The Social Change Sanctuary is an inter-spiritual collective created to support those grappling with humanitarian grief.
In a time when so many are overwhelmed by the weight of social injustice, environmental devastation, and global crises, we provide a sacred space for healing, reflection, and transformative action.
About Us
Our collective is made up of spiritual leaders, compassionate chaplains, human rights activists, social entrepreneurs, psychologists, and spiritual and religious leaders. Together, we embrace a wide range of traditions and beliefs, united by a shared commitment to nurturing the human spirit and fostering meaningful change.
Alison Avigayil Ramer
Alison Avigayil Ramer (she/her) is the descendant of Jewish, Anglican and Quaker missionaries, mercenaries, mystics and misfits. On her mother’s side she is a 15th generation settler in Turtle Island. Her father’s family were Jewish refugees to Turtle Island in the early 1900s. She was born on Munsee Lenape land (New York City), grew up in Duwamish territory (Seattle) and studied Politics and Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College on Nonotuck land (South Hadley). She spent 15 years living and working in the Levant (Palestine & Israel) and Iraq, before returning to the west coast of Turtle Island (North America), where she lives now.
She has had her own long journey and transformative experience with militarism, nationalism, Zionism that informs her way of being in the world. This includes twenty years of work on demilitarization and fifteen years working on human rights with local and international organizations including the Parents Circle Families Forum, Grassroots Al Quds, 7amleh, World Vision and Oxfam. She also has consulted on human rights issues to UN experts, diplomats and tech companies like Meta, Twitter, TikTok and Google. Further information about her work here.
Since 2011, when she experienced tremendous personal grief she has been an “apprentice of sorrow,” as Francis Weller calls it, and lived in the culture of perpetual mourning that is a part of Palestinian life under apartheid and occupation.
She has studied how to hold ritual spaces and was mentored by several rabbis and ritual leaders including Rabbi Diane Elliot, Rabbi Irwin Keller, Rabbi Eli Herb and Shomeret Shula Pesach through the Taproot Immersion Program. She is a current student of Reverend Sara Jolena Walcott, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Choctaw-Navajo/Chahta-Dineh Wisdom Keeper Patricia Anne Davis, Psychotherapist Francis Weller.
Angeline Thomas (she/her) is a hospital chaplain and nonprofit executive at an International Organization founded to serve widows. Between 2016-2020, Angeline lost 8 close family members, including both her parents and what would have been my second child 7 months apart. Following these losses, she took a sabbatical from my legal job, sold her house, and bought one-way tickets to Asia with her husband and four-year-old son. She learned that getting quiet and leaning into grief can bring about transformation in new and unexpected ways--for her, that was a big career change.
Out of her commitment to creating more compassionate, equitable, and empathetic systems of care for every grieving person, she joined Soaring Spirits International as the Associate Director of Programs in 2022, where she brings heart-centered legal, nonprofit, and grief support expertise to every aspect of program development and execution. Soaring Spirits provides peer-based resources, programs, and community for people after the death of a spouse or partner. Through walking myself and hundreds of others through the worst moments of their lives, she has come to believe deeply in the power of hope, resilience, and healing through community.
In her spare time, she also serve as a per diem hospital chaplain at Harborview Medical Center and has a private practice offering one-on-one spiritual coaching for individuals navigating seasons of discernment, life transitions, questions of vocation and calling, Dark Nights of the Soul, grief, and exploration of spirituality. Her approach is one of deep listening, non-judgement, and compassion, providing a safe container for asking your most tender questions, and space to allow your own deepest wisdom to emerge. When life hands you the unexpected and you're looking for a soul friend to accompany you to the other side of where you find yourself, give her a call.
Angeline Thomas
Amanda Nagai
Amanda Nagai (she/her) is a poet, artist, and ritualist who focuses on grief and advocating for collective, embodied grief work. She is the author of Walk Us Home (YG2D Publishing, 2024), a personal grief journey told through narrative poetry and art, an Ignite Talks speaker, repeated podcast guest, and performer and ritual-holder at events by the non-profit You’re Going to Die and some private festivals. She is a student of grief and has followed and learned from the work of many teachers – living and ancestral, including: Malidoma Patrice Somé, Sobonfu Somé, Martín Prechtel, Masanobu Fukuoka, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Báyò Akomolafe, Chairman Ron Goode, Hafiz, Rumi, the Ohlone land she lives on in the Bay Area, and the animistic practices of Shinto.
Amanda’s professional career has spanned research and analysis roles for the federal government, repeat tech startup founding in San Francisco, software engineering, nonprofit management, operations for festivals and spiritual organizations, and graphic art and design. Her life career has encompassed much close personal loss and several major health journeys. These challenges have taught her more about life and herself than she could ever have imagined, and she is grateful for the person she has become and continues to evolve into.
She believes that loss and grief can be modern initiations for human beings who have largely lost our indigenous technologies of ritual practices that foster ongoing and life-stage-marking growth of the individual and their community. She is passionate about advocating for what is possible within ourselves and inter-personally from true communal, embodied grief work.
Coby Leibman
Coby Leibman (he/they) is a somatic practictioner that has been working for over 25 years in somatic and spiritual communities creating healing spaces for individual and collective healing and planetary/structural change.
He studied Somatics at SEI, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and with many amazing teachers including Peter Levine(SE), Gabor Mate (drgabormate.com), Efu Nyaki (SE Trans-generational Trauma), Ariel Giarretto (SE), Joshua Sylvae (SE), Nick Walker (CIIS), Twig Wheeler (SE), Catherine Lemon (SE), Monique LeSarre (CIIS).
He also attended Bolad's Kitchen, an International school based in New Mexico with Martin Prechtel (Keres/Mayan Spiritual Leader) since 2009, a school focused on revitalization of living culture, ancestral crafts, stories, and ritual. Other long-term teachers and mentors include Malidoma Some (Dagara tribe 15 years), Sonbonfu Some (Grief Ritual, Dagara tribe 12 years), Keith and Shane Pashe (Dakota Tipi, 12 years).
I currently offer private sessions and group work in SE, spiritual coaching and SE integrative touch work. He also assist SE trainings and offer classes of his own and through organizations including Kinhood, and Landpaths.
Gabi (he/him) is the son and descendant of Christian Palestinians and Egyptians. His father was born in Jerusalem and became a refugee from his home at the age of 5 during the Nakba in 1948. His family would go on to settle in Bethlehem for three decades. His mother was born in Bethlehem and her ancestry dates back to those lands for as long as history has been recorded there. Gabi was born on Ramaytush Ohlone land (Menlo Park, CA “Silicon Valley”) and he’s spent most of his lived experience on these lands. It often amazes him how much can change in one generation. His life there has been in many ways a journey of what it means to belong and find home in a place that is ancestrally foreign.
In this place, he has been witness to and participated in the remarkable change that comes with record levels of financial prosperity that is disconnected from the people and place that created the conditions for that prosperity to begin with. He worked in the tech industry and recognized the impact the “attention economy” was having on colonizing our minds. He felt completely disconnected from what his body needed and burnt out.
Ever since, he’s been on a mission to cultivate healthy cultures and communities in which people and planet can prosper through the non-profit HAPPI (Helping Awesome People Prosper Intentionally). What he has learned is that it’s critical to create spaces where people can be themselves while belonging and contributing to something bigger than themselves - essentially feel at home. As we unite to alchemize the impact of settler-colonialism, his intention is to create the feeling of home in all the places, spaces and relations he belongs to.
Gabi Jubran
Hadar (she/her) is an Arab Jewish scholar, mystic and artist. She is the founder of Malchut, a spiritual skill building school teaching Jewish mysticism and direct experience of God. She cultivated her own curriculum on the cosmology of creation and teaches it through her training God Fellowship. Malchut is also home for her Jewish Mystical School that includes a library of her classes and a community platform for connection.
She is a 10th-generation Jerusalemite with lineage roots also in Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq and Iran. Hadar weaves the spiritual with the political through performance art, writing, music and ritual. Hadar consults and teaches on Judaism, multi-faith solidarity, spiritual and political activism and more. Her podcast, Hadar’s Web, features community conversations on spirituality, healing, justice, and art. Hadar coaches and mentors people 1:1 as well as leads and facilitates groups and community gatherings. She offers tarot reading on Mystic Mondays available to book through her website. She writes a monthly newsletter with spiritual teachings and current offerings.
Hadar Cohen
Mark (he/they) is a queer Irish American raised by the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in the Central Valley of California, Miwok Territory. He is a performing artist, environmental scientist, and facilitator working at the intersection of intention and identity.
During his degree in climate science at Cal Poly Humboldt, he organized grief spaces in an effort to help process the course content he and his classmates were receiving. Later, during Covid, he created and played out a show with Laura Murilljo Hart called “As The World Rises and Falls”, a clown piece and an apocalyptic anecdote; they went on to tour this piece, playing at eight different theaters over the years. Now he works at HAPPI (Helping Awesome People Prosper Intentionally) as Lead Program Manager, supporting the organization as they create facilitation frameworks, curriculum, and group spaces like the ones that Social Change Sanctuary offers.
In the Sanctuary, Mark provides tech support, website design, and occasionally facilitation. He is humbled to be included in this powerful project.
Mark Farrell
Morgan Bach, PsyD (she/her) is a therapist and organizer whose healing practice is grounded in peer and community models of care. She is a U.S. citizen of Danish and German descent. She follows a tradition of Lutheran faith leaders, organizers and artists who challenged their institutions and created community through contemplative practice, nature and the arts.
Morgan is particularly passionate about peer and community models of care, and has trained in conflict mediation, assault survivor advocacy, restorative justice, harm reduction and mindfulness meditation. Morgan is also trained in using Internal Family Systems and psychedelic-assisted therapy as both therapeutic modalities and spiritual practices.
Morgan was born in Taiwan and raised in Japan and India, which instilled a curiosity for identity and conflict transformation. Curiosity about our own and others’ experiences is foundational to her work, and she loves to hold spaces of collective curiosity and exploration. Morgan’s ongoing journey is to witness and honor the Divine within and between us.
Morgan majored in Race & Ethnic Studies at Whitman college with a focus on Middle East Studies. She studied Arabic for a semester in Jordan and taught English in a Palestinian refugee camp for one month in Southern Lebanon. She also spent nine months in the West Bank assisting a village under threat of demolition, operating a guest house and writing about Palestinian and Israeli resistance to the occupation. She has participated in interfaith organizing for collective liberation since 2012. She currently lives on Ohlone territory in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner and cat, Chico.
Morgan Bach
Rabbi Cat Zavis shapes Jewish rituals and services that connect the spiritual, personal, and political. A spiritual social justice activist, attorney, and visionary leader, she brings over 20 years of empathic, people-centered leadership and collaboration. With 25+ years as a sought-after facilitator and trainer in nonviolent communication, prophetic empathy, and conflict resolution, she helps challenge othering and build beloved communities. Currently the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun and co-editor of Tikkun magazine, she has written articles, shaped the magazine, and trained over 1,000 people in Prophetic Empathy and Revolutionary Love as Executive Director of the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
You can listen to Rabbi Cat’s rabbinic ordination talk on the role of Jews and spiritual people today here. To listen to additional teachings and writings by her, click here.
Ore Ganin-Pinto
Ore (formerly known as Wren) Ganin-Pinto (they/them) is an ordained Chaplain and Oreget Adamah (Earth Weaver). They currently serve as a spiritual care provider and death doula at Stanford Children’s Hospital and Hospice of Santa Cruz, and as musical prayer leader at both Kehilla Community Synagogue in Oakland and Temple Beth El in Aptos. They support grief and bereavement and end of life conversations. They are here especially for those who are working with religious wounding, on the LGBTQIA + spectrum and living on the margins in some way. They are here for those wrestling with tough and transformative questions about oppression and how it shapes the collective body. Ore draws from their understanding of Jewish embodied practice, the wisdom of the earth and deep play. Ore lives in community and are grateful for the redwoods, ocean and expansive possibilities of love in action. If you’d like to be in touch with Ore please contact them here.