fundraising Committee.

Ivy Ang is founder and president of Visionlinc, a company dedicated to linking vision, people and strategies. Ivy works with CEOs and teams committed to new ways of thinking and doing business. She has 30 years of business and human resources management experience in high-tech, bio-technology, strategic design consulting and financial services. She has worked for global industry leaders such as Genentech, AIG and Landor Associates. She serves on the Executive Committee.

Dr. Kyra Bobinet is the Founding Director of Vision Youthz, an organization dedicated to the rehabilitation and transformation of incarcerated youth, where she received national recognization as a pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based practices to urban youth. Vision Youthz merged with MBA in December of 2007. Dr. Bobinet is a graduate of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and holds a Masters in Public Health from Harvard University. She serves on the Program and Fundraising Committees.

Ariane Herrera is a Public Relations and Marketing consultant. Current clients include Mother, New York, T.A.G, San Francisco, and Energy BBDO, Chicago. She has worked on branding, strategy, and public relations for brands/companies including Apple, Jeep, Johnson&Johnson, and Virgin Mobile. She serves on the Fundraising Committee.

Chip Gettinger is Vice President of Sales for Astoria Software. He was the Board Chair of Vision Youthz, an organization dedicated to the rehabilitation and transformation of incarcerated youth, prior to its merger with MBA. He serves on the Executive Committee.

Isaiah Seret, M.A. is a filmmaker who has produced, directed, and assistant directed commercials, music videos, and feature films. Isaiah co-founded the MBA Project after working for Spirit Rock’s Family Program and for the Lineage Project at the San Mateo juvenile hall. He is the Chairman of the Board.

Stuart Sovatsky, Ph.D. wrote the first Federal grant to bring meditation and yoga into youth facilities in 1975. He is Co-president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and has been a marriage therapist since 1973. Stuart chairs the Program Committee.

Advisory Board

MBA Project Advisory Board
General Advisors to the MBA Project, Inc.

Daniel Goleman, PhD: Dr. Goleman was a co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale University Child Studies Center (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago), with the mission to help schools introduce emotional literacy courses. One mark of the Collaborative—and book’s—impact is that thousands of schools around the world have begun to implement such programs. His 1998 book, Working With Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books), argues that workplace competencies based on emotional intelligence play a far greater role in star performance than do intellect or technical skill, and that both individuals and companies will benefit from cultivating these capabilities. His most recent book, Primal Leadership – Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, explores the crucial role of emotional intelligence in leadership. Dr. Goleman is co-chairman of The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, which seeks to recommend best practices for developing emotional competence. In 2003 he published Destructive Emotions, an account of a scientific dialogue between the Dalai Lama and a group of psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers.

Joan Halifax: Joan is a medical anthropologist, deep ecologist, and meditation teacher, who has long been at the forefront of cultural and spiritual exploration. A former Rockefeller fellow, she lectures and teaches worldwide. She directs the Upaya Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which includes the Upaya Prison Project, a network of contemplative prison programs.

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn: Major research pursuits lie in the emerging field of mind / body medicine, with the focus on the clinical, social, and human performance effects of mindfulness meditation training in various populations. These include people with chronic pain, stress related disorders, and / or a wide range of chronic diseases with a particular focus on breast cancer; multi-ethnic and multi-racial inner city communities experiencing high psychosocial stress due to poverty and associated social conditions; and inmates and corrections personnel in the prison system. Other areas of research are directed at the effects of regulated attention on healing processes; stress in medical education; cost-effectiveness of mind / body interventions; stress related to work and organizational re-engineering; the Tao of work; mindfulness in the physician-patient relationship; the development of psychological resilience to stress; mindfulness-based stress reduction curricula and their implementation in the primary and secondary education; achieving optimal performance in athletes through mindfulness meditation training.

Noah Levine, M.A.: Noah is one of the founders of the Mind Body Awareness Project. He has been teaching meditation in prisons for close to 10 years and he leads retreats and workshop all over the world. He is the author of, “Dharma Punx”, a spiritual biography chronicling his transformation from Juvenile hall to spiritual activist. Noah has led rights of passage retreats for youth and he has become a leading advocate for incarcerated youth.

Stephen & Ondrea Levine: are world famous meditation teachers and writers who have counseled nurses, doctors, their terminally ill and many others for over 25 years. Stephen and Ondrea’s books include, “A Gradual Awakening, “Who Dies” and “Embracing the Beloved”.

Bo Lozoff: is the director of Human Kindness Foundation and its internationally acclaimed Prison Ashram Project. His writings and workshops have helped countless people to transform their lives even in the worst prisons in America. He is the author of, “We’re All Doing Time”, “Lineage And other Stories” and “Just Another Spiritual book”.

Research Advisory Council

Research Advisory Council Working Group:
Dr. Kyra Bobinet, MD, MPH (Chair of Research Advisory Council)
Sam Himelstein (Research Intern)
Angela West, PhD

The MBA Project, Inc. has, over seven years of clinical work and evaluation, developed proprietary mindfulness-based rehabilitation interventions for at-risk and incarcerated youth. We seek to become a national model for the provision of mindfulness-based rehabilitation services to these populations. A key component of this effort is the demonstration of the efficacy of our interventions as evidence-based practice through the design, implementation, interpretation, and dissemination of research studies measuring the effectiveness of the intervention in achieving a number of key outcomes related to increased well-being and reduced risk factors in the youth we serve.

The MBA Project’s Research Advisory Council exists to provide expert guidance and oversight for MBA’s evaluation design, implementation of research studies, and interpretation of data gathered. Members of the Council represent perspectives from both Mindfulness research and Corrections.

Susan L. Smalley, PhD
Founder and Director, Mindful Awareness Research Center, UCLA
Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA

Dr. Susan L. Smalley is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and Founder and Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center in the Semel Institute. Dr. Smalley’s research laboratory at UCLA investigates the genetic basis of childhood onset psychiatric disorders such as ADHD and neurodiversity, in general. She is particularly interested in how self-regulation of environments – including one’s own attentional states – can be used to enhance health and well-being while reducing impairment associated with neurobiological differences. This work has led to research on mindfulness including studies of basic biological mechanisms, relationship and intervention in childhood onset psychiatric disorders including ADHD, and dissemination of mindfulness across the lifespan, from Pre-K to the elderly. Dr. Smalley is widely published in both scientific journals and mainstream press (e.g. The Huffington Post) as she is particularly interested in the intersection of science and self-exploration (such as meditation) and its translation to the general public. Lab websites: http://www.marc.ucla.edu and www.adhd.ucla.edu

Susan Turner, PhD
Co-Director, Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, University of California, Irvine.
Professor, Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine.

Susan Turner is a Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California’s Irvine campus. She also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, and is a board member of the newly created California Rehabilitation Oversight Board (C-ROB). She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has lead a variety of research projects, including studies on racial disparity, field experiments of private sector alternatives for serious juvenile offenders, work release, day fines and a 14-site evaluation of intensive supervision probation. Dr. Turner’s areas of expertise include the design and implementation of randomized field experiments and research collaborations with state and local justice agencies. Dr. Turner has conducted a number of evaluations of drug courts, including a nationwide implementation study. Her article, “A Decade of Drug Treatment Court Research” (2002) appeared in Substance Use and Misuse, summarizing over 10 years of drug court research conducted while she was at RAND Corporation. Dr. Turner is a member of the American Society of Criminology, the American Probation and Parole Association, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology.

Dr. John Astin, PhD
Research Scientist, California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco

John Astin is a Research Scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. His research and clinical work has focused on several related areas: 1) the use of mind-body therapies, particularly mindfulness meditation, to treat various health-related problems; 2) psychosocial factors associated with use of complementary and alternative medical therapies; 3) the psychological construct of control and its relationship to mental and physical health; and, 4) the role of spirituality in healthcare. Dr. Astin received his Ph.D. in Health Psychology from the University of California, Irvine. From 1997-1999, he was a research fellow in the Complementary and Alternative Medicine Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine. From January 2000-June 2002, he was the director of mind-body research at the Complementary Medicine Program, University of Maryland School of Medicine. He has occupied his present position at CPMC since July of 2002. His research has appeared in such journals as Archives of Internal Medicine, JAMA, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. He is the co-author (with Deane Shapiro) of the book: “Control therapy: An integrated approach to psychotherapy, health, and healing.”

Angela M. West, PhD
Developer of the MTASA- Mindfulness Thinking and Acting Scale for Adolescents

Ms. West has studied mindfulness meditation as an adjunctive therapy since 2001; initially in a maximum security forensic mental hospital. In 2003, she initiated her own research in this field focusing on measurement of mindfulness in an adolescent population. The result of an initial project dedicated to measuring mindfulness in youth resulted in an experimental self-report questionnaire, the Mindful Thinking and Action Scale for Adolescents (MTASA). The MTASA is a thirty-two item pencil and paper instrument designed for administration to English speaking adolescents ages thirteen through nineteen. Currently, this project is in a second stage devoted to determining the psychometric properties of the MTASA, along side mindfulness measures designed for use with adults. Results are expected to assist with the further exploration of mindfulness as a potential wellbeing marker in adolescence.

Founders

Andrew Getz, R.N.: Andrew is the founder of Youth Horizons, which merged with the MBA Project in 2005. Andrew is a child and adolescent psychiatric nurse and long-term practitioner of mindfulness meditation. He is an experienced teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and has taught MBSR in numerous healthcare and community settings to adults, teens, and healthcare providers. Andrew is also a seasoned health educator, most recently working with HIV positive clients struggling with chemical dependency issues. Andrew brings a depth of understanding from 25 years of intensive mindfulness meditation training to the education process and enjoys blending his experience of traditional and complimentary approaches to medicine into his work with at-risk youth.

Noah Levine M.A.: Noah has been teaching meditation in prisons for 10 years and leads retreats and workshops all over the world. He is the author of, “Dharma Punx”, a spiritual biography chronicling his transformation from Juvenile hall to spiritual activist. Noah has led rights of passage retreats for youth and he has become a leading advocate for incarcerated youth.

Jonathan S. Raymond, JD

Isaiah Seret, MA

Catherine Diamond: Catherine has worked with at-risk youth in creative and therapeutic non-profit organizations, sharing her knowledge and experience as a successful artist and entrepeneur. Her yoga and meditation background comes from training throughout Asia and North America since 1998.

Scott Diamond: Scott has worked in a variety of professional mental health organizations with an emphasis on anger management and stress reduction. He has practiced meditation/yoga for the past ten years and his graduate research focused on their application in the context of western therapeutic models.