Community Offering
The Resilience Initiative together with our partners at
The LeadersTrust and a vibrant community of collaborators, are delighted to invite you to join us for our Mindful Together series.
About Mindful Together:
This offering is designed to provide a moment for connection, wholeness and respite from the day-to-day many of us are experiencing as we navigate through these challenging times. We will share tools and ways of being to help us integrate inner (individual) work with the social justice movement (collective) work we are all engaged in. Ultimately, we know that the key to building a more just and sustainable world requires intentionality and community.
Who is this for:
This offering is available to all our partners advancing social and environmental change. This includes staff, grassroots and community leaders, consultants, coaches, program officers and board members that are directly or indirectly connected to the Resilience Initiative, The LeadersTrust, and our many collaborators as well as anyone in their networks that might benefit from this series. Beginners welcome, no experience necessary!
This is an open invitation to our community. You do not have to be a member of the Resilience Initiative or The LeadersTrust to attend!
What you can expect:
Mindful Together will offer an opportunity for you and your teams to connect with and learn from practitioners who are skillfully integrating culturally based contemplative, embodiment and earth based practices (such as guided meditation, journaling, somatic practices and others) with movement building work.
Each monthly 90min session will be followed by three 30min weekly practice sessions. All sessions are on Mondays. We encourage you to sign up for ALL SESSIONS.
For questions about the program feel free to reach out to Maria@theleaderstrust.org.
Mindful Together: Dates, Times, and Logistics
This series offers a space to reconnect with our shared humanity and with what matters most. We hope it provides a moment of respite from the day-to-day overwhelm many of us are experiencing in these challenging times.
Please note: All sessions will be held on Mondays. 90 min. Mindful Together Sessions will be followed by three weekly 30 min. Practice Community sessions. See dates and times below.
Monthly 90min Mindful Together sessions will be held on Mondays starting at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm CET/ 1pm BRT (please note: Nov. sessions CET & BRT +1hr):
Session 4: January 12, 2026
Bonus Session: January 26, 2026
Session 5: February 2, 2026
Session 6: March 2, 2026
Session 7: April 6, 2026
Session 8: May 4, 2026
Session 9: June 1, 2026
- Welcome by hosts.
- Storytelling and guided practice by guest practitioners/guides.
- Reflection and community building with colleagues in small groups.
*Follow up 30 min Weekly Practice Community sessions will also be held on Monday starting at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 5:00pm CET/ 1:00pm BRT :
Practice Community for Session 4: January 19
Practice Community for Session 5: February 9, 16, 23
Practice Community for Session 6: March 9, 16, 23, 30
Practice Community for Session 7: April 13, 20, 27
Practice Community for Session 8: May 11, 18
Practice Community for Session 9: June 8, 15, 22, 29
Each 30 min. practice session will include:
- Brief guided practice session that builds on the monthly practice.
- Light community building.
*Participants must have attended or viewed a recording of the corresponding Mindful Together session to join the Practice Community sessions.
Upcoming Mindful Together Sessions
Bonus Session: Let Us Be Free Together! Practicing liberation: re-membering our collective being
Monday, January 26, 2026
(90 min.)
No practice session
Practicing liberation together allows for intergenerational wisdom to emerge. Intergenerational wisdom can only be shared when we show up as our full selves. Join our Climate Youth Resilience facilitators in an exploration of embodied liberation to practice the freedom & joy that comes from liberating ourselves. Let us be free together!
Led by: Sinethemba Mtshali, Monique Sundree Rodgers, Tiara Samson, Lauren Uba, Taylen Reddy
Session 5: Surrendering into Wholeness
Monday, February 2, 2026
(90 min.)
Community Practice Sessions: Feb. 9, 16, 23
How can we be mindfully together, in this moment? This is an invitation to see beyond the horizon–to our oneness, to our wholeness– without losing sight of the moment we are in. Challenging ourselves to see the parts we play in sustaining the “othering” that keeps our oneness in fragmentation. We will engage in a practice of healing surrendering: surrendering to the divine light within; accessing our own healing to be in oneness with self & others.
Led by: Eva Young & Izumi
Session 6: Shaping Change with The Ancestors
Monday, March 2, 2026
(90 min.)
Community Practice Sessions: March 9, 16, 23, 30
What does it mean to connect and create with The Ancestors? How might we cultivate a relational way-of-being, and what might transform in our world when we do? In this session, ChE and Nana Fofie guide us in exploring how cultivating relationality with past and future relations opens a portal to healing. Through contemplative practices of meditation, Freedom singing, and ceremony we discover interbeing as a gateway to community. When we know we are a living continuation in the river of our Ancestors, we know we are never alone.
Led by: ChE and Nana Fofie Amina.
Mindfulness Practitioners & Guides
Sinethemba Mtshali
Sinethemba is a social impact entrepreneur, visionary and creator. Passionate about Africa. Specifically creating systems that form the foundations of a liberated Africa, where our land & our people are emancipated.
Monique Sundree Rodgers
Monique is an intersectional climate justice advocate. Her work explores joy in activism and Nature-based practices of decolonising place and self. She is the Global Wellbeing & EDI Lead for a conservation and climate organization working across 20+ countries. Monique has authored work on access to outdoor spaces and national parks in South Africa and the UK. She’s contributed to a British publication, Walkbook Recipes, with her piece titled Walking Together Across Space and Time. She has also researched and written a piece on Extinction, Economy and Environmentalism for Art.Earth.
Lauren Uba
Luren is a facilitator, educator, public speaker, and community builder. She is the founder of Climate Action Community, an organization that aims to support a collective transition from climate anxiety to climate action. She designs workshops and residencies that facilitate authentic expression and being with what is in order to unlock the potential for wisdom and cultural evolution hidden within the meta-crisis.
Tiara Samson
Tiara is a practitioner working across youth civil society, environmental governance, and film. She serves as the Asia-Pacific Regional Convenor of the Climate Youth Resilience Project. Her earlier work with the Break Free From Plastic movement involved coordinating global youth campaigns, developing capacity-building programs across 25+ countries, and representing civil society in UNEP plastics treaty negotiations. She is currently developing The Sea Remembers, a documentary on the Sama Bajau Dilaut’s ecological knowledge and political marginalisation. Her chapter, Beyond Urgency, will appear in the Routledge International Handbook of Mental Health and the Climate Crisis.
Taylen Reddy
is an environmental justice advocate, youth leader, and TEDx speaker from Durban, South Africa, dedicated to championing social justice and amplifying the voices of African youth in global climate governance. As the founder of Zero Waste Durban, Taylen has spearheaded campaigns tackling waste colonialism, plastic pollution, and climate-induced mental health crises, working towards bringing grassroots realities into high-level decision-making spaces. Taylen’s work aims to embody the intersection of environmental sustainability, youth empowerment, and justice-driven solutions for a resilient future.
Eva Young
Eva has over 25 years of providing leadership development and coaching to individuals and teams. Eva keeps deepening her own understanding and practice of spirituality, mindfulness, power, healing, mind and body connection for individual and collective transformation. She was born and raised in Panamá.
Izumi
For more than 25 years, Izumi Leelahana has supported individuals and groups through the shifting landscapes of leadership, wellbeing, and personal transformation. She offers a centering, attuned space – one that helps people return to themselves with greater clarity and ease. Having worked with leaders from over 60 countries, she understands leadership as a journey of both the human heart and the spirit.
ChE (Xé | we, they)
Deeply rooted in the diasporic lands and waterways that shape them, ChE, is an honored steward of living ancestral wisdom—an award-winning Creatrix weaving the arts, movement organizing, decolonial psychology, African Indigenous spiritual and contemplative pathways to conjure worlds of embodied Liberation. ChE is the founding priestexx of HAUS OF THE BLACK MADONNX, and founding director of of FREEDOM LAND. Their work as a transdisciplinary artist comes alive through choreographic, installation, visual and performing arts. You can learn more at che-art.life and wefreedom.land.
Nana Fofie Amina
Nana Fofie is a Memory Cartographer, Imaginator, Facilitator, Expressive Arts & Somatic Therapist. They are rooted in Bvlbancha/New Orleans. Nana Fofie grounds her life and work in the lands, waters, and wisdoms of her African Indigenous and Black Southern lineages. She is the founder and principal of Ancestral Futurisms, an initiative offering cultural arts and education, Circle processes, embodied wellness, and collective land practice for communities and organizations seeking connection, imagination, and aligned action. Nana Fofie also leads the Institute for Ashé Movement (IAM), a collaborative community organization advancing culturally resonant, decolonial approaches to therapy through narrative, expressive arts, and somatic modalities.
Past Sessions
Session 1: Leading with Fierce Compassion
Monday, September 29, 2025
(90 min.)
As we support and serve others in our organizations, movements and communities, let’s slow down, listen and check-in with our own body and heart. The practice of turning inward towards what feels difficult – with awareness and kindness – allows for more skillful responses in the way we show up with others at home and at work.
Led by: Maria Rogers Pascual & Jonathan Relucio
Session 2: Returning to the Whole
Monday, October 27, 2025
(90 min.)
In this session, we explored what it means to re/member ourselves as part of the living web of life. Through guided meditation, reflection, and embodied practice, we turned toward the elements—earth, water, fire, air, and space—as teachers of interdependence and relational wisdom.
Led by: Andrés González & Jonathan Relucio
Session 3: Nature as Your Teacher
Monday, November 24, 2025
(90 min.)
Join us for what promises to be a profound and dynamic Mindful Together session with Carol Cano and Janet Roos from Braided Wisdom. This mindfulness offering invites you to reconnect with the Earth as a living guide for how to move through the world. Through simple earth-based practices, we explore how nature embodies resilience, balance, and interconnection.
Led by: Carol Cano and Janet Roos
Session 4: Artmaking as Contemplative Practice
Monday, January 12, 2026
(90 min.)
Community Practice Session: January 19 in honor of MLK Day
Join us for this first session of the year to activate the imagination and explore what is already possible. We will play with words and images to settle our collective nervous system and allow what is already present to show us the way to a more liberated future. No artmaking experience necessary. Come as you are!
Led by: Janet Nami McIntyre & Maria Rogers Pascual.
Past Session Mindfulness Practitioners & Guides
Janet Nami McIntyre (she/her)
Janet is the director of the Resilience Initiative where she designs offerings that are responsive to emergent needs of social change organizations and the people who lead them. She brings decades of experience supporting leadership and organizational strengthening within non-profits that builds on a lifelong passion for the arts. Janet has been a spiritual seeker since a child when she took her first meditation class, embracing all the many ways to explore cultural traditions and spiritual paths. She is the child of immigrants from Japan, and currently lives in Los Angeles where she was born and raised.
Carol Cano, M.A. (she/her)
Carol Cano began her Dharma practice over 30 years ago at Wat Kow Tahm in Thailand and has since dedicated her life to building mindful communities and teaching internationally. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Braided Wisdom, a BIPOC-led, cross-cultural mindfulness non-profit organization that empowers diverse communities by fostering transformational change through integrating indigenous wisdom teachings and cross-cultural mindfulness practices. In all her work, Carol invites us to stay grounded in our hearts as we live and uphold our spiritual ideals, and to move through the demands of modern life with balance and grace. Learn more about Carol Cano here.
Janet E. Roos (she/her)
Janet E. Roos, PMP, CMT-P, has been an innovator in Business Technology for over 30 years. Most recently, she served in both a Director and Project Management role at McKesson Corporation—a “Fortune 6 Company.” She is a certified member of the International Mindfulness Teacher’s Association having successfully completed the UCLA “Mindfulness Certified Training Program”. Her goal is to provide a “Mindfulness Framework” for supporting career development, stress management, change/ uncertainty management, and career/life transitions. As a four time “Hall Of Famer” and recognized elite athlete, she understands the inherent value of employing Mindfulness Practices.
Andrés González (he/they)
Andrés relates to himself firstly as a spiritual being embodying, Earth-side, the multiplicity of gender, sexuality, race, & culture as a two-spirit Mestizo with primarily Yaqui, Mexican, Spanish, & Scottish ancestries. He’s also a transracial adoptee, connected to a lineage of Indigenous adoptees separated from family, land, & culture by way of the U.S. child welfare system. Andrés’ lived experience integrating these many worlds has informed his path as a practitioner of curanderismo, dharma teacher, and community mental health clinician. Trained in harm reduction, healing-justice, & Indigenous psychology as a psychotherapist, he holds a masters degree in social workand is a graduate of East Bay Meditation Center’s two-year Spiritual Teacher & Leadership Training. To stay connected, visit: www.homecomingwithandres.com
Jonathan Relucio
With over 20 years of experience in social services, community organizing, training, and leadership development, Jonathan values Buddha Dharma, mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and indigenous medicine as practices for liberation that heal us from systems of oppression. Jonathan facilitates transformation in social justice movements as a Trainer for Rockwood Leadership Institute; integrates mindfulness with restorative circles for healing and racial equity as co-founder of AllThriveEd.org; and serves on the Healing Advisory council for Filipino Advocates for Justice. Currently, he teaches at both Spirit Rock Meditation Center and East Bay Meditation Center. He loves dance, DJing, martial arts, connecting to his Filipino ancestral roots and being in the water.
Maria Rogers Pascual
Maria currently serves as the Director of Strategic Initiatives & Partnerships at The Leaders Trust. More than anything, she loves curating creative and contemplative spaces where leaders can discover their brilliance and connect across differences in new ways that build the kind of worlds we all want to live in. She is bilingual and bicultural and speaks English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. She is a certified coach, mindfulness teacher, and a dedicated Buddhist practitioner in the Vipassana tradition. Maria loves to engage friends and family in collage-making, mosaic murals and music.