Chris McKenna

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Biographical Information

"From 2009-2012, Chris McKenna was the Executive Director of the Mind Body Awareness Project, a nonprofit that pioneered the development of mindfulness-based interventions for at-risk adolescents. Chris oversaw a period of significant growth – both programmatically and financially – for the organization. During his tenure, MBA published the first formal research on the impact of mindfulness programming on youth in the U.S. juvenile probation system. In collaboration with Colorado State University, MBA also developed mindfulness training programs that met the specific needs of diverse youth populations, including Native American youth on the South Dakota’s Flathead Reservation, and military youth with parents on combat deployment. Chris has spent over a decade working with diverse communities suffering from high incidents of trauma, including five years with an organization launched out of Amnesty International that provided legal and psychosocial services to victims of torture and war crimes from over 20 countries. He has a eighteen-year history with mindfulness meditation and has taught mindfulness practices to refugees with post-traumatic stress disorder and other severe mental health conditions. He is on the Curriculum Advisory Committee of Dalai Lama Fellows and the Advisory Councils of the Mindful Community (UK) and Honoring the Path of the Warrior – a project which teaches mindfulness to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He holds a degree in Religion & Asian Studies from Columbia University. "

Affiliations

• Program Director, Mindful Schools