Executive Director
Randima (Randy) Fernando was a product manager for several award-winning projects over 7 years at NVIDIA Corporation (Forbes Magazine’s 2007 Company of the Year), where he also served as an inaugural member of the employee-run NVIDIA Foundation Board.
He has successfully managed large projects with over 100 people and has worked on all aspects of product development, from technical aspects to public relations and marketing. He has published three highly acclaimed books (two of which held the #1 spot on Barnes & Noble’s “Graphics Programming” list for most of 2003 and 2004), written several papers, and given numerous presentations on real-time computer graphics. (Full Resume)
Randy is from Sri Lanka, grew up in the Philippines, and attended Cornell University, where he received his BS in Computer Science and MS in Computer Graphics. Randy was drawn to Mindful Schools because of the program’s compelling results and preventive nature, and he is excited to combine best practices from Silicon Valley with the sincere core values and intentions of the Mindful Schools team. Randy learned mindfulness as a child, and has been practicing it formally since 2004.
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Co-Founder and Program Director
Megan Cowan comes to this work with over 15 years of formal and intensive mindfulness training, a background in teaching and education, and a degree from UC Berkeley in Alternative Health. Megan is the primary author of the Mindful Schools Elementary School Curriculum, and created their first Adolescent Curriculum. She has taught more than 3500 youth via Mindful Schools’ in-class direct-service program, trained more than 2000 educators, mental health professionals, and parents in mindfulness practices and applications for youth, and has been leading the Curriculum Training domestically and internationally since its inception in 2010. She has been the sole trainer for the dozens of instructors who have taught for Mindful Schools. In 2012, Megan was featured in “Room To Breathe,” the first feature-length film documentary on the effort to integrate mindfulness training into U.S. public schools.
Program Director
From 2009-2012, Chris McKenna was the Executive Director of the Mind Body Awareness Project, a nonprofit that pioneered the development of mindfulness-based interventions for at-risk adolescents. Chris oversaw a period of significant growth – both programmatically and financially – for the organization. During his tenure, MBA published the first formal research on the impact of mindfulness programming on youth in the U.S. juvenile probation system. In collaboration with Colorado State University, MBA also developed mindfulness training programs that met the specific needs of diverse youth populations, including Native American youth on the South Dakota’s Flathead Reservation, and military youth with parents on combat deployment. Chris has spent over a decade working with diverse communities suffering from high incidents of trauma, including five years with an organization launched out of Amnesty International that provided legal and psychosocial services to victims of torture and war crimes from over 20 countries. He has a eighteen-year history with mindfulness meditation and has taught mindfulness practices to refugees with post-traumatic stress disorder and other severe mental health conditions. He is on the Curriculum Advisory Committee of Dalai Lama Fellows and the Advisory Councils of the Mindful Community (UK) and Honoring the Path of the Warrior – a project which teaches mindfulness to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He holds a degree in Religion & Asian Studies from Columbia University.
Senior Trainer
Vinny Ferraro is a long-time mindfulness practitioner and instructor and a nationally recognized leader in designing and implementing interventions for at-risk adolescents. The child of an incarcerated father, Vinny spent the majority of his teenage life hustling and living on the streets. In 1987, after recovering from drug addiction, he began leading youth groups in drug rehabilitation centers, juvenile halls, schools and half-way houses through the Hospitals and Institutions Program of Narcotics Anonymous. Vinny continued this work for nearly a decade before transitioning to a more intensive focus on mindfulness and emotional intelligence work. In 2001, he began teaching for the Challenge Day organization, a nationally recognized, school-based emotional intelligence and life skills program, eventually becoming Challenge Day’s Director of Training and leading workshops for over 110,000 youth on four continents. In 2008, Vinny became Training Director of the Mind Body Awareness Project (MBA) and is the principle author of MBA’s mindfulness-based curriculum for incarcerated youth. Vinny has received national media coverage for his work with adolescents; he is the subject of the MTV series “If You Really Knew Me…” In addition to his work with youth, Vinny teaches mindfulness retreats to adults around the U.S. and the world.
Training Coordinator
Christina Costelo received her MA in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her BA in Psychology from San Francisco State University. With a passion in progressive and innovative learning environments, Christina has worked in education for 9 years in a variety of settings. Most recently, she worked as a Camp Director for 3 years for Camp Galileo during the summer and an afterschool program quality assessor for OUSD during the school year. She has also worked as a Program Director for a nonprofit afterschool program funded by No Child Left Behind where she managed academic programming and wrote extensive guided reading curricula for elementary and middle school students in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Mountain View.
The role of Training Coordinator has allowed Christina to bring her love of connecting to people and her project management experience to a mission she feels strongly about. She has cultivated her own mindfulness practice since joining the team.
Since Bonnie began practicing meditation in 2005, she’s spent almost a year on silent retreat, spread out over 1 month, 2 month and 3 month periods. She is passionate about practice and has found it has benefited her life in innumerable ways. She teaches mindfulness to children in Cambridge and Boston, both in the classroom and in an after school program. She also teaches non-violent communication to youth and adults.
Baruch Golden started practicing mindfulness in 2000. He has been teaching mindfulness in elementary schools in San Francisco and Oakland with the Mindful Schools Program for the past 3 years and teaches in family programs as well. In addition, he volunteers in the SF County Jail teaching meditation and yoga. He is a registered nurse and has been doing hospice nursing for the past 12 years.
Professor Emeritus University of California, Davis
Former President & Chief Executive Officer Asha for Education
Co-Founder Mindful Schools
Executive Director Mindful Schools
Marriage and Family Therapist Kaiser Website
Founder, Mindfulness Research Guide Researcher, Preventive and Behavioral Medicine Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior University of California Los Angeles Website
Assistant Professor of Social Psychology and Health Psychology Department of Psychology Virginia Commonwealth University Website
Research Scientist University of Oregon Website
Professor of Business University of California, Davis Website
Director of the Initiative on Contemplation and Education Garrison Institute Website
Research Assistant Professor of Human Development, Prevention Research Center Pennsylvania State University Website
Associate Professor Montclair University Website
Assistant Professor Department of Education Stanford University Website
Research Analyst SRI International Website
Maureen O'Brien (Previous Version) Chris Clifford (Previous Version)
Zachary Cincotta
Lou Giampa
Emily Taylor
djovida
Anna Bullard (Current) Jenny Liu Trupti Glaubman Sarah Tariq
Kevin Bjorke
...And so many more who have contributed on smaller projects! We are extremely grateful to all our volunteers for their kind and enthusiastic support.
Please contact us if you'd like to volunteer.
