OUR HISTORY
We founded the Mind Body Awareness Project in 2001 to share the transformational power of meditation we had experienced in our own lives. After battling addiction, depression, and incarceration ourselves, we committed to bringing mindfulness and emotional intelligence programs to youth in juvenile detention facilities around the Bay Area. Seed funding came from renowned Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who recognized the transformative power of mindfulness in healing trauma within the justice system.
Read MoreIn 2011, we deepened our clinical capacity by adding licensed clinicians—psychologists and marriage and family therapists—to our staff. Their expertise grounded our programs in trauma-informed practice. In the years since, that foundation has grown into a healing-centered approach—one that moves beyond addressing harm to actively cultivating wellbeing, agency, and connection.
Over the years, our work has expanded from detention facilities and schools in the Bay Area to adult corrections, educator professional development, and leadership training for correctional officers, law enforcement, and mental health clinicians. In 2018, we co-designed a three-year multi-system project with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and community re-entry partners—the first program of its kind to integrate mindfulness-based mental health services across a pre- and post-release clinical pathway and a community model of impact.
Today, MBA partners with organizations across California — juvenile justice and adult correctional systems, schools, county agencies, and expanded learning programs in under-resourced communities. In each of these settings, we bring trauma-informed, healing-centered mindfulness programming to the youth and adults who need it most.
We believe in building a world where mental health is a human right, not a privilege.
OUR MISSION
Transforming underserved communities—and those who serve them—with mindfulness-based mental health tools that support equity, healing, and empowerment.
OUR TEAM
Oscar Paul Medina
Executive Director
Oscar Paul Medina is a leader committed to bridging healing, mindfulness, and systems change.
Raised between East Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, his early experiences of trauma opened the way to a lifelong path of healing and transformation.
Through his fellowships with the Dalai Lama Fellows and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Oscar deepened his approach to mindfulness, equity, and collective care as foundations for reimagining social systems.
He has carried that vision into his work with the Mind Body Awareness Project, designing and leading healing-centered programs for incarcerated youth, educators, and underserved communities.
As Executive Director, Oscar is guiding MBA’s vision to center well-being and belonging across education and justice spaces so young people thrive and communities become more whole.
Micah Anderson
Clinical Director, Board Member & Facilitator
Micah has been walking the intersection of suffering and transformation for over three decades — first as a traveler through his own difficult terrain, then as a practitioner, teacher, and clinician committed to making that passage possible for others. A personal contemplative practice begun in the early 1990s is the thread that connects everything since.
He joined the Mind Body Awareness Project in 2011 and has served as its Clinical Director since 2020. A Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #132754), he brings clinical depth and hard-earned wisdom to some of the most demanding contexts in the field.
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A featured presenter at Stanford University’s Contemplation by Design Summit, Micah helped articulate the distinction that animates MBA’s approach: the difference between trauma-informed care — which asks what happened to you — and healing-centered engagement, which asks what is right with you. That shift, from wound to wholeness, from pathology to possibility, is the north star of his clinical and organizational work.
Micah holds an M.A. in Psychology and Counseling from Sofia University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.
Diego Arancibia
Volunteer Facilitator
Diego Sulaiman Arancibia has been a leader in the after school and non-profit field for nearly two decades. His experience has ranged from working with students in elementary, middle school, and high school in both programmatic and administrative capacities.
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Husna Mohammadi
Program Manager & Facilitator
Husna is passionate about heartwork, community wellness, and Love. As an Afghan-American woman, her personal struggles and discovery of intergenerational trauma led her to a path of spirituality, the practice of mindfulness, and a commitment to prioritizing wellness.
Read MoreHusna is a Speech Pathologist at KIPP Bay Area Schools and the founder of Literacy and Love, a nonprofit expanding literacy access for youth from Oakland to the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan.
For Husna, leading one-on-one sessions with MBA at the Youth Services Center is the most fulfilling part of her week.
Vinny Ferraro
Facilitator
Vinny Ferraro has practiced insight meditation (vipassanā) since the mid-1990s and serves as the Guiding Teacher of Big Heart City Sangha in San Francisco, where he has led a weekly meditation group for over twenty years. He is a fully empowered Dharma Teacher through Spirit Rock and the Insight Meditation Society, regularly teaches residential retreats at centers internationally, and currently leads Spirit Rock’s Year to Live course.
Read MoreMeditation wasn’t Vinny’s first path. His own journey included addiction, incarceration, and violence before he found practice as a way to heal and be of service. Today, he draws on both Dharma training and lived experience to support others in discovering their inner strength and breaking free from the forces—personal and systemic—that hold them back.
Pamela Fong
Program Management Consultant
Pamela brings more than twenty years of executive and fundraising experience with SF Bay Area nonprofits of varying sizes and missions, with budgets ranging from under $1 million to over $15 million.
Read MoreAs Managing Director at Youth Radio, she oversaw the organization’s transition from a local agency to a community institution that culminated in the purchase a $3 million building with state-of-the-art digital studios. She worked as Director of Finance and Human Resources at Youth ALIVE! for several years before joining Safe Passages. There, she led the Elev8 collaborative which represented a $50 million public/private investment in five of the highest need middle schools across the Oakland flatlands.
She served as Managing Director at Youth Radio, where she guided the organization’s growth into a community institution anchored by a $3 million building with state-of-the-art digital studios, and as Director of Finance and Human Resources at Youth ALIVE! At Safe Passages, she led the Elev8 collaborative — a $50 million public/private investment in five of Oakland’s highest-need middle schools. An Oakland native, Pamela is committed to supporting young people to create positive change in their community.
Lisa Cooper
Facilitator
Growing up as a sarcastic New Jersey native, it took Lisa awhile to discover mindfulness. After attending an MBSR class 18 years ago, her life was and continues to be changed by the practices of meditation and loving-kindness.
Lisa is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a long history of working with formerly incarcerated and severely mentally ill adults, unhoused Veterans, and marginalized communities. When not working with MBA, Lisa is an instructor at San Francisco State University and an Integrated Behavioral Health Clinician at Kaiser.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Micah Anderson
Clinical Director, Board Member & Facilitator
Micah’s full bio appears in Our Team above.
Alex Scott
Chairman of the Board
Alex Scott has been serving as Chairman of the MBA Project Board since 2017. Professionally, Alex has held a variety of leadership roles at Charles Schwab, Lehman Brothers, and Accenture. Most recently, he worked as Managing Director at Charles Schwab – responsible for a wide range of cross-enterprise initiatives. He has been meditating since 2006 when he found a dusty cassette tape from Jack Kornfield and is trained as a Meditation Facilitator in the Thai Forest tradition. He lives in San Francisco and is sometimes found doing pushups in Dolores Park or wolfing down burritos in the Mission.
Jennie Powe Runde
Board Member
Jennie Powe Runde is a trained expressive arts therapist who helps individuals tune in to three levels of lived experience—mental, physical, and emotional—to find new resources, ideas, and experiences to understand what’s working and transform what isn’t. In her practice, she works with people unpacking racial, ethnic, and cultural identity, as well as those considering identity at the intersection of sexuality, gender, class, spirituality, and dis/ability status. Her background and training include Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Mindfulness-Based approaches, with influence from Buddhism and Buddhist psychology. Jennie uses an integrative approach grounded in the understanding that mental health is about more than our minds—it’s about how we show up in our bodies, our environments, and our relationships.
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Mark Jimenez DiPerna
Director of Strategy & Operations, Board Member & Facilitator
Mark Jimenez DiPerna brings to MBA a unique combination of professional expertise, lived experience, and personal commitment to the organization’s mission. Having been justice-impacted as a youth, Mark understands firsthand the transformative power of mindfulness practices.
Mark is MBA’s Director of Strategy and Operations and serves on the Board of Directors. Prior to MBA, Mark served as Assistant Vice Provost and Deputy Dean of Students at Stanford University, where he led strategic operations focused on student mental health and well-being and directed high-level case management for students facing substance abuse, mental health crises, and behavioral concerns.
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Before transitioning into higher education, Mark spent seven years as an attorney at an international law firm in San Francisco. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Boston College (magna cum laude) and a Juris Doctor from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (cum laude).
Sam Himelstein, Ph.D.
Sam Himelstein, Ph.D. is passionate about serving marginalized and incarcerated youth through the practice of mindfulness and other emotional intelligence skills. He is a Clinical Therapist at Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center. A formerly incarcerated youth himself, Sam brought a great deal of personal and professional experience to his seven years at MBA Project in roles including Program Director, Executive Director and Clinical Services Director.
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As an adolescent, Sam was heavily involved in the juvenile justice system and incarcerated on several occasions over three years. He was on a path to destruction, struggling with drugs, violence, delinquency, and most notably anger. He eventually turned his life around through connections with mentors and personal inner work, including mindfulness meditation. Sam went on to receive his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Sofia University. At MBA, he completed the first published research for the organization entitled, “A Mixed Methods Study of a Mindfulness-Based Intervention with Incarcerated Youth” as his dissertation. He later published his book, A Mindfulness-Based Approach to Working with High-Risk Adolescents, through Routledge in April 2013. Sam runs his private practice, Lion Mind, in Oakland.
Chris McKenna
Chris McKenna is Program Director at Mindful Schools, one of the leading organizations in the U.S. integrating mindfulness into education and youth mental health. Mindful Schools has trained educators in all 50 U.S. states and more than 80 countries, reaching over 300,000 children and adolescents. Chris served as the Executive Director of MBA from 2009 to 2012. He sits on the Curriculum Advisory Committee of Dalai Lama Fellows and the Advisory Councils of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, Mindful Muslims, and Veterans PATH.
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Vinny Ferraro
Vinny Ferraro has practiced insight meditation (vipassanā) since the mid-1990s and serves as the Guiding Teacher of Big Heart City Sangha in San Francisco, where he has led a weekly meditation group for over twenty years. He is a fully empowered Dharma Teacher through Spirit Rock and the Insight Meditation Society, regularly teaches residential retreats at centers internationally, and currently leads Spirit Rock’s Year to Live course.
Read MoreMeditation wasn’t Vinny’s first path. His own journey included addiction, incarceration, and violence before he found practice as a way to heal and be of service. Today, he draws on both Dharma training and lived experience to support others in discovering their inner strength and breaking free from the forces—personal and systemic—that hold them back.
FACULTY REFLECTIONS
