SEEDS Staff
SEEDS employs a highly-skilled team of full-time and part-time conflict transformation professionals.
Read more about our staff below and on our practitioner page!
Core Staff
AddieRose Mayer
(she/her)
Executive Director
AddieRose Mayer is the Executive Director of SEEDS. She is a dynamic, process-driven, strategic leader with a commitment to increasing social impact in the public, private and non-profit sectors. AddieRose had more than 15 years experience leading and facilitating teams to have brave communication across differences. As a practiced strategic thinker, AddieRose supports individuals, communities and institutions as they lean into discomfort to solve challenging social issues. As a leader and practitioner, AddieRose draws on principles of adult learning, leadership development, human-centered design, and social change. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and a Master’s in Public Health.
An East Coaster in humor and a West Coaster in style, AddieRose lived in New England until moving to the Bay Area in 2010. AddieRose has a passion for cooking and sharing food, spending time in the woods, and connecting with others. AddieRose is proud to be a community leader of the purpose driven community: Thrive East Bay.
Elyce Berrigan
(she/her)
Elyce Berrigan (she/her) is the interim Communications Coordinator for SEEDS. Since 2014, she has worked in non-profit communications, supporting organizations that are striving to make positive, lasting changes in the Bay Area. As a professional writer and editor, Elyce brings a strong knowledge of the written word and its power to inspire understanding, compassion, and empathy.
She is a graduate of Cal Poly Humboldt, where she earned a Major in English Literature and a Minor in Journalism. When she’s not writing or designing digital media, she can be found playing with her pug, solving BBC mysteries, or drinking coffee on outdoor patios.
karina norton
(they/them)
Senior Practitioner - Conflict Transformation for Movement Spaces
karina (they/them) is a mediator, healer, transformative justice (TJ) practitioner, and digital organizer that takes a collaborative, collectivist approach to movement, accountability, and education work. After graduating from Vassar College with concentrations in Africana Studies, Political Science, and Francophone Studies, they joined the Spring Up collective doing TJ work, which introduced them to Restorative Justice and the SEEDS family.
karina is a facilitator and coach with Spring Up, a coach and organizer with the Newburgh LGBTQ Center, and an advocate for Disabled, mad, and mentally ill students with Project LETS in addition to their capacity as Interim School Services Coordinator. They love tending to their plants, creating spaces that center joy and laughter, and believe that building intentional, accountable relationships and communities rooted in care and consent can transform our worlds.
Kelen Laine
she/her or they/them)
Senior School Services Practioner
Kelen Laine (she/her or they/them) has been exploring the healing of interdependence, with a focus on conflict transformation, trauma healing, and complex living systems, for the last 14 years. As a facilitator, trainer, coach, mediator, and companion, she is honored to support others to heal and evolve our relationships and the webs they exist within. She brings deep ecology, intergenerational somatic healing, harm repair, communication skills, grief work, and candid explorations of emotions, accountability, shame, consent, and soul to groups reaching for generative relationships and more holistic belonging.
Kelen is a graduate of Duke University. Her experience is extensively multi-cultural and includes restorative justice, public education, crisis response, de-escalation, conflict resolution, domestic violence and sexual assault counseling, youth care, human resources, and consulting. She has also worked as an organic veggie farmer, in the Alaska salmon industry, and in ecological regeneration.
She deeply values integrity, friendship, bodies, music, genuine soulful presence, houseplants, great lighting, the rawness of winter ocean storms, the subtleties in peoples' faces, exploring the world by bike, dancing from the inside out, and whatever liberates the inner creature in each of us.
Lauren Lofton
(they/them)
Special Projects Manager
This photo expresses the gender expansiveness of this staff member. Thank you to non-binary and transgender professionals who paved the way with gender diverse headshots.
Lauren Lofton (they/them) is the Special Projects Manager for SEEDS. They support business development, program projects in partnership with the leadership team, facilitate the organization's communications teams including the Board of Directors, staff members and volunteers and support funding development projects in support of a sustainable business model. Lauren's speciality areas include effective program implementation and impact, development of SEEDS' theory of action, and organization-wide program evaluation. Lauren joined the SEEDS community in 2017 as a mediator, facilitator, and trainer (conflict resolution, communication, diversity, equity, inclusion).
Lauren is a bi-racial Black attorney, a proud member of the LGBT+ community, and a born and raised San Franciscan. They enjoy spending time with loved ones, swimming, traveling and writing. They are a firm believer "the impossible" is possible. They believe our collective liberation is inevitable through the uprooting of systems of oppression and the planting of SEEDS of conflict transformation in support of a new and different world. They also believe in resting for resilience.
Maaika Marshall
(she/her)
Programs Coordinator
Maaika Marshall is a proud Bay Area native, raised in Richmond, CA, and an Alumn of Cal State East Bay with a major in Communications.
Maaika has worked in service of her community for almost 10 years, dedicated to providing resources and support to youth ages 13-21. Specifically, youth who were entering or exiting the Juvenile Justice system. As the Youth Justice Program Coordinator Maaika created the first pre-adjudication program available to West Contra Costa County School District students. She supported youth as they navigated the system and provided diversion-based programming to reduce the engagement and recidivism of West Contra Costa County youth.
Maaika has also provided mentorship for young women in partnership with the California Endowment and Sisterhood Rising to create and facilitate workshops, group discussions and retreats for young women across California to come together and collectively navigate identity and relationships.
Maaika brings a unique approach to the Program Coordinator role with proficiency in workshop and training development and a strong sense of organizational and program management to this supportive role at SEEDS.
Maaika is an aspiring food blogger and loves cooking just about anything. She also enjoys live music, show or open mic!
Sarah Dobson
(she/her)
Interim Organizational Effectiveness Services Manager
Trainer/ Facilitator
Sarah Dobson grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland and has been a violence prevention educator and conflict transformation practitioner in the US, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. She earned her M.A. in Gender and Peacebuilding from the UN mandated University for Peace and has a particular passion for preventing gender based violence and restorative responses to identity-based harm. She loves petting dogs, playing ultimate frisbee, and walking slowly in thick forests.
Dr. Sherry
Congrave Wilson
(she/her)
Sherry Congrave Wilson is the Director of School Services at SEEDS. Her main role is to support schools and youth serving organizations to be restorative in service of students, their families and their communities.
She started her career as a high school Social Studies teacher in San Diego and San Lorenzo, California. She then shifted her focus to nonprofit management while earning a Masters in Educational Equity and Social Justice at San Francisco State University. She eventually continued her graduate studies and earned a doctorate in Educational Equity and an administrative credential at Mills College. She has conducted domestic and global educational research in the U.S., China, Japan and Cameroon highlighting issues around equity, racial identity development and arts based education.
In her free time, Sherry enjoys collecting books, cooking, camping, art, traveling, roller skating and going on urban hikes with her miniature pinscher, Zala.
Talia Sharpp
(they/she)
Talia Monet Sharpp (pronouns: they/them and she/her) is a community educator. They graduated from Hampton University in 2018 with a degree in Political Science and completed post-baccalaureate studies in African and African American Studies and Politics at Princeton University. Before joining SEEDS, she served as a Program Coordinator for the LGBTQIA Resource Center at the University of California Davis. Talia’s vocation is creating critical loving, communal spaces of support, agitation, and mitigation of harm for people within their community through collective based leadership.
As a black queer and nonbinary person, Talia is passionate about supporting communities through the development of programming sensitive to the needs of our community with an aim to dismantle systems of oppression. Talia brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in crisis management, facilitation and training to their work as Community Programs Manager at SEEDS. In their free time, Talia enjoys cooking soul food, swimming, and dancing to afrobeats.
Toby Briggs
(She/her)
Interim Case Supervisor
Toby Briggs (she/her) is a facilitator, mediator, and educator. She seeks to create containers that allow people to catalyze their potential to resolve conflicts that have outsized benefits for their communities. She recently moved back to California from Wyoming.
Toby is formally trained as an interpreter of the natural environment working as an outdoor educator, researcher, and program manager in Yosemite National Park, the Boundary Water Canoe Area, Everglades, and Big Cypress National Preserve. She more recently worked to protect California rivers engaging volunteers in rafting, canoeing, and advocacy training programs and facilitating stakeholders to build water resilience into 2050.
Toby trained as a mediator with SEEDS in 2017. Since then she has grown her skills as a mediator and is excited to support SEEDS and its volunteers in this interim position.