Harnessing Wisdom Traditions and Science for Social Change

 

Hosted by the Garrison Institute Fellowship Program, Contemplative Wisdom, Transformative Action is a three-day virtual gathering that brings together contemplative practitioners, social change leaders, scholars, and visionaries. Together, we will explore how awareness-based practices can catalyze personal resilience, systemic healing, and collective regeneration.

Anchored in the Fellowship’s four core pillars—contemplative wisdom, the science of interconnection, generative action, and collective healing—this convening is a space to deepen understanding, share field-leading innovations, and cultivate new possibilities for social transformation.

Drawing inspiration from the Garrison Institute’s Spirituality & Social Change Initiative, the conference will highlight an evolving map of organizations integrating contemplative practice into their social impact work. This initiative illuminates a growing ecosystem of changemakers who lead from depth, relationship, and reciprocity.

Participants will hear from renowned guest experts, engage in guided contemplative practices, and connect with Fellows and peers through storytelling, field-mapping, and experiential sessions. Together, we will explore how contemplative values—such as stillness, compassion, and interdependence—can guide regenerative leadership and support lasting social transformation.

Core Question: How can contemplative wisdom nourish bold, transformative action in times of planetary urgency?

This gathering is a field-building moment for those cultivating justice, compassion, and planetary well-being from the inside out. 

 

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

This conference is designed for:

• Contemplative practitioners seeking to deepen their engagement with social change.
• Educators, nonprofit leaders, and organizational changemakers integrating contemplative practices into their work.
• Scholars and researchers exploring the intersections of spirituality, neuroscience, and social transformation.
• Activists, artists, and visionaries committed to regenerative leadership and collective healing.

 

EVENT DETAILS

This conference will be hosted virtually through Zoom, allowing participants from around the world to gather in real time. Registered participants will receive a secure Zoom link, as well as access to session recordings for continued learning after the event.

• Dates: Friday, November 7 – Sunday, November 9, 2025
• Times: Daily sessions (see agenda below)
• Location: Online via Zoom 
  

AGENDA
Day 1	Friday, November 7
Theme:	Entering the Field: Attunement, Imagination, and the Sublime
Time:	3:00 PM - 7:00 PM ET
3:00 - 3:20 PM		Welcome & Grounding Practice
		Led by Garrison Institute leadership, with music/poetic opening
3:20 - 4:50 PM	Session 1:	Awareness as Bridge – From Self to Systems, from Wounds to Wholeness
		Guest Experts: Jon Kabat-Zinn & Dan Siegel
5:00 - 6:30 PM	Session 2:	The Art of Awakening – Music, Poetry & Embodied Creativity
		Guest Experts: Laura Inserra, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz & Arawana Hayashi
6:30 - 7:00 PM		Relational Sensemaking
		Fellows lead an integrative practice weaving art, neuroscience, and embodiment.
Day 2	Saturday, November 8
Theme:	Embodying Change: From Justice to Leadership
Time:	11:00 AM - 5:00 PM ET
11:00 - 11:30 AM		Morning Practice
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM	Session 3:	Somatics, Dharma & the Work of Collective Liberation
		Guest Experts: Resmaa Menakem & Kaira Jewel Lingo
1:10 – 2:40 PM	Session 4:	Ethical Leadership – Transforming Leadership at Scale
		Guest Experts: Max Klau & Douglas Rushkoff
2:50 – 4:20 PM	Session 5:	The Mind's Eye — Cultivating Attention, Inner Development & Collective Resilience
		Guest Experts: Cliff Saron & Robert Roser
4:20 – 5:00 PM		Relational Sensemaking
		Fellows facilitate embodied reflection on justice and leadership.
Day 3	Sunday, November 9
Theme:	Earth, Spirit, and the Future We’re Making
Time:	11:00 AM - 5:00 PM ET
11:00 - 11:30 AM		Morning Practice
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM	Session 6:	Living Earth – Ecology, Resilience & Social Transformation
		Guest Experts: Mary Evelyn Tucker & Elissa Epel
1:10 – 2:40 PM	Session 7:	Spirit in Action – Spirituality, Justice & the Soul of Social Change
		Guest Experts: Gretchen Ki Steidle & guests
2:50 – 4:20 PM	Culminating Plenary:	Weaving the Future – Insight, Action & Our Shared Field
4:20 – 5:00 PM		Relational Sensemaking
		Fellows guide participants in weaving across ecology, spirit, and justice, moving from insight into commitments.

 

 

HOSTS

Dr. Angel Acosta – Healing-Centered Leader & Founder, Acosta Institute has worked to bridge the fields of leadership, social justice, and mindfulness for over a decade. He holds a doctorate degree in curriculum and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Acosta has supported more than educational leaders and their students by facilitating leadership trainings, creating pathways to higher education, and designing dynamic learning experiences. His dissertation explored healing-centered education as a promising framework for educational leadership development. After participating in the Mind and Life Institute’s Academy for Contemplative Leadership, Acosta began consulting and developing learning experiences that weave leadership development with conversations about inequality and healing, to support educational leaders through contemplative and restorative practices. As a former trustee for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, he participated as a speaker and discussant at the Asia Pacific Forum on Holistic Education in Kyoto, Japan. He continues to consult for organizations like the NYC Department of Education, UNICEF, Columbia University and others. Over the last couple of years, he has designed the Contemplating 400 Years of Inequality Experience–a contemplative journey to understand structural inequality. He’s a proud member of the 400 Years of Inequality Project, based at the New School. He is currently the Director of the Garrison Institute Fellowship Program and the Chief Curator at the Acosta Institute.

 

Nichol Chase, ERYT-500, TSM, is an educator, program leader, and contemplative teacher specializing in resilience science, trauma-informed care, and embodied wisdom practices. A Fellow of the Garrison Institute, she designs and leads programs integrating mindfulness, movement, and music to help individuals and communities navigate stress, heal from trauma, and cultivate well-being. Nichol has presented and led practices at UCSF, Spirit Rock, Kripalu, Esalen, the Climate CAP Summit for MBA students, and BrainMind. She is the co-author of a forthcoming chapter on trauma-informed yoga for the Palgrave Handbook of Third-Wave Psychotherapy with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science, James Cook University, Bangor University, and Santa Clara University. A classically trained ballerina and opera singer, Nichol brings creativity and depth to her teaching. She is the founder of the Wisdom Building Method School, creator of a 300-hour advanced trauma-informed yoga teacher training, and faculty in anatomy and physiology for multiple yoga teacher training schools. Trained in diverse lineages—including Iyengar, Ashtanga, Anusara yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and iRest Yoga Nidra—she has studied with Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Richard Miller, David Treleaven, Noah Mazé, Douglas Brooks, Annie Carpenter, and Richard Rosen. Nichol’s work integrates embodied practice, science, and contemplative wisdom to advance resilience, trauma-informed care, and holistic well-being. Learn more at https://www.nicholjoychase.com/.

SPEAKERS

 

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., did his doctoral work in molecular biology at MIT in the laboratory of the Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria. He is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (in 1995), and (in 1979) its world-renown Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic. He is the author of 15 books, the most recent of which are Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief (2023), and a Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of Wherever You Go, There You Are 2024). Others include Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go, There You Are, and Mindfulness for Beginners. In 2018/2019, he published a series of four volumes updating and expanding the 2005 edition of Coming to Our Senses: Meditation is Not What You Think; Falling Awake; The Healing Power of Mindfulness; and Mindfulness for All. His books are published in over 45 languages. His work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, health care, neuroscience, schools, higher education, business, social justice, criminal justice, prisons, the law, technology, government, and professional sports. Over 700 hospitals and medical centers around the world now offer MBSR. Jon lectures and leads mindfulness workshops and retreats around the world and online. In the Spring of 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he offered 66 consecutive weekdays of 90 minute online guided meditations, talks, and dialogue, the so-called mitigation retreat. Learn more at jonkabat-zinn.com.

 

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., is the Founder and Director of Education of the Mindsight Institute and Founding Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, where he was also Co-Principal Investigator of the Center for Culture, Brain and Development and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine. An award-winning educator, Dan is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and over fifteen other books which have been translated into over forty languages. As the founding editor of the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology (“IPNB”), Dan has overseen the publication of over one hundred books in the transdisciplinary IPNB framework which focuses on the mind and mental health. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dan completed his postgraduate training at UCLA specializing in pediatrics, and adult, adolescent, and child psychiatry. He was trained in attachment research and narrative analysis through a National Institute of Mental Health research training fellowship focusing on how relationships shape our autobiographical ways of making sense of our lives and influence our development across the lifespan. Learn more about Dr. Siegel at: drdansiegel.com.

 

Laura Inserra is a sound alchemist, multi-instrumentalist, and internationally recognized pioneer in the field of sound and transformation. Born in Sicily and classically trained as well as self-taught, she blends ancient wisdom traditions, psychology, mythology, and modern science with immersive sound experiences. A world-renowned Hang musician, Laura performs on a vast array of rare instruments, creating music and environments that foster healing, connection, and transformation. She developed MetaMusic Healing, a modality combining sound, ancient practices, and psychology, and her work has been featured in the New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art and selected by Johns Hopkins for research on music’s therapeutic benefits. Through retreats, corporate programs, global conferences, and her Chambers of AWE project, she designs meta-sensory experiences to cultivate leadership, creativity, and well-being. Her recent planetarium film Qualia bridges music, science, and ancient wisdom to open audiences to wonder and transformation.

 

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D. is a Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a leading voice on racial literacy in education. She is the co-editor of five books, including the forthcoming All About Black Girl Love: bell hooks and Pedagogies of Love (2024), and co-author of the award-winning Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education (2021), where she introduces her Archeology of Self™ framework. A poet as well as a scholar, she has published two poetry collections: Love from the Vortex & Other Poems (2020) and The Peace Chronicles (2021). Yolanda has been named one of EdWeek’s EduScholar Influencers for three consecutive years, placing her among the top 1% of educational scholars in the U.S., and in 2024 she received NYU’s Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award. She is the founder of the Racial Literacy Project @TC and the long-running Racial Literacy Roundtables Series, and she delivered the opening talk at the 2022 TEDxUPenn conference. Her work has been featured in Spike Lee’s 2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright (2016) and in the documentary Defining Us: Children at the Crossroads of Change. Connect with her on Twitter at @RuizSealey and Instagram at @yolie_sealeyruiz.

 

Arawana Hayashi heads the creation of Social Presencing Theater (SPT) for the Presencing Institute, where she serves as a core faculty. Working with Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge, and colleagues, she brings her background in the arts, meditation, and social justice to creating “social presencing” that makes visible both current reality and emerging future possibilities for individuals and groups. Arawana is both an improvisational dancer and a lineage holder of the Japanese traditional dance of Bugaku. She is also a longtime practitioner and senior teacher in the Shambhala tradition of meditation. Arawana delivers workshops on SPT throughout the world. Learn more at arawanahayashi.com. 

 

 Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP is a therapist, author, and cultural architect based in Minneapolis, internationally recognized for his work on racialized trauma, communal healing, and embodied antiracist practice. He is the originator of Somatic Abolitionism, a transformative approach to healing and culture building, and the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute. A senior fellow at The Meadows Behavioral Healthcare, Resmaa is the author of the New York Times bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017), as well as The Quaking of America (2022), Monsters in Love (2022), and The Stories from My Grandmother’s Hands (2023). His career spans decades of work as a counselor, mediator, and community organizer, including serving as a military family consultant in Afghanistan, directing counseling services for Tubman Family Alliance, and leading behavioral health at African American Family Services in Minneapolis. In 2022 he launched The Addieun Foundation to support healing in marginalized communities, and in 2023 released the online course Healing Racialized Trauma: Somatic Abolitionism for Every Body with Sounds True. Resmaa is a sought-after voice in national conversations on race and healing, with appearances on On Being, 10% Happier, The Breakfast Club, Tha God’s Honest Truth, and Oprah’s Sundays with Vernā. Learn more at resmaa.com. (Photo by Nancy Wong)

 

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and activists, as well as artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation. Learn more at kairajewel.com.

 

Dr. Max Klau is the Founder of the Center for Courageous Wholeness, an organization dedicated to helping individuals and organizations integrate shadow, serve others, and scale their impact. He recently served as the Chief Program Officer at the New Politics Leadership Academy (NPLA), an organization focused on bringing more servant leaders–military vets and alumni of national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps–into politics. Prior to that, he was the Vice President of Leadership Development at City Year, the education-focused AmeriCorps program. He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2005 with a focus on human development and leadership. His second book, Developing Servant Leaders at Scale: How to Do It and Why It Matters, was published in August 2025. He is a husband, father, consultant, speaker, Integral Master Coach, and musician. Learn more about him at centerforcourageouswholeness.org.

 

Douglas Rushkoff, Ph.D. is an author, documentarian, and professor whose work explores human autonomy in a digital age. Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, he is the author of over twenty books, including Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022), Team Human (2019), and bestsellers such as Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He is also the creator of the award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. Rushkoff coined concepts like “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice in applying digital media toward economic and social justice. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, where he founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism, and serves as a research fellow at the Institute for the Future. A frequent commentator in major media and host of the Team Human podcast, his work bridges media, technology, culture, and economics to help reorient digital society toward human values. Learn more at rushkoff.com.

Clifford Saron, PhD is a Research Scientist Emeritus at the Center for Mind and Brain and MIND Institute at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1999. In the early 1990s he conducted field research investigating Tibetan Buddhist mind training under the auspices of the Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama. A faculty member at Mind and Life Summer Research Institutes in the US and Europe, he received the inaugural Mind and Life Service Award in 2018. Dr. Saron directs the Shamatha Project, a multidisciplinary longitudinal investigation of the effects of intensive meditation on physiological and psychological processes central to well-being. In 2012, Dr. Saron and his research team were awarded the inaugural Templeton Prize Research Grant in honor of H.H. the Dalai Lama. Currently his research team is investigating the consequences of compassion vs. mindfulness training on engagement with suffering, as well as how meditation experience may have affected stress coping and cellular aging during the pandemic. His other research area focuses on sensory processing and integration in children with autism spectrum development to better understand how these children experience everyday environments.Robert W. Roeser is the Alice Valli Professor of Compassion and Ethics and Professor of Behavioral Social and Health Education Sciences at Emory University. He also serves as the Director of Research for the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-based Ethics in the College of Arts and Sciences. His training is in education, developmental science, clinical social work and religion; and he is a thought leader in the emerging fields of Contemplative Education and Developmental Contemplative Science. Dr. Roeser’s research interests include adolescence and early adulthood, schooling from Pre-K to College/University as a central cultural context of students’ academic, social-emotional and identity development; and the role of mindfulness and compassion training for teachers and students.  His recent work has focused on introducing mindfulness and compassion practices in for-credit, college courses for students to help them to (a) manage mental health challenges and (b) pursue their own vision of a life of flourishing.

 

Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director with John Grim of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. They are affiliated faculty with the Yale Center for Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment. They organized 10 conferences on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard and were series editors for the 10 resulting volumes from Harvard. Her research area is Asian religions and she co-edited Confucianism and Ecology, Buddhism and Ecology, and Hinduism and Ecology. She has authored with Grim, Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014). They co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2017) with Willis Jenkins. They are editors for the series on Ecology and Justice from Orbis Books. They have created six online courses in Religions and Ecology: Restoring the Earth Community, which include Indigenous religions, Western religions, and Asian religions. They also edited the books of cultural historian, Thomas Berry, including Selected Writings (Orbis 2014). They published Thomas Berry: A Biography (Columbia University Press, 2019) with Andrew Angyal. With Brian Thomas Swimme, they created a multi-media project Journey of the Universe that includes a book (Yale, 2011), an Emmy Award winning film on PBS, a series of podcast Conversations, and free online courses from Yale/Coursera.  Tucker was a member of the Earth Charter Drafting committee and the International Earth Charter Council. She won the Inspiring Yale Teaching Award in 2015 and has been awarded 7 honorary degrees. With Grim, she has received numerous awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.

 

Elissa Epel, Ph.D, (pronunciation) is an international expert on stress, well-being, and optimal aging and a best-selling author.  She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is Vice Chair of Psychology and directs the Aging Metabolism Emotions Center.  She studies the environmental, psychological, behavioral, and social factors that impact cellular aging (such as telomeres, inflammation, and mitochondria), and is also focusing on climate wellness. She studies how self-care practices such as meditation and positive stress can promote psychological and physiological thriving and is interested in large-scale interventions for communal well-being and health equity. She co-wrote the New York Times best-seller “The Telomere Effect: A revolutionary approach to living younger, longer” with Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn (translated into 30 languages) and the new “Stress Prescription,” an independent bookstore best seller and being translated into 15 languages. She enjoys leading science-based meditation retreats. Epel is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, past President of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and past co-chair of the Mind & Life Institute Steering Council.  She has served as a consultant to NIH, CDC, Facebook, Apple, United Health, and UC campus-wide initiatives on stress and health.  Epel’s research has been featured in venues such as TEDMED, Wisdom 2.0, NBC’s Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, 60 minutes, National Public Radio, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and science documentaries. In 2022, she was named as a highly cited researcher, among the  top .1% of researchers globally (for publication impact). Learn more at elissaepel.com.

 

Gretchen Ki Steidle is the Director of Garrison Institute’s Spirituality & Social Change Program.  She is also the Founder and President of Circles for Conscious Change, a transformative education firm working with social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and corporations on the use of mindfulness as a design tool for social innovation. Previously, she founded Global Grassroots, an international organization that operated a social venture incubator and mindful-leadership program for women and girls in East Africa. She has an MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth and a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia. Gretchen is author of Leading from Within: Conscious Social Change and Mindfulness for Social Innovation (MIT Press, 2017) and lectures and teaches on mindfulness and social change worldwide. A certified Integrative Breathworker, Gretchen has been delivering breath-based therapeutic practices, resilience training, and trauma healing since 2002 to a range of individuals globally, including survivors of and first responders to war and mass disaster. Her workshops have been offered at institutions including the Skoll World Forum, Omega Institute, Kripalu Institute, Wellbeing Project, AshokaU Exchange, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and University of Virginia, among others. In 2007, Gretchen was honored by World Business Magazine and Shell as one of the top International 35 Women Under 35. She was recognized in 2010 as a CNN Hero volunteering in Haiti after the earthquake. She was chosen in 2011 as one of seven Remarkable Women of the World by New Hampshire Magazine. In 2018, Gretchen was named one of Inc.’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers.

 

Rhonda V. Magee, M.A., Sociology; J.D., is a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco and an internationally recognized leader in integrating mindfulness into education, law, and social change. Born in North Carolina in 1967 and shaped by a childhood of trauma and challenge, she discovered early that healing, service, and contemplative practice could provide a way forward. For more than two decades, she has pioneered courses on civil law, race and inequality, and mindfulness and lawyering, while training extensively in Buddhist traditions, mindfulness-based interventions, and interpersonal dialogue. A former president of the board of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute, Rhonda has served on its steering council and sits on the boards of the UMass Center for Mindfulness and the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. She has also taught in leading mindfulness teacher training programs and led retreats at Spirit Rock, the Garrison Institute, Omega, Esalen, and other centers nationwide. Her teaching and writing focus on compassionate conflict engagement, presence-based leadership, and embodied mindfulness as keys to personal and collective transformation. She is the author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness (2019).

 

Aqeela Sherrills, Founder of the Community-Based Public Safety Collective, is a spirit-centered organizer and activist who has worked for three decades to promote community ownership of public safety and facilitate healing from violence in marginalized communities. A nationally recognized expert in victim service and community-based public safety, Aqeela has created and led multi-million-dollar nonprofit organizations focused on reducing violence and fostering safety in urban communities and advised hundreds of organizations. Currently, Aqeela is the Founder and leader of the Community-Based Public Safety Collective. Aqeela’s dedication to ending violence and promoting community-based public safety began in Watts, Los Angeles, where he joined the Grape Street Crips before fleeing the violence in his community to attend college. At age 19, Aqeela and Hall of Fame NFL star Jim Brown co-founded the Amer-I-Can Program, Inc. to heal gang violence in cities across the country by empowering individuals to overcome behavior that negatively influenced their lives. During that time, Aqeela was a chief architect of a historic truce between the Crips and Bloods in Watts. Aqeela and his brothers created the Community Self-Determination Institute in 1999 to heal communities’ post (and present) traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Aqeela launched The Reverence Project in 2007 to make meaning from his own son’s death. TRP brings together activists, healers, and artists in urban “war zones” to shift the culture from violence, shame, guilt, and fear into one rooted in forgiveness, compassion, reverence, and truth.  Aqeela serves as the Senior Advisor to the Alliance for Safety and Justice’s Shared Safety Initiative, and is a member of the Board of Directors of The Alliance for Safety and Justice, and Chairman of the Board of the Newark Community Street Team.

 

Tracy Ferron is Founder and Board President of Life On Art, a California-based non-profit which brings people together in therapeutic community art-making processes, healing trauma while building hope. Life On Art combines community artmaking, creative arts therapies, social action, and large-scale public art exhibitions. The customized programs further social and environmental justice movements and transform the world through love, creativity, and community building. Tracy’s passion for mental health and arts equity emerged from her experiences with her two severely mentally ill brothers, and her personal journey of transforming childhood trauma into purpose and social action through art. Through the symbology of winged hearts and cages, Ferron’s work compels audiences toward compassion. Tracy has innovated groundbreaking art programs at the margins, serving patients and staff in a forensic state psychiatric facility and men and women in California state prisons.  These programs are developed in partnership with therapists, artists, educators, non-profit leaders and community volunteers.  Tracy created Unbound (2021-22), an 80-foot sculpture of hundreds of winged hearts, in an innovative partnership at one of California’s largest psychiatric facilities. This project involved 1500 people: 500 psychiatric patients, 200 staff and 800 community participants.

 

Susan Olesek, Founder of the Enneagram Prison Project, is an unapologetic idealist and a Human Potentialist in passionate pursuit of what is possible for people. Born near Boston and raised in Hong Kong and Japan, she earned a BA in Sociology from Occidental College, where she received the Alumna of the Year award in 2025. As a consultant, Susan has facilitated Fortune 500 clients in the work of self-development for over a decade, but it was an opportune visit to a Texas prison that changed the trajectory of her life forever. In 2012 she founded the Enneagram Prison Project (EPP), a burgeoning California Bay Area nonprofit offering self-awareness education and self-regulation training to those incarcerated. With a vision to see her favorite transformational tool in every corner of society, EPP is now programming from San Quentin State prison, to Australia, the UK, Belgium and beyond. In 2021, she launched The Human Potentialists, a Benefit Corporation focused on doing business for good, with a vision to democratize the Enneagram. Ultimately Susan has a dream of changing our collective vision of Social Justice in the long term through teaching the incarcerated about the prison of our own personality. Susan believes wholeheartedly in everyone and anyone willing to take an honest look at themselves to make deep and lasting changes from the inside out.