The Director of the Center for Council Practice is Jared Seide.

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We are honored to celebrate the legacy of our Elders Circle:

Jack Zimmerman

Gigi Coyle

Marlow Hotchkiss

Leslie Roberts

Leon Berg

Lola Rae Long

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The following is a list of all CCP-Affiliated Council Trainers:
(click on their name to read more about them, below):

Doug Adrianson
Doug Adrianson believes that better communication is a key to improving any relationship, and that the "listening circle" practice called Council is an excellent tool for this.

A leader of numerous Council Training programs for The Ojai Foundation’s Center for Council Training over the past decade, he also has facilitated weekly council circles with students for one or more years at five separate schools in Southern California.

He has helped to guide rites-of-passage programs for hundreds of California teenagers and adults and is a member of The Ojai Foundation’s Board of Directors and its Youth Program Leadership Circle. He has been an active member of several men’s circles and a couples’ circle.

A lifelong writer and editor who loves the power and mystery of language, Doug holds a Bachelor of Science in Journalism degree from Northwestern University and brings to his Council work the experience of 25 years in daily newspaper editing, including 12 years with the Miami Herald and nine with the Los Angeles Times.

His ongoing education also has included a vision fast and other programs with the School of Lost Borders, an initiation weekend with the ManKind Project, a vision fast with Animas Valley Institute, and a variety of workshops at the Esalen Institute and The Ojai Foundation.

He is an avid musician, hiker, ropes course facilitator, adventure diner, and tree house builder. He lives in Ojai, California.
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Camille Ameen

Camille began facilitating Council in 1991. She’s had the pleasure of working with kindergarteners through Master’s Degree candidates, has mentored numerous LAUSD teachers and council interns, worked in private and public schools, and recently introduced council to the Santa Monica YWCA. Camille has contributed many curriculum ideas to CIS, including for English Language Learners, and a paper on Council for special needs youth. In 1996, she co-founded Inside Out Community Arts - a nationally award-winning, theatre-based program that builds communication, socialization and problem resolution skills and fosters understanding between diverse youth. She designed/oversaw curriculum development and evaluation, co-wrote IO’s Artist Leader Manual and continues training artists. She’s been honored to work with thousands of youth. Camille has combined her love of theatre and Council into a curriculum which culminates in performance art for continuation high school students with The HeArt Project. She has presented in-services for numerous non-profits on team building, arts and literacy training, and social/emotional learning. From 1987-1996, she taught with Imagination Workshop serving psychiatric patients, homeless families, homeless/addicted veterans in recovery and forensic clients with mental illness. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College in Theatre Arts, she’s appeared in over 90 plays, including Broadway, and numerous TV shows and films. She holds a Professional Designation in Arts Education from LA County Arts Commission.

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Lori Austein
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Sheila Bloch
Sheila Bloch has been leading Council trainings through The Ojai Foundation for more than ten years. 

Her first introduction to Council began with an internship at Crossroads School over twenty years ago while she was working on a degree in Psychology at Antioch University.  It wasn't long before she was "hooked" on the process of Council, and luckily landed a full-time job teaching Council at Crossroads. During her twenty year teaching career at Crossroads, she has had the privilege of leading Councils with children grades six through twelve, and for the past seven years, Sheila held the position as Chair of the Council Department.

Over the years, Sheila has also led Councils in public schools in the Los Angeles area including Palms Middle School and Morningside High School.  A devoted Yoga teacher with thirty five years of experience, Sheila has blended the spirit of the two philosophies; Council and Yoga, into her work as a Council facilitator and as a Council trainer.

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Andrea Brown
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Monica Chinlund
Monica currently serves as Director of Program Development of the Ojai Foundation's Council in Schools (CIS) Program and is the Program Advisor for Council Practitioners Center (CPC) established in 2006 in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Office of Curriculum, Instruction, and School Support (OCISS).  She holds a Masters degree from California State University, LA in School-Based Family Counseling and is a credentialed school counselor with an authorization in Child Welfare and Attendance in the State of California.   She has served as a Pupil Services and Attendance Counselor at several schools in the LAUSD.

Monica has worked for The Ojai Foundation since 1995, facilitating council in public and private school classrooms, providing mentoring for teachers and counselors, and coordinating numerous school council programs in Los Angeles.  She has been a certified TOF Council Trainer since 1999.  She co-authored "The Council Facilitator's Guidebook for Eighth Grade," and has made numerous contributions to council lesson plans and articles on the CIS website cis.ojaifoundation.org.  

Gigi Coyle
Virginia "Gigi" Coyle, Council Trainer, wilderness rites-of-passage guide, community and organizational consultant/facilitator. She is a co-author of The Box; Remembering the Gift and The Way of Council. Gigi helped create, direct and oversee The Ojai Foundation, where she still teaches and serves as an advisor today. With a Masters degree in international relations, she has worked extensively in the area of citizen diplomacy and women’s empowerment, traveling to 37 countries in the past 40 years. She recently completed a year-long intergenerational pilgrimage of service, Beyond Boundaries, and continues to mentor young people in community leadership. Currently, she is focused with co-leader Marlow Hotchkiss, on seeding Council in other countries and has recently helped to initiate a European Council Network. Her interests and skills include numerous healing modalities, permaculture, and interspecies communication. She is co-founder of four social-profit organizations and has served on the Board or as an advisor to many others.

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Viviane Ephraimson-Abt
Viviane Ephraimson-Abt, Ms Ed., is the Assistant Director for the culturally and globally diverse residential community of Apartment Life at Colorado State University.  For the past 20 years she has been an interculturalist and trainer at several universities, in K-12 schools, and with non-profit organizations. Her intercultural experiences include being a first generation American from a multi-national, multi-lingual and multi-religious family and living in diverse communities in the USA and abroad.  She also facilitates mindfulness based practices for groups and individuals. 

Viviane has been leading Council for the past 10 years.  She became a Council trainer in 2005 and is the Co-Director of the Council in Colorado with John McCluskey.  She enjoys experiencing how the practice of Council supports healthy relationships and transformative shifts in community, educational, professional, and family settings. 

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Jeannie Gunter

Jeannie Gunter, MA has been a facilitator of personal and professional growth programs for over twenty years. She has worked both nationally and internationally as a wilderness guide, organizational consultant, facilitator, and trainer. She is a vision quest guide trained by Steven Foster and Meredith Little at the School of Lost Borders and began guiding rites of passage ceremonies in 1999. She is a certified Council Trainer and facilitator through The Ojai Foundation where she worked on staff as Program Director, Youth Program Coordinator and Ropes Course Director and lived in community for several years. She has guided Council over the last ten years with youth, teachers, corporations, in community, with couples and women’s groups. She is currently the President and Founding Director of Transformative Training, a company that provides training in leadership, communication skills, conflict management and team development for organizations seeking to deepen their interpersonal skills and leadership capacity.

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Galit Hanien
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Kelly Kagan Law
Kelly Kagan Law, Ph.D. is a licensed Marriage and Family therapist and educator who works directly with youth in mental health and educational organizations. Her experience serving both the private and public sectors with at-risk and affluent youth gives her a unique perspective, which is valuable in understanding the needs of diverse communities. 

Kelly first experienced council and the Ojai foundation as a student at Crossroads School. She returned to her alma mater and became a council facilitator for several years in the Mysteries program. For the past decade Kelly served as a member of the Ojai Foundation Board of Directors, lead youth rites of passage trips and trained hundreds of teachers in the council process. She continues to lead councils for teenagers as well as national and international council trainings for schools, social service and government agencies.

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Kate Lipkis
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Bonnie Mennell
 Bonnie’s work as an educator for the last 40 years has centered round the creating of inviting, vital, collaborative, inclusive “containers” for life expanding, self-directed, experiential learning in partnership/community. As a faculty member at the SIT Graduate Institute (since 1974, currently as an adjunct), she has woven Way of Council into faculty and department meetings, planning retreats, and the Community Building processes for graduate students as well as offered a credited Council I course for students and community participants.

Her consulting work in education, group dynamics and team/community building has allowed her to offer Way of Council as both explicit and implicit parts of the teacher training, curriculum development and team building work she does in educational settings (both private and public), non-profit organizations and community groups around the US and overseas. Council practice finds fertile ground whether the setting is a language classroom in the US or abroad, a department meeting, a small non-profit’s planning retreat, a teacher-training workshop, an intentional group meeting, a coaching/mentoring session or a weekend training in The Way of Council. Awareness of self, of others, of community, of the communication and group dynamics patterns that contribute to and detract from the type of work relations/human relations we all long for--blossom in--are fundamental to the way she works.

She has been offering TOF/CCT Way of Council I & II trainings on the east coast, many in the small Vermont town of Putney, since 1996 with her partner Paul LeVasseur.  Her work is informed by her many years of language teaching, teacher training, teacher supervision and program management in diverse educational contexts around the world, her studies of and uses of Psychosynthesis in education, Vipassana meditation, Dialogue practice, Council practice, her work as a visual artist and the stewardship with her partner Paul of a beautiful 10 acres of hilltop land in Vermont. A weekly Council Walk has been a central and life-giving part of their 32-year relationship..
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John McCluskey
  John W. McCluskey, Assistant Principal at the Jefferson County Open School in Lakewood, Colorado, is also Co-Director of the Colorado Center for Council Training and a faculty member with the PassageWorks Institute. He began working with Council in 1991 and has been a teacher and school administrator in public option schools since 1989. 

John helped to found the Center for Council Training in Colorado. He has facilitated Council for youth, educators, couples, men and civic groups. John lives in Longmont, Colorado with his wife, Emily, and their children, Reilly and Grace.

Tom Nolan
Tom Nolan is an educator, musician, and actor.  He has been teaching council at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California for the past 25 years.  He has been the dean of students there for 15 years. Tom has taught adults how to facilitate council for ten years at the Ojai Foundation, and has helped seed council programs at Palms Middle School, Malibu High School, and Sonoma Academy in California. He studied and trained at Harvard College and Cornell University.  Tom is front man for the 9 piece Tom Nolan Band.   He is married and has two grown children. 

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Joe Provisor
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Lise Ransdell
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Jane Raphael
Jane Raphael discovered early in her career the power of having children sit in a circle to communicate with each other. A thirty-year veteran teacher in the L.A. Unified School District, she began using council ten years ago to help build an inclusive classroom community and deepen children’s connection to the curriculum. Jane is committed to educating the whole child, and has used Council as a vehicle for developing students’ social, emotional, physical and academic potential. Jane has received many awards and honors recognizing her outstanding work as a teacher leader, including the Los Angeles Reading Association’s “Outstanding Literacy Teacher” award in 1993. She has served as a UCLA Writing Project fellow, LAEP demonstration teacher, LAUSD mentor teacher, ASCD network facilitator, and Ojai Foundation Council trainer. Jane has designed curriculum for the Council in Schools website for our youngest learners, parents, and teachers.
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Deborah Raoult
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Lori Richards
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Jodi Rosner
Jodi Rosner first experienced council when her daughters were attending Open Charter, a public elementary school in Los Angeles.  Teachers and trained facilitators were leading talking circles in the classrooms, and the staff was sitting in circle with each other.  Jodi was moved by the the way in which council practice enabled her to understand and appreciate both others and herself in a new way.  She observed that through non-judgmental listening and the sharing of personal experiences, participants develop respect for each other's perspectives and come to recognize the value of their own stories.  Inspired, she began learning to facilitate councils through workshops at The Ojai Foundation.  After years of facilitating circles with children, adults and non-profits, she became a certified council trainer. 

Jodi's education includes an A.B. in Political Science (magna cum laude) from Brown University and a law degree with distinction from Stanford University.  In addition to being a lawyer, council trainer and facilitator, Jodi teaches yoga and practices capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that is also a circle practice.   

She currently helps to open dialogue in the workplace and creates ceremonies in private settings through her personal endeavor, LA Circleworks (www.lacircleworks.com).  Jodi believes passionately that council has the power to not only create community and connection, but that it helps us develop confidence and compassion for others.   

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Jared Seide
Jared was introduced to The Ojai Foundation by his 8-year-old daughter, Sophie, in 1999.  Sophie attended the Open Charter Magnet School where Jared was President of Open’s Governing Board and was honored to be part of initiating the first campus-wide elementary school council program; it was transformative and, for Jared, there was no turning back.  Jared worked with Jack Zimmerman to introduce council at Walter Reed Middle School, where it lived for 3-years, and then went on to work with the Council Practitioners Center (now CIS) at Paul Revere, Daniel Webster, Amelia Earhart, Malibu, Palisades, Crenshaw, Brentwood and Shalhevet Schools.  
  

Jared coordinated the “Los Angeles Council Collaborative Initiative” and has led Rite of Passage retreats for a host of middle and high school students. He has designed, piloted and coordinated council programs in Assisted Living facilities, prisons and a variety of non-profit organizations, including the 9-month  Co-Mentoring Project , which initiated a council-based community of emancipated foster youth and congregants from Kehillat Israel synagogue.  In addition to being an active Council Trainer, Jared has played a leadership role in TOF’s  re-shaping of the Center for Council Practice  and serves as Director of CCP.

Jared’s educational background includes a BA with high honors from Brown University and professional studies in the performing arts in London, New York and Los Angeles. He has had successful careers in the Entertainment Industry and the Corporate World and is in recovery from both.  He is a member of the Zen Center of Los Angeles.  Jared feels blessed to have the opportunity to ally with so many disparate carriers of this dynamic, healing work of “listening from the heart,” to co-vision ways to create responsive and sustainable structures for reactivating these powerful tools in the world and to share the path with so many courageous teachers, generous collaborators and enlightened goofballs…

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Bonnie Tamblyn
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Raymond Tucker
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Julia Mason Wasson
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Ronit Weintraub
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Natalie White
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Jack Zimmerman
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