OUR HISTORY
We founded The Mind Body Awareness Project in 2000 to share the transformational power of meditation we experienced in our own lives. After battling addiction, depression, and incarceration ourselves, we committed to providing mindfulness and emotional intelligence programs for juvenile detention facilities around the Bay Area.
Read MoreSince our inception, MBA has continued to provide group facilitations and trainings in a variety of settings and demographics, including detention facilities and schools in Alameda, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco counties. To further MBA’s commitment to systemic change, we began offering mindfulness-based leadership trainings for correctional officers, police departments, and mental health clinicians.
In 2018, we co-designed a 3-year multi-system project with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and community re-entry partners to provide our services to incarcerated adults, correctional officers and mental health clinicians. This project was the first of its kind to provide mindfulness-based mental health services through a pre- and post-release clinical case management program and a community pathway model of impact.
Currently, we are developing a whole systems approach to digital learning to train and support educators and youth in trauma-informed and healing-centered approaches within the California Department of Education.
At Mind Body Awareness Project, we believe in building a world where mental health is a human right, not a privilege.
OUR MISSION
Transforming at-risk communities—and those who serve them—with mindfulness-based mental health tools that support equity, healing, and empowerment.
OUR TEAM
Micah Anderson
Clinical Director
Born in Connecticut, Micah spent several of his teen years in and out of placements due to struggles with drugs, crime, and anger. Around this time, he was introduced to 12-step fellowship, and after extensive travel overseas, began a personal meditation practice in the early 1990s. He began working with MBA in 2011.
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Oscar Paul Medina
Director of Strategy & Development
Oscar Paul Medina is a meditation educator, purpose guide, and somatic counselor born in East Los Angeles and raised in the Mojave Desert. His personal battles with trauma and addiction led him to the path of meditation, healing and rites of passage work.
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As project manager & facilitator at Mind Body Awareness Project, he has been leading mindfulness and healing circles with inner-city youth and incarcerated individuals in the Bay Area since 2014. He is a graduate of the Hakomi and Purpose Guides Institute, where he studied somatic psychology, and purpose guiding through an integral lens. As a bi-cultural Spanish speaker, he is a passionate advocate for bridging mindfulness and restorative justice work to Latinx communities. Currently, he consults and coaches organizations and individuals towards their deepest impact and purpose in the world.
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, practice of mindfulness, and a commitment to prioritizing wellness.
Read MoreShe is currently a Speech Pathologist at KIPP Bay Area Schools and non profit founder of Literacy and Love, enhancing literacy access to at-risk youth from Oakland to the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan.
Husna enjoys leading one on one sessions with MBA at Youth Services Center, it is the most fulfilling part of her week. She is excited to continue training and facilitating with the MBA project team.
Melrose Content
Facilitator
As a San Francisco Bay Area native, Mel has seen his peers fall to domestic abuse, drug addiction, crime and apathy for his whole life. As he got older he too experienced his share of trauma, picked up some bad habits, but despite these hurdles managed to graduate from San Francisco State University in 2011 with both a Bachelors Degree in Psychology and a serious drinking problem.
Read MoreArmed with awareness of breath and the work ethic of the drug fiend, Mel then pursued any and all avenues to creating a both a refuge within and a refuge for others. With a few months clean he began facilitating Refuge Recovery meetings, a Buddhist-based recovery system. A few years after that, he was asked to step in and facilitate the Oakland chapter of Dharma Punx. In early 2017, he found himself volunteering in a maximum-security detention facility for juveniles with the Mind Body Awareness Project. Sitting in that room, he saw the reflection of every face from his old neighborhood that he never sees anymore. In those stoic faces of those incarcerated youth, hardened to protect their tender child within, he sees himself.
While he can never truly pay back those to whom he owes the freedom of his heart, he is motivated to serve in any way he can, fueled by both the aftertaste of suffering and the verified truth of his own freedom.
Vinny Ferraro
Facilitator
Vinny Ferraro was running the streets at a young age. With an incarcerated father and not much supervision he soon found himself headed there too. Vinny was introduced to the path of service in 1987 and began a journey that continues today.
Read MoreVinny underwent 10 years of teacher training under the guidance of Jack Kornfield. He’s a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk youth. He is also one of the founding members of Dharma Punx, was the Guiding Teacher of Against The Stream Meditation Society, and doesn’t like talking about himself in the 3rd person.
Pamela Fong
Program Management Consultant
Pamela brings more than twenty years of executive and fundraising experience for 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.
Pamela has an unsentimental view of what it takes to make impact on our communities and brings a level of pragmatism to her work, tweaking old business rules to match new values in an ever-changing nonprofit environment. Her fundraising and budgeting expertise has helped secure over $10 million in local, federal and private foundations for leading Oakland nonprofits. As 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
Born in Connecticut, Micah spent several of his teen years in and out of placements due to struggles with drugs, crime, and anger. Around this time, he was introduced to 12-step fellowship, and after extensive travel overseas, began a personal meditation practice in the early 1990s. He began working with MBA in 2011.
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Alex Scott
Volunteer Facilitator
Alex Scott is a Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Charles Schwab and has been serving as President of the MBA Board since 2017. He has been meditating since 2006 when he found a dusty cassette tape from Jack Kornfield. He is trained as a Meditation Facilitator in the Thai Forest tradition.
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Jennie Powe Runde
As a trained expressive arts therapist, I help individuals tune in to 3 levels of lived experience- mental, physical and emotional- in order to find new resources, ideas, and experiences to understand what’s working and transform what isn’t. In my practice, I work with people who are unpacking racial, ethnic, and cultural identity, as well as folks who are considering their identity at the intersection of sexuality, gender, class, spirituality, and dis/ability status. In addition to expressive arts, my background and training includes Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Mindfulness Based approaches. I am also influenced by Buddhism and Buddhist psychology in my work. I use an integrative approach- which includes an understanding that ‘mental’ health is about more than our minds, but how we are able to show up in our bodies, our environment, and our relationships.
Kevin DeBastos
Kevin DeBastos has over 11 years of experience in the financial services industry. He is currently practicing his passion for Client Service as a Senior Associate at Jordan Park, where he spends his time helping families manage their financial wellbeing. Prior to Jordan Park, Kevin worked at Fidelity Investments in their Family Office division.
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Kevin lives in San Francisco. You can find him shredding at the local skate park, cycling through Golden Gate Park or perusing the nearest comic book shop.
Mark DiPerna
Mark P. DiPerna is an Associate Dean of Students at Stanford University and has been serving as an MBA Board Member & Secretary since June, 2020. Mark has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Boston College and a Juris Doctarate from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Mark quit the practice of law to join Student Affairs at Stanford, where he tries to teach students that it is okay to fail (something he has learned from personal experience). Before joining Stanford, Mark worked for 7 years at an international law firm in San Francisco. When not working, he can be found exploring the city with his partner and their Boston Terrier, Sancho.
Sam Himelstein, Ph.D.
Sam Himelstein, Ph.D. is passionate about serving high-risk and incarcerated youth through the practice of mindfulness and other emotional intelligence skills. He is currently a Clinical Therapist at Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center. A formerly incarcerated youth himself, Sam brought a great deal of both personal and professional experience to his seven years at MBA Project in various roles including Program Director, Executive Director and most recently as Clinical Services Director.
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Since then, he taught retreats and led trainings on mindfulness, emotional literacy, and mental wellness in five countries, and leads a weekly meditation group in the Bay Area.He is currently an Associate Marriage Family Therapist with a humanistic-existential lens, focusing on both trauma-informed approaches and mindfulness-based interventions. Micah lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and two children, and received his Masters in Psychology from Sofia University in Palo Alto, CA.
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 80+ countries, impacting over 300,000 children and adolescents. Chris was the Executive Director of MBA from 2009 to 2012. He is 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 was running the streets at a young age. With an incarcerated father and not much supervision he soon found himself headed there too. Vinny was introduced to the path of service in 1987 and began a journey that continues today.
Read More
Vinny underwent 10 years of teacher training under the guidance of Jack Kornfield. He’s a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk youth. He is also one of the founding members of Dharma Punx, was the Guiding Teacher of Against The Stream Meditation Society, and doesn’t like talking about himself in the 3rd person.
FACULTY REFLECTIONS
