About the Somatic Facilitators/ Teachers
Staci K. Haines
Staci has been experimenting at the intersections of personal and social transformation for the last 30 years through the work of somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. Staci is the author of "The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice" (North Atlantic Books 2019) and "Healing Sex: A Mind Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma" (Cleis 1999, 2007).
Staci is a leader in the field of Somatics, focusing on how it can bring transformative capacity to social and climate justice movements, and help to heal the impacts of trauma and oppression. She leads online and in-person programs and partners with social justice organizations, recently teaming up with Healing Justice London, Equality Lab, and Crenshaw Dairy Mart. She is the co-founder and prior executive director of generative somatics, a senior teacher at Strozzi Institute, and a core contributor to the Strozzi methodology. In 1999 Staci founded generationFIVE, a non-profit whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations using transformative justice approaches.
Erika Lyla
Erika Lyla is a somatics coach + bodyworker + trainer + therapist + facilitator + activist + mother. Erika works with people to reveal their power, potential, and purpose. She guides with love and laughter towards life grounded in authenticity and shaped by dreams. She practices in unceded Ohlone land known as Oakland, CA and leads programs through generative somatics and Strozzi Institute. Erika is also a member of The Embodiment Institute’s Black Practitioner Cohort, an international group of Black transformational leaders.
Erika has been facilitating collective and personal transformation processes for over 15 years and holds a Master’s Degree in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. She specializes in working with people facing psychiatric crises, survivors of sexual violence, and individuals healing from complex trauma. Prior to expanding her private practice, Erika supported individuals in navigating the medical industrial complex as a social worker, and also worked as a youth organizer and with school age children as an after school teacher and program director.
Brandon Sturdivant
Brandon Sturdivant helped build the capacity of East Bay organizations through co-founding the Justice Reinvestment Coalition, which secured half of state realignment funds in support of reducing probation terms and policies that expand opportunities for employment and access for community services for formerly incarcerated people. As co-founders of Mass Liberation Project, an abolitionist organization that works to train, coach, and develop black organizers who are directly impacted by incarceration, Brandon along with Alex Muhammad helped to seed the creation of four new femme-led abolitionist organizations: Mass Lib Arizona, Michigan Liberation, Mass Lib Nevada, and Life After Release (DMV).
In addition, working on the principle that transforming systems requires transforming ourselves, Mass Liberation Project has instituted “Return & Reclaim,” taking black formerly incarcerated organizers to Ghana to reclaim their ancestral heritage as an act of generational resistance. Lastly, Brandon has been studying and teaching somatics for 7 years through generative somatics, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Strozzi Institute, and in programs and courses with Staci Haines.
About the Movement Leaders
Alok Vaid-Menon
ALOK (they/them) is an internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor. ALOK’s literary works “Beyond the Gender Binary,” “Femme in Public,” and “Your Wound, My Garden,” have garnered global recognition.
Alicia Garza
Alicia believes that Black communities deserve what all communities deserve -- to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. An author, political strategist, organizer, and cheeseburger enthusiast, Alicia founded the Black Futures Lab to make Black communities powerful in politics. She is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, serves as the Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and is a co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism. Alicia has become a powerful voice in the media and frequently contributes thoughtful opinion pieces and expert commentary on politics, race and more to outlets such as MSNBC and The New York Times. She has received numerous accolades and recognitions, including being on the cover of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World issue and being named to Bloomberg's 50 and Politico's 50 lists. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World Penguin Random House), and she warns you: hashtags don’t start movements, people do.
Deepak Bhargava
Elected by The JPB Foundation’s board in 2023, Deepak Bhargava assumed the role of president full-time in February 2024 after many years as a grantee, board member, and board vice chair of the Foundation. Bhargava brings over 30 years of expertise in social justice movements as a leader, campaigner, and strategist.
Since 2019, he has been a distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. He previously led Community Change for 16 years, where he worked to strengthen the community organizing field and launched coalitions that achieved major policy reforms at the federal level on issues such as poverty, health care, and immigration.
Bhargava has trained and mentored hundreds of leaders who’ve played key roles in progressive organizations and social justice movements, and, more recently, he co-founded a new organization, Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, which trains and supports early and mid-career people working for social change, especially people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people from working-class backgrounds.
He has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights, the Open Society Foundations (US), and 350.org, where he was Board Chair. He currently serves on the board of the Democracy Fund.
Evelyn Lynn
Originally from low-income folks in small town Western North Carolina, Evelyn Lynn has 20+ years in grassroots organizing and campaigns, primarily in the American South, Appalachia, and rural communities. After Hurricane Katrina, Evelyn helped found Safe Streets/Strong Communities, a Louisiana-based community organization led by formerly incarcerated people and families impacted by law enforcement violence. In Georgia, she co-founded the Racial Justice Action Center, an organization created to support transformative organizing initiatives led by formerly incarcerated women and Black transgender communities targeted by the criminal legal system. More recently, Evelyn founded and directed Southern Crossroads, an organization incubating transformative organizing projects of low-income people in the rural South. Evelyn currently serves as the Special Projects Organizer for the Highlander Research and Education Center campaigning to reclaim Highlander’s original home - seized by the state in 1961- and cultivating organizers across the South through the coordination of the Greensboro Justice Fund Fellowship.
Malkia Devich Cyril
Malkia Devich Cyril is a media and movement strategist, writer, public speaker and award winning activist on issues of collective grief, Black liberation, cultural change and narrative power. As the founding and former director of Media Justice, Malkia spearheaded national grassroots efforts for abolition and access in a digital age, and galvanized communities of color for an open Internet and media accountability. After two decades of media justice leadership, and in an era of devastating mass loss, Devich-Cyril has launched The Radical Loss Project – a Black-led change lab transforming how modern freedom movements face loss and build collective power through collective grief.
Maria Poblet
María Poblet has roots in Buenos Aires, Guadalajara, and East Los Angeles, and learned community organizing in San Francisco’s mission district in the 90s. María was instrumental in building Causa Justa :: Just Cause, aggregating the power of 3 different neighborhood-based Latino and African American organizing groups into a single, multi-racial powerhouse in the SF Bay Area. As founding Executive Director, she led the organization in groundbreaking work building cross-racial solidarity against the displacement of immigrant and black communities. She helped build Bay Rising, the US Social Forums of 2007 & 2010, the Right to the City Alliance, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, the California Working Families Party, and the US chapter of the World March of Women. María is grateful to have been trained by June Jordan, Bill Sorro, and Marta Harnecker. Building on lessons from those experiences, she now designs strategy development work across organizations, as Executive Director of the Grassroots Power Project.
Marielena Hincapié
Marielena Hincapié is a Distinguished Immigration Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Cornell’s Immigration Law and Policy Program. She served as the executive director of the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the NILC Immigrant Justice Fund (IJF) until November 2022. Marielena began her tenure at NILC in 2000 as a staff attorney leading the organization’s labor and employment program. During that time, she successfully litigated law reform and impact-litigation cases dealing with the intersection of immigration laws and employment/labor laws. Marielena is a nationally respected leader, legal and political strategist, and a leading voice in the national conversation on immigrants. A seasoned strategist and bridge builder, she co-led the transformational Immigrant Movement Visioning Process resulting in a long-term vision grounded in racial, economic, and gender justice and equity. She co-chaired the Biden Campaign’s Unity Taskforce on Immigration, and helped lead the national conversation on the essential role immigrants play in shaping the future of the US and safeguarding our democracy. She played a key role in supporting youth leaders in the creation and successful implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and co-founded the Protecting Immigrant Families (PIF) coalition to address children and families’ access to safety net programs. She co-created the #ImmigrantsAreEssential cultural campaign which won a Shorty Award and a Gold Anthem Award for Civil and Human Rights. As an immigrant from Colombia, Marielena brings a bilingual and bicultural perspective to her work, advancing equity, justice, and democracy. She currently serves as an advisor to Unbound Philanthropy and as a member of the Board of Trustees for The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She is writing a forthcoming book Becoming America: A Personal History of A Nation’s Immigration Wars, under contract with Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, in 2026.
May Boeve
May Boeve is a passionate climate activist, spurring campaigns and leading the climate movement in the US and on a global stage for almost two decades.
May is currently the Executive Director of 350.org, an international organization that she co-founded in 2008. Since then, the group has grown to over 160 staff members and mobilizes a network of more than 500 local groups spread around all continents. 350.org is an innovative movement building organization, which combines public pressure, campaigning, and organizing to stop the fossil fuel industry and foster a transition towards renewable energy that is rooted in justice and builds people power.
As a young female leader, May became 350's Executive Director when she was just 27. She has been a strong advocate for equity and diversity, working to build alliances across social movements. May is a co-author of Fight Global Warming Now, and was featured as a TIME Magazine next generation leader, a recipient of the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, and has been featured in numerous publications as a thought leader about movement building to fight the climate crisis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter.