JON KABAT-ZINN, PH.D.
Featured in Bill Moyer's PBS Special, "Healing and the Mind",
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., is executive director at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He is the founder and former director of the UMMC Stress Reduction Clinic and an associate professor of medicine in the division of preventive and behavioral medicine. Using mindfulness meditation, Kabat-Zinn works to help people reduce stress and deal with chronic pain, and a variety of illnesses, particularly breast cancer. He was a trainer for the 1984 U.S. Men's Olympic Rowing Team and is especially interested in reducing the stress-related problems in the inner city and in prison populations.
Kabat-Zinn's books include:
Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness (1991);
Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (1994) and
Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting (1997), which was co-authored with his wife, Myla.
LAURIE GROSSMAN
Laurie Grossman, one of the founders of the mindfulness in education movement, has been an activist since 1975 – she believes that mindfulness in schools is the tool most likely to help achieve social justice. Over the last two decades, she started two innovative programs: one that created partnerships between private and public schools, and one that brought mindfulness into schools. In 2007, as part of Park Day School’s Community Outreach Program, she and two colleagues launched a pilot program of mindfulness in an Oakland, CA, elementary school that was covered in The New York Times and on NBC. Grossman is cofounder of Mindful Schools, now one of the largest mindfulness-in-education programs in the world. She currently works with Inner Explorer, an organization focused on bringing daily mindfulness practices into schools to improve educational outcomes and the well-being of children and teachers. She is passionate about Inner Explorer because the organization has made mindfulness scalable, providing easy and immediate access to every K-12 classroom, anywhere, anytime.
ANGELINA ALVAREZ
Angelina Alvarez, holds a degree in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. She believes that every child should have the opportunity to grow up with a foundation of mindfulness practice. Alvarez works with Mindful Life Project in Richmond, CA, a nonprofit organization that teaches mindfulness, yoga, therapeutic art, and hip-hop/performing arts to elementary school students in underserved communities.
MASON MUSUMECI
Mr. Musumeci has spent two decades teaching, caring, and advocating for children in New York, NY, and Oakland, CA. As a teacher at Reach Academy in East Oakland from 2009 to 2014, he was a proponent of mindfulness, and was delighted when one of his students suggested the class create a mindfulness superhero. His class was comprised of twenty-six wonderful, lively, and smart fifth graders who loved mindfulness. Reach Academy is a transitional K-5 school where the vast majority of students are on free and reduced lunch, and 99 percent of the students are children of color. Mr. Musumeci’s 5th Grade Class is excited to publish a book of their own about mindfulness for other kids because they have benefitted so much from the practice.