our beloved team
Sonali Sangeeta Balajee, Founder
Sonali Sangeeta Balajee (she/her) is a proud mother, artist, organizer, facilitator, mindfulness/yoga instructor, and emerging health practitioner who works at the intersection of belonging, equity, and deep transformative change. She roots in her home cultures and lands of India and Sri Lanka, and honors those from the Midwest (States) who also contributed to her growth and commitment to justice. Her formative education is in the arts, business, and educational reform. Her life work has focused on bringing forward ideas and strategies that speak to wholeness, specifically calling for leading with multiple truths and perspectives required for collective health. To those ends, she strives to elevate the connection between social and spiritual wellbeing, focusing on artistically embodying and animating the web of health, belonging, collective care, and liberation.
Sonali is a former Senior Fellow at the Othering and Belonging Institute (UC Berkeley). She worked closely with the Othering and Belonging conference, frameworks, and strategies. Sonali spent 13 years in U.S.-based government in Portland, Oregon, innovating in the areas of health equity, policy and systems shift towards justice, and community visioning. Her positions spanned senior policy and program manager positions on equity for both Multnomah County’s Office of Diversity and Equity and the Commission on Children and Families, as well as the City of Portland’s Mayor’s Office. She is the lead author on the racial equity tool and process, the Equity and Empowerment Lens (with a racial justice focus [Multnomah County]). During those 13 years, Sonali also contributed to national movement-building of racial equity initiatives within government with the Governing Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE). Her community organizing background has focused on youth development, environmental justice, and HIV / AIDS-related advocacy and service. Her current advocacy focus is on resource mobilization for projects and initiatives that speak to the social and environmental antidotes our world so desperately needs. Sonali has 20 years experience in performance art (dance and music), and 35 years of deep study of yoga and mindfulness, studying their effects in schools, correctional facilities, and on classroom instruction. She served as a Healing Practitioner with the WK Kellogg Truth, Reconciliation, and Healing Initiative, and continues her education in health and healing through study inspired by Ayurvedic sciences, Contemporary Alexander, and naturopathic efforts.
Bodhi was born from her loving inquiries laying at the intersection of her spiritual traditions, arts efforts, queerness, overall education, experience of chronic illness, and love for the health and well-being of all living systems.
Diana Dvora Falchuk, Collaborator
Diana Dvora Falchuk (she/her) is an artist, mother, organizer, facilitator, strategist, coach and organizational change consultant based on Coast Salish Land (Seattle, Washington) who works in diverse contexts – from grass roots community groups to government, social services, arts organizations and universities – to cultivate equity and belonging, and support transformation. Diana is honored to collaborate with Our Bodhi Project. You can learn more about Diana and her approach on her website.
Sarah Amsler, Collaborator
Sarah Amsler (she/they) is an ecosocial researcher, writer, educator and cultural organizer who is dedicated to deepening capacities for life-generating relationship in its widest sense, and to facilitating the systemic transformations of thinking, sensing and relating upon which the ongoing of all life on earth depends. Sarah works with educators, artists, organizers, and institutional leaders who want to deepen and sustain processes of systemic transformation, and with communities tending queer, land-based, and translocal projects that are committed to decolonial learning and living.
Sarah’s teaching, research and organizing focus on clarifying the conceptual and emotional roots of social and ecological violence in modern-colonial perceptions of reality, institutions and embodiments, and on deepening connection with our abundant yet not-yet-imagined possibilities to live in response-able relation with ourselves, in human co-existence and as healthy members of our more-than-human family and vital ecological metabolism. Sarah draws on critical, queer and decolonial social analysis, poetics and linguistic activism, affective-somatic and experiential pedagogies, and radical relational practice to create multi-sensorial learning experiences that facilitate and sustain complex processes of institutional disinvestment and disentanglement, the expansion of sensibilities and intimacies beyond modern normative forms, and epistemic and ontological disobedience, decomposition and transformation in directions of co-liberation.
Sarah is a queer person of Anglo-European settler-colonial ancestry, born and raised on the ancestral lands of the Lenni Lenape people (Mideast US), and makes home with people and lands in Britain, Europe and the US. Sarah works as an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham, is a member of the transnational Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective, and moves work in collaborative art/pedagogical/political/life projects. They worked as an educator and activist in higher and informal education for twenty years, as well as in anti-racist, feminist, and anti-capitalist pedagogy and curriculum in early childhood, school, youth, museum/curatorial, public-pedagogical and autonomous social center contexts. Sarah holds a BSc in Education from the University of Delaware, an MA in Sociology from George Mason University and a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Additional members of our ecosystem: Mila Buckland, Advisor