What Makes Us Different
Mindfulness from the inside out — built on 25 years of lineage, lived experience, and results.
There are many organizations bringing mindfulness to schools, workplaces, and communities. What sets MBA apart is who we are, where we come from, and how we do the work. For 25 years, we have served the people most likely to be overlooked — incarcerated youth and adults, educators and frontline professionals, and the communities navigating generational trauma. We do this with a team that has walked the same roads as the people we serve, a curriculum co-created with the leading voices in contemplative science, and a set of practices rooted in one idea: that every person carries inherent wisdom and worth, regardless of what they’ve been through.
A lineage of expertise
MBA was founded in 2001 with seed funding from Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who recognized the transformative potential of mindfulness for healing trauma within the justice system. From the beginning, our curriculum was co-created with pioneers in contemplative science and trauma treatment, including Jon Kabat-Zinn (founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), George Mumford (former meditation coach for the Chicago Bulls and L.A. Lakers, and a pioneer in teaching mindfulness to gang-involved youth), Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence), and MBA facilitator Vinny Ferraro. Our foundational research was authored by Dr. Sam Himelstein, whose published studies on mindfulness interventions for incarcerated youth remain empirical anchors for our work today.
Credible messengers
Our facilitators are not outside experts parachuting in. They come from the communities they serve. Many have lived experience with incarceration, addiction, recovery, or the justice system — and have found in mindfulness a path forward they are now equipped to share with others.
Trauma-informed and healing-centered
We work with people whose baseline experience has included violence, neglect, and systemic harm. In the incarcerated populations we serve, 98% have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience; more than half of youth in the justice system have four or more. Our approach begins with trauma-informed care — creating the safety, transparency, and trust that allow people to engage at all. But it does not stop there. Trauma-informed care says we see your pain. Healing-centered engagement says we see your wholeness. Our work is built to move people along that continuum — from surviving to regulating to recognizing their own worth to becoming the ones who help others do the same.
The Golden Buddha
In 13th-century Thailand, monks covered a solid gold statue in plaster and clay to hide it from invading armies. For centuries, the clay dried, cracked, and dulled. The statue was forgotten — remembered only as a plain, unremarkable figure. It took 700 years before someone noticed a glint beneath the clay and began to chip it away.
This is how we think about the people we serve.
The defensive behaviors, the armor, the survival strategies — hypervigilance, emotional numbing, aggression, withdrawal — these are not who someone is. They are the clay. They formed for a reason, often a very good one. They protected something that needed protecting.
Our work is not to strip the clay away by force. It is to create the conditions in which a person can safely begin to see, for themselves, that the gold has been there all along — and then to become one of the people who helps others see the same in themselves.
OUR PROGRAM IS:
- Trauma-informed, culturally responsive mindfulness training rooted in two decades of training with incarcerated populations.
- A community of resilience and belonging forged through courageous vulnerability and connection.
- Over 10,000 young adults, professionals, and activists connected by a common goal of collective transformation.
Want to be a part of the movement?