Meet our Community Engagement Team
“Listening to community requires a community to listen.” -Sarwang Parikh
The community engagement strategy is a project close to our hearts and crucial to our fruitful growth. We specially designed this survey for our maha sangha far and wide. The heart of the community engagement project are our listening sessions. These sessions are designed to be more intimate opportunities to listen to our diverse community. Alongside our board and current staff, we recruited additional facilitators from various sanghas and lineages that also hold intersectional identities to help hold this work of listening deeply with great care. Read about our facilitators below.
Guangping Chu
Guangping Chu (they/them) plays many roles including learner, educator, caregiver, sibling, and facilitator. They facilitate meditation and somatics practice for Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), a Boston-based grassroots organization, and they are part of the Care Crew and facilitation team for Heartwood: A BIPOC Mindfulness Community. Their healing journey includes uprooting patriarchy and toxic masculinity, making reparations for intergenerational wealth, learning their ancestral language(s), and being silly, to name a few threads. Guangping is a student of Zen Buddhism in the Plum Village tradition, having received the Five Mindfulness Trainings through Kaira Jewel Lingo and Marisela Gomez.
B.Anderson
B. Anderson (they/them) is a somatic healing & music therapy practitioner, earth steward, meditation teacher, Transformative Justice consultant and community organizer. They call up the traditions, legacies and medicine of their southern Black American, Jamaican Maroon, Balanta, Fulani and Choctaw ancestry as the foundation of their healing arts and organizing praxis. As a founding member of Harriet’s Apothecary, envisioned and led by Adaku Utah and the spirit and teachings of Harriet Tubman, B. was able to further develop their healing justice practice and ritual work under the indirect tutelage and care of elders like Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. Co-leading and facilitating retreats for partners across the organizing community in various sectors and holding collective practice during healing villages and safer spaces centering qtpoc and black and brown allies.
Dorothy Imagire
Dorothy Imagire is a retired professor of photography and installation artist, worked at the Insight Meditation Society, Vipassana Hawai’i, and currently assists a meditation teacher. Dorothy completed Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practicioner’s Program in 2018, was part of CDL 7 that was canceled due to Covid, is a member of the Puna Hongwanji, and co-facilitates both the Asian American Book Group and the Asian Am Deep Refuge. She identifies as a third generation Japanese American hybridized with Iranian.
Renata Moreira
Renata Moreira brings 20 years of experience as a movement leader; having served as executive, communications, and policy director for various LGBTQI, Immigrant, Reproductive and Healing Justice organizations across the U.S. She embodies a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to empowering people and transforming organizational culture. She is also a trauma-informed social impact consultant, clinical hypnotherapist, Reiki Master Teacher. As a social impact consultant, she weaves together transformational coaching, mindfulness, energy therapy, and indigenous wisdom from her birth lineage (Xucuru-Kariri Native Brazilian/Portuguese). Her heart is the happiest facilitating retreats, rituals, and story circles among changemakers for collective healing and (r) evolution. She has been a vipassana practitioner for 20 years and is a graduate of East Bay Meditation Center’s “Practice In Transformative Action” Program. She was born and raised in Brazil, Renata currently lives in Occupied Lisjan Ohlone territory with her beloved child Mayla and a familiar feline who adopted them.
Meet the Community Engagement Consultant
Celia Kutz
Celia Kutz (she/her) has been training and facilitating in the movement for social change for 15+ years. Her primary home during this time has been with Training for Change leading Training of Trainers and facilitating a wide range of movement groups in their organizational transformation. Rooted in organizing, ahimsa, and conflict that transforms, she has benefited from many teachers including those in the community of Global Somatics, Process Work Psychology, Sacred Vibes Apothecary and the Dharma. Her first formal encounter with the Dharma was in 2002. Currently she is rooting her practice in the teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya and is receiving guidance from teachers Vance Pryor, Dawn Scott, Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey and Kaira Jewel Lingo. She is thrilled to be in this support role at BPF because it helps her tend to this crucial moment in movement building in the U.S. in which the majority of organizers and activists she coaches are struggling on a spiritual level.