Megan Cowan, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Programs
Megan Cowan received a BA in Comparative Health and Healing from the University of California,
Berkeley, and has been practicing mindfulness since 1996 and working with children in various
settings since 1999. She first brought these two passions together in 2001 when she expanded a
mindfulness program from 15 to over 100 children and created mindfulness curriculum for monthly
and summer programs. As a cofounder of Mindful Schools, Megan has taught mindfulness to over
2000 children and trained over 200 teachers. Megan also consults with families on how to
incorporate and apply mindfulness to address a variety of struggles that families encounter
and increase the happiness of households.
Her additional teaching experience includes teaching at a private school for mildly to severe
physically and developmentally disabled children, tutoring children and adults in reading,
and teaching English as a second language. In each of these contexts, she applied her knowledge
of mindfulness to enhance her effectiveness
Additionally, Megan has experience in the business world working as an office manager, bookkeeper
or accountant for several companies. She has run the office of several small companies, set up books
for start-ups, and is experienced in all areas of accounting for large companies.
Randy Fernando, Executive Director, Operations
Randima (Randy) Fernando was a product manager for several award-winning projects over 7 years at
NVIDIA Corporation (Forbes Magazine's 2007 Company of the Year), where he also served as an inaugural
member of the employee-run NVIDIA Foundation Board.
He has successfully managed large projects with over 100 people and has worked on all aspects of
product development, from technical aspects to public relations and marketing. He has published three
highly acclaimed books (two of which held the #1 spot on Barnes & Noble's "Graphics Programming" list
for most of 2003 and 2004), written several papers, and given numerous presentations on real-time
computer graphics.
Randy is from Sri Lanka, grew up in the Philippines, and attended Cornell University, where he received
his BS in Computer Science and MS in Computer Graphics. Randy was drawn to Mindful Schools because of
the program's compelling results and preventive nature, and he is excited to combine some of the best
practices from Silicon Valley with the sincere core values and intentions of the Mindful Schools team.
Laurie Grossman, Co-Founder and Director of Funding & Outreach
Laurie Grossman received a BA in Spanish from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent the
next 17 years in social service agencies running programs and fundraising for a variety of organizations
serving low-income adults and their children. Laurie joined Park Day School as their Capital Campaign
Coordinator in 1992 and launched the Community Outreach Program at that time. She created and found funding
for the community outreach coordinator position that she now holds. Because of Laurie’s leadership, Park Day
School now sponsors one of the largest public/private partnership programs in the country. Laurie's most
recent endeavor was launching Mindful Schools, a program to teach mindfulness in schools. Due to the success
of the program, Laurie has been asked to speak about the program at a wide variety of educational conferences
from coast to coast.
Richard Shankman, Co-Founder and Advisor
Richard Shankman holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and an MA degree in Philosophy and Religion.
He has twenty-five years experience working for high tech companies in engineering and operations roles,
including ten years experience managing engineering development teams. He has worked for large companies
including Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices and Cisco Systems, as well as startup companies S3, Inc.
and Eagle Mountain Systems, which he co-founded.
Richard has co-founded and helped organize and manage three other non-profit public charities.
Richard has practiced mindfulness for forty years, and for the past twenty years he has taught
mindfulness to people of all ages, including elementary school children, and prison and jail inmates,
and patients in drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers.
Kate Janke, Director of Training
Kate Janke started studying mindfulness in 2004 and began teaching it 2008 in venues around the Bay Area.
Her passion for bring the tools of mindfulness to youth started a year ago when she began developing
programs for young adults, primarily in Berkeley and San Francisco. Kate began working for Mindful Schools
as a Mindfulness Teacher and event coordinator in the fall of 2008. She has taught mindfulness to about
1000 children in Oakland and finds working within the schools deeply fulfilling and invigorating.
Kate is now coupling her mindfulness teaching with her past occupational experience, the course coordinator
for an internationally recognized online program, as the Director of Training. She has recently developed a
multi level mindfulness training program that will be launched in 2010. In addition, she is also the volunteer
coordinator and works closely with the scaling team to develop programs and trainings in new remote locations.