Meet Our BIJAH Fellows
Camille Goodison
Camille first received the 5MT in June 2014 and was given the dharma name, Deep Awareness of the Heart. She practices with BIPOC Meditation Sangha (Garrison Institute), as well as Sweet Blossoming, Lotus in a Sea of Fire, and St. Marks Mindfulness sanghas. Her aspirations include further reconnecting with her Jamaican roots and sharing the dharma with people of the African diaspora.
LoAn Nguyen
LoAn is a parent-ally of a queer, nonbinary daughter with transgender experience. She serves the monastic community with LGBTQIA+ training in Vietnamese language to ensure friends who come to the monasteries for refuge are cared for with understanding and love in action. LoAn helped to co-found the Chrysanthemum Sangha and the QT Viet & Viet Allies Intergenerational Healing Sangha. She serves on the TNH Foundation Board, Co-chair in the JEDI Council. LoAn works in Queens for a nonprofit organization as Outreach & Training Coordinator to raise awareness and to create safer spaces for LGBTQIA+ youth and allies in schools. She has been a student of Thay since 2011 with the Lineage name of Ripening Seed of the Heart, and the name True Garden of Compassion as an OI Member. LoAn considers herself to be a support person for any community that needs her skillsets.
Kim Thai
Kim Thai (she/her) is a writer, mindfulness teacher, community organizer, and Emmy-award-winning storyteller. She is a certified yoga and meditation teacher and is currently a student in Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village Buddhist tradition. She is the founder of Joyful Liberation Collective, a grassroots community organization that provides space and ways to find liberation within the oppressive systems we live in. As a Queer Asian woman and proud kid of Vietnamese refugees, her personal mission is to help others reclaim their power and freedom in the world.
Maya Adams
Maya Adams is a creative interested in climate justice, adaptation and mitigation. She a passion for exploring the effects of climate change on human experiences, specifically on the topics of climate justice, ecological grief, and futures thinking. Her experience as a mixed race Ugandan-American informs her pieces which delve into the complexities of race, the environment, spirituality, climate anxiety, and pathways to equitable futures. Maya graduated from the University of Oxford with a MSc in Environmental Change and Management.
Lorena Gaibor
Lorena is on a healing sabbatical right now. In her previous life she served as a social work educator committed to supporting students in developing awareness around systemic oppression as well as personal growth and cultural humility in working with marginalized communities. She is grateful to be able to practice with the Garrison BIPOC Sangha and very much wants to support the sangha in developing beloved community connections that facilitate collective awakening.
Sung E Bai
Sung E Bai’s roots in social justice organizing began in the South Africa anti-apartheid movement on her college campus, followed by primarily organizing around immigrant and worker rights and against police violence, as well as advocating for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. After experiencing tremendous personal losses in 2004, she began her spiritual journey with martial arts and writings by Thich Nhat Hanh and has been an active member of the Garrison BIPOC Sangha since 2020. Certified to teach martial arts (adults and children) and mindfulness, Sung E offers mindfulness practices to young mothers of color, as well as new students of her martial arts school. Currently she is the Chief Operating Officer at a non-profit.
Grace Sanghyun Nam
Grace Sanghyun Nam was born and raised within a Corean immigrant family in suburban Detroit. She is a student of Thich Nhat Hahn whose personal story and lineage holds connective Asian history with her own family’s relationship to the American empire. Grace received the 5 MT in 2019 with the dharma name Compassionate Action of the Heart. She practices with the Garrison BIPOC sangha with visions for an in-person Brooklyn/NYC BIPOC sangha. Grace currently lives on the land of the Lenape people (Brooklyn). She is a parent, life partner, educator, and an undoing racism organizer, facilitator, circle holder. Grace enjoys watercolor painting, hiking, and making kimchi.
Tala Dowlatshahi
Tala is an international humanitarian and development specialist. She was born in Iran. She has received her five mindfulness trainings and is an active member of the Garrison BIPOC sangha.
Hawah Bunduka
Hawah works globally on issues of social justice, resilience and leadership in Africa, Europe and fragile and conflict-affected settings. She is a facilitator, adviser and practitioner who loves working with and for the women and young people that are the most marginalised in society. She teaches and studies dances from African and the African diaspora, is a joyful carnival arts practitioner and is mother of one. Although practising meditation sporadically for many years, the combination of the events of 2020 with her own experiences of grief and loss were a turning point. Hawah became aware of the need to integrate her personal and professional life and to live more consciously in body-mind-spirit. In 2022 she took her mindfulness trainings and contemplations and was given the dharma name Gentle Manifestation. Hawah’s aspiration is to practice mindfulness in ways which integrate her everyday life, work and passions. She supports herself, her sangha siblings and others – particularly women, young people and survivors – to better understand the relationship between their own healing/liberation and collective healing/liberation.
Tanya Chuang Conley
Tanya Chuang Conley is a sangha builder, spiritual mentor, mindfulness teacher, global strategist, and business partner. She was born in Saigon during the American-Vietnam War, escaped Vietnam by boat and spent a year in a Malaysian refugee camp with her family before immigrating to America. She has experienced the spiritual cost of the assimilation process in the West, trying to find a place that could truly be called home. It wasn’t until she discovered Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings late in life that changed everything for her. She is deeply grateful to have found a path that she finally can call home and is committed to helping and encouraging others, especially those with similar experiences, find their way home, too. Adding to her list of many hats, she is also a wife, doggie mama, silly aunt, photographer, diver, certified yoga teacher with trauma-informed specialties, DEIA specialist, and a lay disciple of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.
Jay Mimes
Jay is a healing justice practitioner, digital strategist, and culture worker based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Engaged Buddhism, afro-indigenous herbalism/hoodoo, Christianity, and interfaith organizing are all parts of Jay’s spiritual history and praxis. In addition to an extensive background in communications and digital strategy, she has organized and co-created multiple politicized spaces for the past decade, including a student walkout against police brutality in 2014; an Indivisible chapter in the wake of the 2016 election; and a transformative justice circle with fellow facilitators in Brooklyn in 2021. Over the last 4 years, Jay has stepped further into her power as a circle-keeper and educator with organizations such as the Restorative Justice Initiative, Rutgers University-Douglass College, and YES! World. Through the lens of their own lived experience as well as the application of interdisciplinary theories of race, gender, queerness, and media, her approaches have helped establish effective frameworks for emotional growth, intellectual curiosity, and spiritual sustainability among peers, clients, and comrades. Radical love, rage, hope, grief, and joy are all key ingredients in Jay’s vision for an abundant and liberated future with solidarity at its core.
Ashley Miller She/Her
Ashley has been a member of the Garrison, online, BIPOC Sangha since 2021, and has received her 5 mindfulness trainings. Ashley lives in the UK where she works in the National Health Service as a clinical psychologist and systemic family therapist, with children and young people. Ashley is influenced by social justice and liberation psychology frameworks, and especially by the ideas of engaged Buddhism, as taught by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Ashley believes in drawing on people’s resiliencies and strengths, and in the importance of social and community support.
Safiya Castel
I am a womanist and a Buddhist. I’m also new to identifying with either of these terms. I feel like a beginner in so many ways. I’m beginning anew in my attempt to take good care of myself and take good care of others. Caring for myself and caring for others sometimes feels like being at opposite ends of a seesaw, and I used to exist at the extremes. I ended up either neglecting myself or not seeing myself in others. I’m learning from the Buddha, the dharma, the sangha, and womanist wisdom that all life is interconnected. To the best of my ability, I want to practice with touching balance as I attempt to care for myself and care for others. I am so grateful for BIJaH and our beautiful sangha. Thank you for helping to ground and guide me.
Regina Scarbrough
Regina Scarbrough (she/her), is a higher education advocate, creative space holder, and compassion-based resilience facilitator committed to cultivating beloved community and healing-centered care. She is grateful to be a student and member of the BIJAH Fellowship program.