Laurie Grossman has over 40 years experience in working in non-profits and creating programs to help improve the lives of people living in underserved communities. Laurie’s passion, energy, creativity and sense of justice have enabled her to imagine innovative methods to address problems and she has helped schools look at how to serve their students in totally new ways. Laurie brings her warmth, enthusiasm, humor and insight into each project. In the last 30 years she has created two initiatives in schools impacting tens of thousands of children and adults. Both were looked at skeptically in the beginning, and both continue to thrive. Both serve low-income and affluent communities.
In 1992 Laurie was recruited by Park Day School, a North Oakland independent school, to raise money for the school. Having spent her career working with under served communities, she initially refused the position. However, once she witnessed the superb education offered to Park’s students, she made a bargain with the board. She would raise funds if they allowed her to share Park’s teaching and resources with Oakland’s low-income public schools. Initially 10% of her job, Laurie created a full-time Community Outreach position. She devised a myriad of public/private partnerships with public schools some of which included service learning, professional development, book drives, literacy programs, and anti-bullying campaigns. Students from both schools benefitted from the interactions and teachers from both schools learned from each other. In addition to working with public schools, Laurie offered several workshops for private schools to encourage them to join in the effort in support of public schools. Park Day School’s public/private partnership program is one of the largest in the country, and Tom Little, the director of the school was an important spokesperson for this important movement.
At Park Day School in 2007, as a method to address the turmoil faced by many students in public schools, Laurie cofounded The Community Partnership for Mindfulness in Education, now known as Mindful Schools. At launching, little did she know how well the program would serve all students and their teachers, or how much she would love teaching mindfulness to children, or that the program would help foster an international movement to bring mindfulness into schools. Mindful Schools has taught hundreds of thousands of teachers and students.
Laurie believes that mindfulness is vital for social justice and educational equity and left Mindful Schools at the end of 2011 in order to focus on bringing mindfulness into a wide variety of communities that serve low-income seniors, troubled students, schools & non-profits. During that time she worked with 5th graders and wrote and a kids’ book called Master of Mindfulness How To Be Your Own Superhero in Times of Stress. New Harbinger published it in 2016. Breath Friends Forever, a book Laurie wrote with Angelina Alvarez, (Co author of MOM) and 4th graders in East Oakland was released in September, 2017.
In 2014 Laurie was recruited by Inner Explorer to be their Director of Program Development and Outreach. With exuberance and delight, Laurie joined the IE team, almost incredulous that her colleagues figured out a way to spread mindfulness to all schools and to students and teachers simultaneously easily, effectively, sustainably and with scalability. As the Director of Social Justice and Educational Equity for Inner Explorer, she is as passionate as ever about spreading mindfulness as far and wide as possible.