Carin Winter — CEO is the founder of Mission Be, Mindful Education and has successfully brought mindfulness into 32 schools from Big Sur, California to Harlem, New York- scaling their impact to over 30,000 students in the first two years. She has been studying the work of mindfulness for over 20 years and is talented meditation teacher, gifted speaker and visionary. Carin holds a LMSW with a clinical background and 15 years of experience working with youth in schools, foster care and the juvenile justice system. Carin was also clinical therapist for many years and founded Healing Arts of the South Shore where she maintained a private counseling and healing practice for over a decade. She was the school social worker at Islip Public Schools from ten years. Carin founded Embrace Yoga Center in New York in 2007 and lead the company for seven years where she successfully directed a team to teach yoga, meditation, dance, yoga camp, children’s yoga & movement, pre-postnatal yoga, mommy and me classes and mindfulness. Carin was recently appointed as the co-chair of the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Social and Emotional Task Force lead by Scarlett Lewis of Sandy Hook. She is proud to be helping contribute to the team, a groups of powerful and gifted leaders, as they work together to encourage legislative policy to support social and emotional learning in schools nationally. In her free time Carin can be found meditating, watering her garden, riding her bike, hiking the mountains or practicing yoga
Osy Harrison, East Coast — Director of Community Outreach Osy Harrison spent the first part of her career in Financial Services, primarily focused on global operational risk sales, marketing, and project management for large corporate accounts. After her time in banking and corporate finance, Osy shifted her focus to the not-for-profit world. She worked part-time as the Business Manager for iRobinHood, Inc., an internet company whose mission is to create the world’s largest online giving community, and most recently, Osy focused her energy on volunteering at her daughters’ school in various leadership capacities. She is proud to join the team and bring Mission Be’s mission to New York City’s wonderful community of parents and children. She is particularly interested in having her children become more mindful so they can increase focus, concentration, and be more present, and also develop self-regulation skills to manage stress and cultivate an outer expression of empathy. In her free time, Osy enjoys biking, weight training, reading and spending time with her family and friends. Osy is married and lives with her husband and three children in New York City’s Upper West Side. She holds an M.B.A from Fordham Graduate School and a B.A. from the University of Miami.
Praveen Dayananda — CFO/COO, Praveen has studied mindfulness with Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village community and is a Certified Mindfulness Facilitator through University of California Los Angeles’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. He co-founded a residential mindfulness practice center in Austin, TX and has led mindfulness-based leadership programs at Dun & Bradstreet, National Wildlife Federation, Stanford University and a number of national and regional conferences. Prior to Mission Be Praveen was with the National Wildlife Federation’s Campus Ecology program and served on the Steering Committee of the Energy Action Coalition. Praveen holds an MA in Policy, Organization and Leadership Studies from Stanford University, and a BA in Economics from Pomona College.