Skip Andrew
A retired lawyer and national business owner, Skip has always believed that the key to mobilizing and sensitizing people to care about the world's challenges is to help them understand the impact of policies on children. He's still wrestling with the inner child inside himself and occasionally trips over himself in the process. He lives in Ashland, OR
Suzanne Arms is an internationally acclaimed author, photojournalist, visionary, and activist, and has been an acknowledged leader of the international birthing movement for over 25 years. Her 1975 book Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth fueled a national movement and was named a New York Times "Best Book of the Year."
In 1995 she has received the prestigious Lamaze International Lifetime Achievement Award for her outstanding contributions to the world of birth. She founded does her work through Birthing the Future, based near Durango, Colorado
Together with John Travis and Meryn Callander, she co-founded aTLC and first envisioned the aTLC summit.
Paul Brenner, MD, PhD
A former chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Scripps Memorial Hospital, Dr. Brenner is one of the founders of the holistic medicine movement and was the moderator of the PBS Series "Healing Through Communication." Dr. Brenner's book, A Shared Creation, Saybrook Publishers, (1988), was selected by the eminent psychologist, Dr. Rollo May for the Mind Age Series. His new book, Seeing Your Life Through New Eyes, Beyond Words Publications, was released in October 2000.
Dr. Brenner is an instructor in the Social Behavioral Studies at theUniversity of California, San Diego School of Medicine. He also holds a doctorate in Counseling Psychology and is the creator of The Family Triangle Process. This visual, psychological process identifies unconscious patterns that are transmitted from generation to generation. It is ideally suited for prenatal counseling.
Raymond Castellino, DC. The birth of my son 30+ years ago, captivated and changed me. His hospital birth experience propelled me to look for holistic approaches to health, which led to my becoming a polarity therapist, and then a chiropractor. I soon found that craniosacral, polarity, and chiropractic techniques would often allow babies to put themselves in positions and movement patterns that appeared to have been imprinted during birth, i.e., they could tell me stories about their formative experiences.
As the co-founder of BEBA (Building and Enhancing Bonding and Attachment): a non-profit research center for family healing in Santa Barbara, I am devoted to supporting families to resolve early physical and emotional traumatic imprints. I also direct the Castellino Prenatal and Birth Therapy Training, for health care professionals and am a faculty member of Santa Barbara Graduate Institute.I have dedicated my professional life to helping prenates, birthing babies, infants, and children start their lives as joyfully and health-fully as possible.
David Isaacs is President of Clearing Communications, an organizational and communications strategy company working with corporate leaders in the US and abroad. David was a co-convener of the MIT Organizational Learning Center's Strategic Dialogue on Large Scale Systems Change in collaboration with an Intel executive, and has worked with a wide range of clients including Chevron, Cargill, Hewlett Packard, Scandinavian Airlines Systems (SAS), Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Lego (Denmark). He has served as guest faculty for innovative learning programs with the University of Texas Business School (Executive MBA), the California Institute of Integral Studies (Leadership Coaching), and the Kaos Pilots University (Denmark/USA). He co-authored with partner Juanita Brown, the World Café Resource Guide and Café To Go
Inbal Kashtan, MA, is the Parenting Project coordinator for the Center for Nonviolent Communication and the co-director of the (San Francisco) Bay Area Center for Nonviolent Communication. CNVC's goal is to contribute to people's ability to create a world where everyone's needs are met peacefully. Inbal's work with the Parenting Project aims to support parents in nurturing the quality of connection and trust with their children that enables all family members to meet their needs.
Inbal facilitates public workshops and retreats as well as trainings in organizations, co-leads an NVC leadership development program and diversity program, and creates curricula for learning NVC. Several of her articles on NVC and parenting have appeared in publications around the country, including in Mothering (January/February 2002). Inbal's greatest teacher for the past four years has been her son, who is mentoring her on what it means to live nonviolently.
Susan Kelly is an independent graphic artist specializing in visual thinking and interactive group graphics as well as process design and materials development.
For the past 18 years, Susan has created stimulating environments that bring out the creativity in individuals and groups. The reflective tools she uses heighten learning and collaboration while they simultaneously provide frameworks for handling complex information. In the process, documentation is created that serves as a thread of information, conversation and decision-making.
She has worked nationally and internationally with a wide spectrum of groups from Fortune 500 companies to governments and non-profit organizations in a broad scope of fields.
Susan has her own company, Occasions by Design, which is based in San Francisco, CA.
Joseph Chilton Pearce is the author of many books including Crack In The Cosmic Egg, and the national best seller The Magical Child. For over thirty years he has written and lectured internationally on human development and the needs of children.
He was a faculty member on child development at the Jung Institute in Switzerland and the Governor of California invited him to address two special legislative planning sessions on the challenges facing children and families.
Recently completed are two books: The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit, which explores the biological foundation for what we think of as "spiritual" development, and, co-authored with Michael Mendizza, Magical Parent--Magical Child, the Optimum Learning Relationship.
Charlotte Peterson, PhD, has been a practicing psychologist and child therapist in Eugene, Oregon, for the past 27 years where she also served as Senior Clinical Supervisor of School Psychology at the University of Oregon. Charlotte's particular focus is on how parents can promote positive psychological development in their children and prevent emotional wounding. Her work has been described in various international publications.
For the past 30 years, Charlotte and her family have spent an average of 6 months every five years living in over 60 different countries. She has made comparative observations of mother-infant interactions, and parent-child relationships, with a particular interest in parenting practices that appear to result in more compassionate and peace-loving children, teens, and adults.
Charlotte was granted the l988 Mayor's Award for Outstanding Contributions in Leadership for her help in establishing a sister city relationship between Eugene, and Irkutsk, a city in the former Soviet Union.
Stan Tatkin, PsyD, has been a practicing psychotherapist for over 18 years. Through a developmental object relations approach, he has maintained a special interest in the treatment of adolescents and adults with personality disorders. His interests have widened over the years to include the psychobiology of attachment. This led to a natural desire to promulgate the need for early intervention of personality disorders.
In addition to his private practice, he teaches and supervises first-year family medicine residents at Kaiser Permanente, Woodland Hills, and is a past-president of the Ventura County Chapter of California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. He is an assistant professor at UCLA in the Family Medicine Department and is currently on faculty at Antioch University, Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, and California Lutheran University. He is currently engaged in infant brain development studies under Allan Schore, PhD, and is being mentored in infant mental health by Connie Lillas, PhD.
John W. Travis, MD, MPH, completed a residency in General Preventive Medicine at Johns Hopkins and subsequently founded the first wellness center in the US (Wellness Resource Center, Mill Valley, CA, 1975). He is the author of the Wellness Inventory, the Wellness Workbook, and three other books on wellness.
Since the homebirth (under water) of a curly redhead named Siena in 1993, he and his wife, Meryn Callander have focused on the wellness of infants and young children, creating TheWellspring Online and in 1999, co-founding, with 11 other people, the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children. They presently live in Meryn's home state of Victoria, Australia.