tHE TEAM
Meet Our Co-Directors
Courage of Care is led by colleagues, friends, and Co-Directors Maha El-Sheikh and Brooke D. Lavelle. While Maha and Brooke run the day-to-day operations at Courage, our team embraces a shared leadership model. Our strategy, vision, and culture is held by our Council with the support of our Board and core staff. Our facilitation programs and consulting projects are run by various sociocratic circles of facilitators and collaborators who collectively enact the mission of our Coalition.
Our Council, Board & Core Staff
Ed Porter, M.S., M.A.
In Loving Memory
Ed Porter, M.A., M.S. has a rich and varied career in public education, professional development, community leadership, and systems thinking and equity training. His vision is to provide services in a variety of modalities to individuals, groups, and organizations that assist them in opening their eyes, minds, and hearts to working together across race, gender, and cultural identities—building a workplace and a world that honors, celebrates, and upholds the values and contributions of all. Mr. Porter has served in many roles and at all levels of school organizations—teacher, principal, district administrator, community leader, consultant and superintendent of schools. . Mr. Porter helps organizations, groups, and individuals to set a clear vision, use multiple measures and perspectives in assessing current strengths and barriers, and engage all constituencies in courageous problem-solving, action planning, and implementation.
Brooke D. Lavelle, Ph.D.
Courage Council, Co-Founder & Co-Director
Brooke is the Co-Founder and President of Courage of Care. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and Cognitive Science from Emory University, an M.A. in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University and a B.A. in Religion and Psychology from Barnard College. Brooke was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany, where she co-developed a climate justice program for ecological sustainability researchers. She served as a lecturer at San Francisco State University where she taught a contemplative-based course on compassion and social justice. She was a consultant to Teacher’s College, Columbia University's new initiative on Spirituality and Education and was the Senior Education Consultant to Mind & Life's Ethics, Education, and Human Development Initiative. Brooke served on the core curriculum team for the Student Flourishing Initiative, a collaboration between the Universities of Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison and Penn State, and previously co-led the Summer Institute for Educators at the Greater Good Science Center. Brooke recently completed a book manuscript on courage and spiritual activism and is co-writing a book on compassion and equity in education with a collaborative she founded in Oakland.
Maha El-Sheikh
Courage Council & Co-Director
With 20 years working in the international humanitarian sector, Maha’s work currently focuses on the social injustices underlying our global crises. She brings her experience in studying and teaching trauma-informed yoga, somatics, and meditation to explore the interconnection of healing, social transformation, and justice. She is core faculty at Courage of Care where she partners with relational facilitators and leaders in the economic, racial and climate justice movements. She also partners with international humanitarian groups to reimagine aid through compassion-centered, counter- oppressive frameworks.
Abra Vigna, Ph.D.
Courage Council, Board & Director of Research
Abra is an Action Researcher and Evaluator in the Population Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this role she provides training, technical assistance and consulting related to community change efforts regarding health equity and offers expertise in transformative education, relationship-building and applied research. A long-term practitioner of contemplative practices, she infuses her capacity building efforts with compassion building practices.
Prior to earning her PhD in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison she worked as a crisis counselor and youth development specialist at a local Runaway and Homeless Youth agency. In addition to providing weekly life skills development programming for LGBT youth, crisis counseling, case management and youth mentorship, Abra has extensive experience supporting youth service providers on the journey toward transforming their organizational infrastructure and personal practice to be more inclusive and explicitly anti-racist.
Vaishali Mamgain, Ph.D.
Courage Council, Board and Faculty
Vaishali (she/her) serves on the Board of the Courage of Care Coalition and is an Associate Professor of Economics and the Director of the Bertha Crosley Ball Center for Compassion at the University of Southern Maine. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her past research focused on the contributions of (im)migrants and refugees in the Maine economy.
Her current research is in contemplative pedagogy where she is passionate about deconstructing epistemology. She specializes in using somatic and immersive nature practices to undo internalized oppression and the “colonization” of contemplative practices. She regularly leads compassion training and anti-racism workshops for faculty and community groups in the US and abroad.
A working contemplative, she has meditated, wandered and ‘retreat’ed for many years. In 2017, she completed a three year meditation retreat at Samten Ling Retreat Center in Crestone, Colorado and now lives in beautiful, coastal Maine where she enjoys swimming in the sea, admiring seaweed, running, hiking and cooking.
Monika Son, Ph.D.
Faculty
As a trained psychologist and expert facilitator and certified embodied leadership coach, Monika is skilled at supporting discomfort and ambiguity in challenging dialogues about race, power, privilege, and oppression. With 20 years of experience in higher education as a justice-centered scholar-practitioner and teacher, Dr. Son integrates mindfulness and contemplative practices to foster spaces for building community, compassionate engagement and healing oriented strategies that cultivate presence, critical inquiry and action.
Shah Noor Hussein
Managing Editor, The Arrow Journal
shah noor hussein is a writer, visual artist, and scholar focusing on black feminism, art, and teaching. shah is a doctoral student and Cota-Robles Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in the fields of Anthropology, Critical Race Theory & Ethnic Studies. From 2016 – 2017, they was a Writing Fellow at the California Institute of Integral Studies and currently works as an adjunct professor, a freelance writer, and a multimedia artist in Oakland. Their previous experience as an editor includes work for arts organizations, journals, magazines, start-ups, and book publishing companies including Umber Journal and Nothing But The Truth Publishing. shah serves as an Event and Program Coordinator at their spiritual spiritual home, the East Bay Meditation Center located in Oakland, California, which offers radically inclusive dharma practices through Buddhist, multicultural, and secular approaches that focus on social justice. Their current research and career aims to (re)center marginalized voices in dialogues on alternative epistemologies and ontologies through a multimedia ethnographic research, creative writing, educational engagement, and editorial outreach. In their free time, shah walks in nature, talks to their ancestors, meditates, eats good food, and sleeps.
Ashley Wilson
Associate Editor, The Arrow Journal
Ashley Wilson earned her PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. Her doctoral dissertation research, funded by Fulbright-Hays and National Geographic, focused on common alternative arrangements to both formal marriage and employment in an urban, Kenyan neighborhood. Her anthropological training continues to be a guiding influence in her roles as writer, editor, mother, and Zen practitioner. In addition to being Associate Editor at The Arrow Journal, Ashley works in educational publishing, teaches yoga, and shares the practice of mindfulness and meditation through personal coaching sessions. She currently lives in central Arkansas with her young son, Sage, and their puppy, Zen.
Katrine Bregengaard, M.A.
Faculty
Katrine Bregengaard’s work as a facilitator combines her background as a critical human rights educator, organizer and researcher with her work as a contemplative and somatic practitioner. She’s passionate about building meditative and compassion-based approaches that can strengthen our personal and collective capacity to address the complexities of eco-, gender-, class- and racial-justice. She facilitates radical mindfulness groups in Copenhagen and works with Courage of Care Coalition to build bridges between individual and collective healing and systemic transformation.
katie robinson
Faculty
katie robinson (any pronouns) is a writer, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to the exploration of what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. Their essay, “Here’s How I Let Them Come Close,” a meditation on encounters, extraterrestrials, and the creative process, was featured in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars from Milkweed in 2023. They are currently a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where they are writing a dissertation at the intersections of depth psychology, decoloniality, and police and prison abolition.
Tina Strawn
Faculty
Tina Strawn (she/they) is a joy and liberation activist, racial and social justice advocate, and author of "Are We Free Yet? The Black, Queer Guide to Divorcing America." Tina is also the owner and host of the Speaking of Racism podcast and she is the co-founder of Here4TheKids, an abolitionist movement to ban guns and fossil fuels. The heart of Tina's work is founding and leading Legacy Trips, immersive, 3-day antiracism weekends where participants visit historic locations such as Montgomery and Selma, AL, and utilize spiritual practices and other mindfulness based resources as tools to affect personal and collective change. Tina has three adult children, an ex-husband, an ex-wife, and an ex-country. Tina has a TedX Talk entitled, " Blaxit: The New Underground Railroad" She has been a full-time minimalist nomad since February 2020 and currently lives in Costa Rica.
Farah Mahesri
Faculty
Farah Mahesri (she/her) works as a strategy, organizational and leadership development thought-partner and collaborator for social justice, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. She previously worked at Tides Advocacy, a 501c4 organization, and its sister organization Tides (a 501c3 entity) providing strategic, political and compliance support to multi-entity organizations working to build independent political power and work toward collective liberation.Previously, as a Muslim-American coming of age during the post 9-11 era, Farah worked with international organizations working on the anti-war/peace agenda. Since 2022, she has been working as an independent consultant supporting organizations to align strategy to operations and navigate the new realities of how we work and interact at work. She sits on the board of multiple organizations, including LA Defensa and Creating the Future and hosts a podcast on applying liberatory principles to the future of work. She organizes with Alliance of South Asians Taking Action. Farah lives in Oakland, California.
Leslie Langbert, LCSW
Board
Leslie Langbert holds a Master of Social Work degree and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with an extensive professional background as a therapist, educator, yoga instructor, meditation facilitator and leader in non-profit and higher education.
She serves as a member of the CBCT Teacher Training faculty at Emory University, and developed and taught contemplative-based undergraduate courses on mindfulness and compassion at the University of Arizona for a decade. She co-founded the University of Arizona’s Center for Compassion Studies and served as the Executive Director from 2014 - 2024.
Norma Timbang
Faculty
Norma Timbang (she/they) is known for their skill in building effective working relationships with community activists and legislators. Norma is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington School of Social Work and a private consultant facilitating educational projects and dialogues on social justice and creating transformative and liberatory cultures.
Board
