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
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.
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
JESSICA GREEN
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 Therapist 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.
SiLVANA “SISA” SAVERI