Our Team
Becca Motola-Barnes
Co-Founder
Becca (she/her) is a queer Jewish 30-something living in San Francisco, where she works as a co-founder of the non-profit Hineinu Institute while studying for her MEd in Adult Learning and Global Change. She is recovering from a decade of working in People Operations in Silicon Valley, and is out to transform the way we value people’s time and labor in our culture. She expresses her creativity through cooking, sewing, and podcasting - check out her podcast InterTREKtional (a production of Federation and Fempire). She is an MIT alumna, and lives with her partner, her partner’s husband and their beautiful son.
Estee Solomon Gray
Co-Founder
Estee (she/her) is a portrait in “multi”: an insister on multiple-identities, multi-minding, multi-time , and multi-threaded lives. With 40+ years in Silicon Valley and a parallel career building out the Bay Area’s Jewish learning ecosystem under her, she’s out to upend the way we conceive of, conduct and design for the business of life. She is multilingual, intermarried (American & Israeli), mother of millennial sons and grand-dog, and enjoying the family’s transition to a multi-nest configuration. She has degrees from Yale and Stanford, co-wrote the cover article of the first issue of Fast Company magazine, and sees immense opportunity - as well as peril - in this era of (or after) Pandemic.
Todd Hoskins
Fellow
Todd Hoskins is both a practitioner and thought leader in the art and science of working together, with a focus on the dynamics of life that lead to coordinated movement in teams, and in ecosystems.
In 2009, Todd launched Canopy Gap, an organization design firm inspired by his passion for Nature, cooperation, collaboration, and navigating complexity. With wisdom guide Marti Spiegelman, Todd co-hosts the podcast and leadership program Leading from Being.
With graduate work in psychology, interest in network science and ecology, and training in awareness and somatic learning, Todd thrives when bridging disciplines and dimensions. Having worked in the corporate world, technology startups, and with a wide variety of entrepreneurs and nonprofits, he has helped launch 15 organizations and initiatives in the last twelve years, as well as worked with large organizations including Microsoft, Lenovo, Kaiser Permanente, NASA, Dell, and Northwestern University.
He is accustomed to a diverse set of spaces – from boardrooms to laboratories to forests – and he revels living splitting time between the tropical dry forest of Costa Rica and the wilderness of Northern Michigan. He, and his beloved partner Pia, have been practicing Argentine Tango for over a decade, one of the many ways Todd dances in relationship.
Sara Saltee
Fellow
Sara Saltee is a creativity coach/consultant who believes in the radical potential of human creativity. She founded the Saltee Academy for Complex Creators in 2019 to share original tools, frameworks, and courses that help creators of all kinds connect to their intricate wholeness and make their highest contributions to the healing and evolution of the world.
Sara's own complex creativity takes many forms - she's an artist, writer, educator, adult learning specialist, curriculum designer, and coach - but within this diversity of activity, her work centers on exploring questions about creativity, identity, gender, culture, and power. After starting her career as Adjunct Faculty and Student Advisor at Regis University and Front Range Community College, Sara joined a small consultancy and served as a culture change and strategic planning consultant to nonprofits and public agencies in the Puget Sound Region. Since 2011, she has designed and facilitated dynamic online train-the-trainer programs for a global community of grassroots leaders as the Director of Leadership and Learning Programs for Riane Eisler’s Center for Partnership Systems.
Dan Schifrin
Fellow
Are we not always in conversation – even when we are talking with ourselves?
— The Draschba
Dan is a curator of conversations, aspiring to help individuals and organizations tell the stories they didn’t know they knew. Through StoryForward, Dan has worked with museums, foundations, tech companies, schools and non-profits to create space for new and more expansive conversations.
As a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Architecture Department, he guided students to consider storytelling from the perspective of the objects and spaces they hope to build.
As an instructor with Stanford University’s School of Continuing Studies, he has taught courses on the art of dialogue, and business communication through the lens of improv.
As a museum professional, he tried to bridge the gap between surface and spirituality, serving as writer-in-residence at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, during which time he also co-curated the exhibition “Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art” with SFMoMA.
As a journalist, playwright, and writer of fiction, Dan hopes to connect people to each other (and themselves) in new and positive ways; his essays and fiction have appeared in publications like the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and McSweeney’s.
Inspired by what he has learned supporting artists who are also parents, Dan is writing a book about the overlap of creativity, care, and community-building.
Dan is also the author of the plays “Sweet and Sour” and “Marie Kondo and Martin Buber Walk into a Bar,” and the winner of the Wilner Award for Short Fiction from San Francisco State University, an Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award for Jewish fiction, and Exposition Review’s Flash Fiction Award.