Meet Our Wellness in Action Leaders and Projects
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Adriana Beltrame dos Santos
"Rodas, Rezas e Raízes" is a group for Brazilians in the Bay Area who are in the process of cultural transition, navigating the rollercoasters of adaptation and the uncertainties and challenges that come with it. The name means "circles, prayers and roots" and the intention of the group is to support participants in connecting with themselves and the community, with their psycho-spiritual well being, as well as the sense of meaning and belonging. Each meeting will have space for the exploration of deep communication and experientials for self-development in the psychological, material and spiritual realms. Adriana started her studies with an undergraduate degree in Visual Arts in Brazil. She became very interested in the expression of the depths of human psyche and eventually took the next step in her studies engaging in independent research on themes such as Mythology, Astrology, Archetypes, Fairytales, Philosophy, Divination, Ecopsychology, Cross-cultural transitions and Meditation. She has experience working as an art teacher, Waldorf teacher, group facilitator and a counselor of nature-based programs for children and teenagers. She came to the US to further her studies and recently completed her masters in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Adriana is offering a wellness group to support Brazilian women in the Bay Area, which she started with Wellness in Action last funding cycle. |
Beatriz Garcia
Fulfilling one’s full potential is difficult when basic needs are not satisfied, resources are inadequate and do not promote sustainable wellness. As we navigate through the uncertain times of a pandemic, and We face the challenges of political and social justice movements that directly impact our community the need for self-care has become essential. I would like to invite you to Honor your sacred self and reconnect to your roots, land or ancestors by utilizing stress reducing strategies, including culturally grounded approaches of storytelling, art and journaling. Let’s come together to create radical self-care. Inviting all WOC, immigrants, refuges and women who are interested in learning more about their indigenous background. Beatriz is a Vocational Nurse and DV counselor who is passionate about advocating for the accessibility to meaningful resources among under-serve communities. She volunteers as an advocate for SAVE in Fremont. As a survivor and former immigrant, Beatriz can relate to the challenges that under-served communities face due to the lack of meaningful resources and trauma informed care. Her vision is to achieve social connectedness among our communities as we can connect and heal together. Beatriz is creating a group for people identifying as women of color, refugees, immigrants, and women who would like to learn more about radical self-care creating stress reducing strategies, with cultural grounding approaches such as storytelling, art, ancestral rituals and journaling. |
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Diler Unal
Diler is a graduate student at Palo Alto University, where she is majoring in Clinical Mental Health. For over six years, Diler held volunteer and director positions at two different nonprofit organizations serving Turkish communities in Boston, MA and Austin, TX. As a professional calligraphy artist, Diler offered Turkish Calligraphy classes at the Austin Community College and calligraphy workshops at various events. Diler currently lives in Fremont, CA, with her husband and two kids. Diler volunteers at Bay Area Cultural Connections (BAYCC), which aims to build good relationships and strong family values among Turkish society. Her previous engagements with the community, art teaching experiences, belief in art's healing power, and background and experiences in the mental health field make Diler passionate about being part of the project of Wellness In Action. |
Eliza Ramos
Calling all social justice activists, healers, changemakers, and practitioners! Beyond self-care, Radical Resilience for Social Justice will explore how we can sustain our mental and emotional health, prevent burnout, and thrive, even as we tackle the world's most pressing issues. Learn more at: https://www.circlesinternational.org/resiliienceforjusticewellnessinaction Eliza supports the wellbeing of social justice advocates and practitioners, and is working to build the movement for emotional health and burnout prevention. During her career in social work and public health, she witnessed a high rate of fatigue and burnout. She began to focus her energy on creating resilience circles for those in high-impact, service-oriented leadership roles, with an emphasis on supporting immigrants and refugees. She now facilitates ongoing circles that emphasize tools such as cultivating wellbeing, preventing burnout, and sustaining collective impact, and is developing this further with a second year in Wellness in Action. Eliza holds a M.S.W. from Columbia University and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Southern California. She is certified in mediation and conflict resolution, emergency medicine, and Reiki. She resides in Oakland, California, and enjoys being part of the Bay Area’s arts, healing and activism communities. |
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Milene Monteiro
Mulheres Em Movimento - A group of Brazilian women, especially Afro and mixed-race Brazilian women who work and promote Brazilian culture in the Bay Area. The main goal of this group is to explore our identities as immigrants. We will use storytelling and performance as a means of transformation identifying the roles we play in our life script embodying memories in order to understand experiences that mark our identities. Each part of the body, and every art medium, acts as a mirror that reflects aspects of our personalities, our relationship to ourselves and to our surroundings. By using performance exercises, freewriting, and body movement expressions we open the space for reflections about who we are as immigrants, how our bodies respond to different situations and how our bodies adapt to new circumstances. Bio: Milene Monteiro is a communication consultant, performance educator, and group facilitator. Native from Bahia, Brazil and based in California, she has worked as a consultant and group facilitator for the Bay Area Capoeira community and for the Brazilian Cultural Center in Berkeley - BrasArte since 2013. At the core of her practice is a conviction that individual stories are powerful, and when embodied, shared and supported by the strength of the collective, stories work as a tool for social transformation. In her consulting, teaching, and performance production practice, she focuses on understanding the performance strategies that marginalized communities employ to combat social, racial, political, and economic inequity. Milene holds an MA in Communication Studies with a specialization in Performance Studies, from San Jose State University, where she was also a professor for five years. In addition to her academic education, she is trained in Expressive Arts and Drama Therapy, and she is on the RDT alternative training track of the NADTA. Her commitment to cultural changes through the arts led her to actively engage with the Brazilian artistic communities, facilitating workshops and training in a variety of environments, especially approaching issues related to gender and race inequities. In her free time, Milene adapts her research on intercultural performance to creative work by writing comic books, play scripts, and producing documentary films. |
Nakhter Ahad
Nakhter (he) is here for the body. As a bodyworker and educator based in Oakland, he facilitates trauma healing and experiential education about the nervous system in individuals. He is proud to be a queer, first-gen immigrant and passionate about holding space toward collective healing through learning that includes our body, mind, and feelings. Roberta Ryan Roberta is a Filipino activist and community organizer from the East Bay. She was born and raised in Fremont, CA. She has spent close to a year integrating with rural, indigenous, and urban poor communities in the Philippines to build international solidarity with the Philippine movement for peace and national democracy. In the U.S., Roberta organizes around workers rights and labor justice, renters rights and housing justice, and immigration. Roberta is building on her work with Wellness in Action last cycle to serve Filipino activists, their families, and Filipino migrant workers, many who struggle with mental health, physical health, including serious chronic illness. The purpose of the group is to create a deep sense of connection, belonging, and vulnerability among Filipino activists and migrants. Roberta's background is in women's studies, public policy, and public health, and she has an interest bridging mental health and wellness and community organizing. |
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Roger Remera
As a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide himself, Roger will offer a space for community care and checking in with the local Rwandan community to take care of self and those close to you. Roger, a documentary/filmmaker focuses his work on human rights issues around the world. He wants to fight ignorance and injustice by telling the untold stories of the voiceless through his lenses. His hope is that people will learn from people in conflict zones around the world. He is especially interested in Africa where he is from as a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. His experience in America has been in the humanitarian sector, where he worked with different non-profits organizations: Roger's work has included education with the American Friends Service Committee in the Peace Building Unit-Africa Program in Philadelphia. Roger has been working as a mitigation specialist for the Center for Capital Assistance where he conducts defense investigations for people who are standing trial for murder or who are on death row. Simultaneous with that he worked as a psychology technician/interviewer in a neuropsychology practice also focused on mitigation of penalty phase murder convictions and appeals. Roger was an invited speaker to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland when they re-launched the United Nations Moratorium on Executions. He has spoken on college campuses, in school classrooms, and has filmed in the US on homelessness and police officer shootings.Currently, Roger a is a leader of Rwandan Community in Northern California and has taken time out as a single parent to raise his 10-year-old daughter. |
Sangita Gautam
Stop Silencing and Start Healing Together. I have developed a group of Nepali women in stress mostly from Alameda County, the group facilitation will start on January 3oth and will run until March 20th. We are all coming together to share stories and build resiliency through art, self reflection and self care strategies. The group will build dreams and play together. The goal is to let participant go with pride, higher self-esteem and self care kits. Originally from Nepal, Sangita completed her Bachelors in Health Wellbeing and Social Care from University of Bradford, United Kingdom. Sangita finds fulfillment working and supporting those in need. She has worked with elderly and vulnerable adults by helping and supporting them with their daily personal, physical and emotional needs for six years in UK. Sangita came to United States in 2016. Sangita pursued a fellowship program in Community Health Worker and has been actively helping and supporting communities in need as she feels a unique connection to communities. Sangita is currently collaborating with CERI in Wellness in Action project and planning to facilitate a group of Nepali women in stress to promote their mental health and wellbeing. Sangita’s plan is to study Masters in Social Work and contribute to society by being more qualified and resourceful. Language(s): Nepali, Hindi and English. |
Take a look at our past grantees and projects
Tsering Yangkey
Songs and Stories with Tibetan Grandmothers in Alameda County is groundwork for deeper intergenerational healing work with the Tibetan community currently settled on Ohlone land. This project aims to celebrate the lives of elderly Tibetan women through their songs and stories using Narrative therapy tools.
With the growing number of young Tibetan couples making East Bay their homes, they are also bringing their aged parents from the refugee settlements across the globe to stay with them. Even though most of these grandparents are cozily nestled in the homes of their caring children, some are re-experiencing the trauma of being uprooted, culture shock and illiteracy. All Tibetans born before March 1959 had the opportunity of being born in a free Tibet, but the Chinese occupation of Tibet thereafter has been one the greatest tragedies in Tibetan lives and toppled their whole world. They were purposefully traumatized through theft of land, destruction of their sacred sites and murder of at least 1.2 million fellow Tibetans. They suffered systemic efforts to extinguish their culture, language and diminish their identity. And yet in the face of such hardship, those who escaped into the freedom of exile have been able to educate their children, preserve their culture, and reestablish Tibetan learning institutions in India and Nepal. The older generations kept alive their national identity and a struggle for the freedom of Tibetan people in Tibet. Many of them still hope and pray that their dedication and sacrifice will not go astray, and it will eventually lead their captive nation to freedom. Unfortunately, their numbers are decreasing and to some even those hopes are perishing, especially in their new country. Some of these grandparents, who reinvented themselves many times in their youth in the refugee camps by adapting to a new land and culture, find it extremely hard to readjust again in their old age to another new country. This first phase aims to celebrate the lives of these grandmothers through their songs and stories which further inspire them in realizing their resiliencies and their vital roles in passing their precious wisdom and knowledge to the younger Tibetans for our cultural continuity and survival. Songs and stories are very educational and can play an active role in intergenerational healing work, allowing language development and intergenerational communication. The hope of the project is to provide spaces for the grandmothers to rekindle their spirits, feel sense of belonging to this new country and acknowledge their important roles in the healing work and spark an impulse for that to happen on its own force.
Tsering, has had a deep interest in supporting community mental health and well-being throughout her growing life as a Tibetan refugee in India. As a recent political asylee in the United States, Tsering was delighted to be able to find an opportunity to support the Tibetan community directly through the API Connections program, understanding deeply the issues, challenges and hopes of members of her community, community struggles and ambitions. The program, 2011-2016, also offered Tsering the freedom to provide support that was aligned with the values and culture of the Tibetan community, including incorporating traditional wellness and spiritual practices into her approach on both an individual and community level. Tsering's understanding and intuitive wisdom about how to approach mental health issues in the Tibetan community – issues that are highly stigmatized – gave openings for supporting many individuals and families in the community who would not otherwise feel comfortable or safe in pursuing support. Tsering explored cultural wellness models, including leveraging activities such as community gardening, spiritual activities such as chanting, song and dance, intergenerational activities, as well as direct support such as assisting clients in their immigration, legal and social service needs. Tsering has long expressed an interest in deepening her counseling skills, including learning Western psychological modalities. Two years ago, Tsering decided to further her education and now has a Master in Counseling Psychology degree from JFK University. Currently, Tsering is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and works at Child Therapy Institute in San Pablo, California.
Songs and Stories with Tibetan Grandmothers in Alameda County is groundwork for deeper intergenerational healing work with the Tibetan community currently settled on Ohlone land. This project aims to celebrate the lives of elderly Tibetan women through their songs and stories using Narrative therapy tools.
With the growing number of young Tibetan couples making East Bay their homes, they are also bringing their aged parents from the refugee settlements across the globe to stay with them. Even though most of these grandparents are cozily nestled in the homes of their caring children, some are re-experiencing the trauma of being uprooted, culture shock and illiteracy. All Tibetans born before March 1959 had the opportunity of being born in a free Tibet, but the Chinese occupation of Tibet thereafter has been one the greatest tragedies in Tibetan lives and toppled their whole world. They were purposefully traumatized through theft of land, destruction of their sacred sites and murder of at least 1.2 million fellow Tibetans. They suffered systemic efforts to extinguish their culture, language and diminish their identity. And yet in the face of such hardship, those who escaped into the freedom of exile have been able to educate their children, preserve their culture, and reestablish Tibetan learning institutions in India and Nepal. The older generations kept alive their national identity and a struggle for the freedom of Tibetan people in Tibet. Many of them still hope and pray that their dedication and sacrifice will not go astray, and it will eventually lead their captive nation to freedom. Unfortunately, their numbers are decreasing and to some even those hopes are perishing, especially in their new country. Some of these grandparents, who reinvented themselves many times in their youth in the refugee camps by adapting to a new land and culture, find it extremely hard to readjust again in their old age to another new country. This first phase aims to celebrate the lives of these grandmothers through their songs and stories which further inspire them in realizing their resiliencies and their vital roles in passing their precious wisdom and knowledge to the younger Tibetans for our cultural continuity and survival. Songs and stories are very educational and can play an active role in intergenerational healing work, allowing language development and intergenerational communication. The hope of the project is to provide spaces for the grandmothers to rekindle their spirits, feel sense of belonging to this new country and acknowledge their important roles in the healing work and spark an impulse for that to happen on its own force.
Tsering, has had a deep interest in supporting community mental health and well-being throughout her growing life as a Tibetan refugee in India. As a recent political asylee in the United States, Tsering was delighted to be able to find an opportunity to support the Tibetan community directly through the API Connections program, understanding deeply the issues, challenges and hopes of members of her community, community struggles and ambitions. The program, 2011-2016, also offered Tsering the freedom to provide support that was aligned with the values and culture of the Tibetan community, including incorporating traditional wellness and spiritual practices into her approach on both an individual and community level. Tsering's understanding and intuitive wisdom about how to approach mental health issues in the Tibetan community – issues that are highly stigmatized – gave openings for supporting many individuals and families in the community who would not otherwise feel comfortable or safe in pursuing support. Tsering explored cultural wellness models, including leveraging activities such as community gardening, spiritual activities such as chanting, song and dance, intergenerational activities, as well as direct support such as assisting clients in their immigration, legal and social service needs. Tsering has long expressed an interest in deepening her counseling skills, including learning Western psychological modalities. Two years ago, Tsering decided to further her education and now has a Master in Counseling Psychology degree from JFK University. Currently, Tsering is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and works at Child Therapy Institute in San Pablo, California.