Staff
Deep appreciation to the small but mighty team that helps us connect and collaborate with our community.
Click on their picture to read more about each Staff member or scroll down the page.
Jovan Sage is the Compassion Community Lead for the Center for Compassionate Leadership, who is a heart-centered facilitator and teacher who guides people back to themselves. Jovan’s heart work bridges leadership development and advocacy while working within their communities around mind and body connection in their personal healing and development.
The threads of their practice are woven at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, sustainability, agriculture, and healing justice. Their expertise includes event planning, project management, and curricula development; meditation, mindfulness, and breathwork; trauma-informed yoga, movement, and meditation; death midwifery, grief and loss support.
Sage holds a B.A. in Communications Studies and Production from the University of Missouri.
Abri Holden is the director of Teacher Training. She thrives at the intersections of mindfulness, compassion and leadership development. She is passionate about supporting individuals and teams with tools and practices that enable human flourishing in service to a more connected world.
She brings over 15+ years of experience in designing, facilitating, coaching, managing and scaling global leadership development programs. Most recently, Abri worked at Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (born at Google), where she managed their teacher training program as well as designed and facilitated programs for Google, Stanford, LeanIn, United Way and Bhutan Ministry of Education and Gross National Happiness teams. Her favorite project while there was working with the Bhutan Ministry of Education where they rolled out a teacher training program to all educators in the nation (10K + teachers).
Abri started her career as Senior Consultant at Korn Ferry Hay Group, a global consulting firm as well as the Director of Linkage’s Women in Leadership Institute, a global conference focused on advancing women. She is also an ICF Certified Coach. Abri received a B.A. from Marietta College in Organizational Communication and Leadership Studies.
Jeffrey Lee Simons is the Community Content Director at the Center for Compassionate Leadership. He is responsible for the sourcing and delivery of relevant research, articles, and events that inform and inspire our global community of compassionate leaders.
Jeffrey is a skillful wordsmith and marketer who has been lucky enough to enjoy a career on the business side of things people do for fun, from selling wooden ship models and radio control cars in the 80s, to evangelizing Marvel Comics in the 90s, to getting people talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk in the 21st Century. Along the way, he’s co-written a book on cause-related marketing, helped clients like Discovery Channel find their audiences, MasterCard and Citibank conquer the worlds of consumer finance, and the United Nations and Save the Children make the world a better place. Jeffrey received his Bachelor of Arts from Georgetown University (Washington, DC).