Contributors

Meet our partners in bringing re-humanization to the areas we work:

We work with a range of world-class experts to provide education and training for our outreaches to people in need, from healers to meditation and yoga instructors to chefs, gardeners and nutritionists.

Education

Contemplative Theater with Rhodessa Jones

Rhodessa Jones is the Director of the award winning Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women / HIV Circle. Rhodessa has been widely recognized for her work using performance art as a method for personal and social transformation with incarcerated women and women with HIV/AIDS, including the Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth University, the Frank Rhodes Chair at Cornell University, an Artist-In-Residency at the University of Wisconsin, the Mayor’s Art Award in San Francisco, and in 2012 selected by the United States Department of State as an ARTS ENVOY! to South Africa.

In June 2001, her film collaboration We Just Telling Stories, a film profiling Ms. Jones and her work with the Medea Project in the San Francisco County jails, won Best Documentary at the San Francisco Black Film Festival.

Drama Triangle with Lynne Forrest

Lynne Forrest is an author and Spiritual Mentor. Lynne uses ancient principles in order to help her clients find their way back into right alignment with themselves, their partners and their life purpose.

Prayer with Rev Joanne Coleman

Reverend Joanne Coleman has been a staff Minister at Agape International Spiritual Center for four decades. Director of Agape Vision Core, expert in Aramaic Studies, artist and Shamanism, her unique gift lies in her ability to teach and speak honestly, joyously and intimately of her own spiritual experience and that of ancient Semitic cultures. She offers eloquent insight and wise humor that energize the imagination, satisfy soulish aspirations for fulfillment and help us taste the Awakened State right now.

Meditation with Margot Koch

Lay ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, Margot Koch has been meditating for nearly forty years. She has been a teacher for twenty-five, and worked with developmentally disabled learners for more than a dozen years. She taught art and public speaking in the schools, and has more recently facilitated speaking groups for adults, focusing on relational presence.

Yoga with Romy Phillips

Romy Phillips, MFA, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT, is an avid Ashtanga practitioner, meditation instructor and yoga therapist who began teaching yoga in 2001 in Los Angeles. She leads workshops, trainings and retreats in the US and Asia. Since 2012, Romy has led teacher trainings in Japan, China and Vietnam for YogaWorks, as well as Yoga Forma® workshops and intensives in the US and for First Ship Yoga School in Tokyo.

Conscious Eating with Sheira Kahn

Sheira Kahn, MFT, teaches people how to love themselves through transforming the inner critic and eating in peace. Her clients learn to embrace the body as the channel for the most humble and the most exalted parts of ourselves. She is co-author of a book on disordered eating for clinicians and offers retreats and workshops (now online).

Garden

Jose Camara

A shamanic landscaper, Jose Camara works with plants and forms that communicate. His landscapes and gardens invite nature in by using indigenous plants to draw in the elements, bugs and birds.

Ryan Potts

Ryan Potts manages food production at the 10 Mile Farm on the Mendocino Coast. He hopes to make the world a better place through the implementation of organic regenerative agricultural practices. He holds an environmental studies degree from UC Santa Barbara. He is trained in bio-intensive farm practices. He is an avid surfer and in his past has been a commercial salmon fisherman, working in Alaska and California.

Chefs

Janelle Weaver

Janelle is the co-owner and chef at the Bewildered Pig in Philo, CA. Her food is exquisite, utilizing what is most in season and every part of each vegetable or cut of meat. Janelle was our first ever partner restaurant chef for Love to Table, designing and helping us cook a meal for the homeless. She has since collaborated with us for numerous meals for homeless at the shelter as well as locals in Philo, imbuing her cooking technique and eye for beauty into the food we serve and elevating it to the next level.

Read more about our meals with Janelle here

Aref Elgaali

Aref has been an integral part of our nonprofit since the start of Love to Table, when we first hosted our sit down restaurant in his Sudanese restaurant in the tenderloin, Z Zoul. Aref was an immediate yes to collaborating, and over the years has supported our vision of a farm to table restaurant for those in need, offering his space and his heart to support our work. Aref cooks and serves authentic Sudanese food in his restaurant, and the restaurant overflows with love and connection with his family and regular customers who come for the food and love.

Read More about our Tenderloin meals with Aref here

Ed Brown

Ed is a Dharma heir who studied under Suzuki-Roshi and ran the kitchen at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. He is famous for his cookbooks, including The Tassajara Bread Book. From our start as Love to Table, Ed has infused his love of cooking into our meals, guiding us in using ingredients and combining flavors. Ed is also a renowned meditation teacher outside the kitchen, and thus cooking and baking with him become a form of meditation, as he shows his care for every ingredient and element of the meal.

Brown helped to found Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. He and founding chef Deborah Madison wrote The Greens Cookbook in 1987. He is the subject of the documentary, How to Cook Your Life.

“The acquisition of food for self and family can be a dehumanizing cycle of low quality to borderline edible items and “leftovers.” The food in Free Food meals offers something very different. Not only do they provide sustenance necessary for physical survival, but they give temporary reprieve from potential risks of harm and sickness, and the feeling of being cared for and human.”

Nicole, Staff at Partner Shelter