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
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
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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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.
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
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 – responsive 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
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.
Mark DiPerna
Mark P. Jimenez DiPerna is an Assistant Vice Provost & Deputy Dean of Students at Stanford University and has served as a Mind Body Awareness Project (MBA) Board Member and Secretary since June 2020. He holds an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Boston College and a Juris Doctor from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings). At Stanford, Mark is dedicated to helping students understand that failure is a natural and essential part of the human experience, encouraging them to embrace imperfection and grow through their mistakes.
In addition to his board service, Mark facilitates weekly meditation meetings with incarcerated youth in San Mateo County and has helped develop mindfulness-based curricula now being used in groups he co-leads in adult prisons within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. His work reflects a deep commitment to healing-centered engagement and transformation through mindfulness.
Prior to transitioning into higher education, Mark spent seven years at an international law firm in San Francisco.
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.
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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
