Team
Meet the OMPowerment Team
We are career humanitarian aid workers, community project coordinators, activists, advocates, and yoga teachers who have come together through a dedication towards service for those most vulnerable within our communities.
We share an embodied belief that wellness should not be determined by geography, social status, ethnicity, access to finance, or privilege. We believe that the practices of self-regulation / trauma informed yoga have the ability to positively affect mental health and healing from stress and trauma.
We believe in the power of community-led intervention, drawing on personal, past experience that highlights the positive impact community-based activities have in reducing dependence and facilitating healing. This is the reason we promote a model of “training the trainer.”
Through these shared values, we form The OMPowerment Project, representing our collective commitment to use our skills to share the practices in as many communities as possible, particularly refugee communities that otherwise don’t have access.
Board of Trustees
Chiara understands first hand how finding some friendship and peace in your own body is so important, even life saving at times. She is currently working towards my 200h YTT qualification and is interested in growing skills to be a trauma informed movement facilitator and space holder. Professionally, Chiara has been working on issues related to women’s rights and gender justice for the past 12 years with a focus on economic justice, land and labour rights at international level and more recently on UK domestic issues. She specialises in writing, research development, knowledge of human rights and policies around women’s rights, migration and trafficking and related issues and ethical partnerships.
CHIARA CAPRARO, SECRETARY
Member of the Board. Nadia Gilani is a yoga teacher and writer. Her working background is in news journalism and communications, which she did for a decade before teaching yoga. After starting life out as a blogger and music reviewer, Nadia trained as a hard news journalist working on local papers before moving onto national titles. After a decade on news desks, having worked as a crime reporter, covered several elections and written dozens of features and front pages, Nadia worked as a communications manager at petition’s website Change.org and later crowdfunding platform GoFundMe.
Nadia has extensive experience of working with people with different bodies and from all walks of life. She is deeply committed to making yoga inclusive. Her teaching approach is contemporary, non-dogmatic and explorative, while maintaining a deep respect for the ancient Indian practice. In her view, anyone can practice yoga - it’s down to the teacher to take a flexible, compassionate and intelligent approach to help students find what best suits them.
NADIA GILANI
Yoga entered Sadia's life during the Covid-19 pandemic and, after falling in love with the energy and challenge of the practice during her first class, decided to make it a fundamental part of her life. She has over 11 years of accounting and finance experience within the charity sector, and she is a qualified Chartered Accountant. She enjoys working within the charity and not for profit sector as it allows her to use her skills in an environment where the culture is to make a difference to other people who are in real need. Her role as a treasurer will entail advice, guidance and reassurance on all aspects of financial management and reporting.
SADIA BAUREEK, TREASURER
Abi is a social entrepreneur with a devoted interest in how health inequality and social disparity can be tackled through accessible wellbeing services. She is the Founder of Supply Yoga, a London based social enterprise that works hard to democratise access to psychosocial health improving wellness practices for underserved communities across the UK’s capital. Whilst currently on hold due to the C19 pandemic, she is also due to undertake an overseas research fellowship that will catalyse a project titled ‘ Shared social experiences as therapeutic interventions for psychosocial health: a community based model’ - her report will
focus on the experiences of displaced communities. In her spare time, she contributes to casework for my local migrant centre and is a Mental Health Advocate with familiar knowledge of the complex, intersectional challenges faced by migrant communities in the UK.
Find Abi on Instagram @supply_yoga
ABI NOLAN
Leila Sadeghee is a healer, ritualist, yoga teacher, and priestess. Skilled at creating powerful healing spaces wherever her voice is heard, Leila is known for her loving, supportive, and intelligent tone, and her talent in bringing the depth of esoteric spiritual teachings into immediately accessible and salient focus. Leila is dedicated to dismantling systemic oppression as a spiritual practice. She is a keeper of the Magdalene flame. She is a devotee of the divine mother in all Her forms, and she is a pilgrimage enthusiast for whom walking on sacred ground brings ecstatic satisfaction. She also is quite the instigator of community, is relentless in her service and studentship, has a freewheeling sense of fun.
Find Leila on Instagram at @leilasadeghee or online at www.leilasadeghee.com
LEILA SADEGHEE
Sally is happiest when her hands and mind are occupied in a creative project. After spending years working in the creative industries, she moved to India in 2015 to deepen her study into the practices of yoga while assisting teacher trainings.
Having returned back home in London in 2018, she teaches regular classes and serves as a committed volunteer to projects within her community.
Sally's fascination with the therapeutic qualities of breath, mind and body practices have led to her current training to become a Yoga Therapist.
SALLY BALFOURTH
Ava is a Creative Facilitator and Yoga Teacher. Her work focuses on using creativity to connect people, and guiding groups into deeper contemplation about issues concerning their liberation and wellbeing- on personal and collective levels. As a guide, Ava is clear that the point of her work is to encourage students to become their own inner teachers: she does this with young people and adults.
AVA RIBY-WILLIAMS
Programming
Julia has worked in international policy and humanitarian aid for over 15 years, evaluating the efficacy of aid programming and assessing impact against intended achievements. Specialising in gender and conflict, she has worked across numerous sectors, including education, humanitarian assistance, governance, health, counter-trafficking, illicit finance, and counter-terrorism. Her work across the globe, with particular expertise in conflict and post-conflict environments such as Somalia, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, has given her an acute understanding of the problems with the typical aid model, and insight into how to make development programming more sustainable through equitable, community-centered intervention.
Julia’s experience working with marginalised communities and her understanding that community-led interventions are more effective, have greater impact, and are more likely to generate sustainable change, led to the foundation of The OMPowerment Project.
Elicica (they/she), RYT-500, is a Black, Queer, CODA, and a movement and mindfulness facilitator. Elicica is the founder of Uniqual Collective, which is centered on co-creating spaces for the exploration of wellbeing on both individual and collective levels. Through their offerings, Elicica aims to embrace and honor the roots of Yoga and empower their co-creators with resources for self-regulation, self-care, and collective care. Their work centers BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ communities and they’re particularly interested in the intersections of Yoga, mental health, and social and economic justice. They believe everyone has a fundamental right to health, healing, rest, and rejuvenation. Elicica is based in Los Angeles on occupied Tongva-Gabrieliño, Chumash, and Kizh land.
Jess has worked in the communities of East London for 20 years. Since 2002 she has practiced yoga, slowly moving her work to teaching yoga full time and spending lass time sitting at a desk. She now teaches in schools: with parents, teachers and students, in her local studios in Leyton and Walthamstow, in Hackney with a special project aimed at the over 50's to reduce isolation and aid wellbeing. Jess was keen to support/participate in the Ompowerment project as she already works in London with female refugees, sharing mindfulness, meditation, movement and breathing skills to help them cope with the symptoms of PTSD and anxiety.
JULIA MIDLAND FOUNDER, DIRECTOR
ELICICA MORRIS, US PROGRAMMING
JESSICA GREEN,
OPERATIONS MANAGER
Global Facilitators
Jessi completed her 200-hour YTT with Himalaya Yoga Valley in Goa, India and a 40- hour trauma-informed yoga training with Hala Khouri and Kyra Haglund in 2017. Jessi lives in Nairobi, Kenya where she founded and directs a yoga for trauma program for young gender-based violence survivors in Kibera slum. She also teaches trauma-informed yoga to unaccompanied refugee girls at RefuSHE, a non-profit in Nairobi. In 2019 she collaborated with The OMPowerment Project to train girls from both of these groups to become leaders of a trauma-informed yoga practice in their communities, and, in the process, became certified to facilitate OMPowerment trainings. She continues to deepen her education in trauma through the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program at Eastern Mennonite University and the Harvard Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery program.
In 2020, Jessi plans to continue to serve the two groups she trained in Kenya to reinforce and expand skills and mentor them as they grow into stronger leaders of this practice. She also hopes to eventually train a new cohort, and to support and lead OMPowerment trainings in other countries in the region and beyond.
Follow Jessi on Instagram @jessiwolz or @growing_girl_gurus, and online at https://jessiwolz.com
Or get in touch with her via email at jessiwolz@gmail.com
JESSI WOLZ, NAIROBI KENYA
Sanaz is an Iranian-American Trauma-Informed coach, consultant and yoga teacher currently living in Pennsylvania (USA). She is a former therapist with a heart for mental health, mindfulness and social justice. Her collaborations in community blend the science of wellness and resilience with group support and yoga. Through coaching Sanaz supports clients towards achieving their goals while coping with stressors & navigating the unknown through a resilience-based lens. As a whole, her work places emphasis on honoring our bodies cues for rest, joy and connection while addressing the systems that may be holding us back from reclaiming our innnate ability to thrive.
DR SANAZ YAGHMAI, PHILEDELPHIA USA
Ava is a creative and intuitive teacher and facilitator who encourages play and embraces diversity. Her teaching focuses on finding presence in the moment, empowering students become their own inner teachers and recognising ourselves as divinity, in unity.
She is passionate about creating safe and inclusive spaces for self exploration, expression and acceptance. Ava is driven by the importance of making healing practices accessible to isolated and marginalised communities, as a tool to unwind trauma. She shares the essence of trauma sensitive practises in youth work, and has also facilitated and assisted two OMpowerment teacher training courses in Palestine.
With over 10 years of yoga, creative practise and devising experience, her classes are often woven with song, poetry and space for reflection as a way to deepen our capacity to love and experience life.
In 2020, Ava plans to bring the OMPowerment work deeper down into her home soil: London. She wants to share this work with young facilitators, to further their space holding skills for their own youth and community projects.
Follow Ava on Instagram @the.soul.sessions, and online at www.thecreativesoulcollective.com (blog, podcast and event info), or get in touch with her via email at avazarah@gmail.com
AVA RIBY-WILLIAMS, LONDON UK
Advisors
HALA KHOURI
Sisa is happiest when she moves or gets her hands dirty with soil and paint.
After nearly two decades of experience in the corporate world, managing complex online projects and brands, she sought out to find projects with more meaning which lead her to become a yoga teacher and to open her own studio. She now is a certified Embodied FlowTM teacher and Somatic Movement Coach and what she likes to call "Conscious Consultant" and others may call project management for businesses with a conscience.
Together with Jessica Green, she co-organizes the European Yogi Nomads, a project dedicated to bringing yogis together in different European cities united by their love of community and yoga. Through one of the events she learned about the OMPowerment Project and immediately hosted a fundraiser.
Sisa believes that coming back home to ourselves and into our bodies is the key to allowing us to experience life to its fullest. That if we can be with ourselves, in light and darkness, we can be there with others too.
Being passionate about using embodiment practices for self-healing, she is excited for the OMPowerment Project to create safer spaces and accessibility to communities around the world.
SISA SAVERI