A collective investment in our wellbeing.
Caring for the humans of Human Services:
This Summit is about investing in our collective wellbeing. Working with our communities to maintain a vital safety net of services, taking on systemic issues, and supporting our communities through violence and occupation is critical and important work. It is also hard on the humans who do it. Investing in our wellbeing as a workforce is critical so that we can stay in that hard work - together. Chronic underinvestment in our sector makes it hard for individual organizations to invest in wellbeing so MACC created a Summit where we can collectively invest in our mutual wellness.
We know that time and resources are stretched thin. To be responsive to the current environment and pressures our members are facing we've adapted by moving to a fully virtual format, lowering our price, and shortening the event to two half-days to make it more safe and accessible for our network.
Also for the first time ever we're opening the Summit up to non-members and inviting our broader human services, nonprofit sector in to experience collective wellness !
Summit Day 1: Tuesday, April 14th (Virtual)
Wellness Moment: Guided Meditation with Jasmine Johnson from Black Zen
Keynote: Building Skills for Complexity: Navigating Conflict, Thinking Creatively, and Managing Strategic Boundaries with Melanie Ho Founder Strategic Imagination
Moment of Joy: Spoken Word Performance
Presentation: Supporting Yourself While You Support Others with Marlee James Founder and CEO Reviving Roots
Summit Day 2: Wednesday, April 15th (Virtual)
Wellness Moment: Guided Bowl Meditation with Toni Wagner
Keynote: Fueling the Fight to Center Equity And Wellbeing with Ashley Oolman Founder and Equity Strategist AlliedFolk
Moment of Joy: Musical Performance
Member Panel and Live Podcast: Strategies to Keep Our Teams, Organizations, and Sector Well in a Time of Chaos facilitated by Sook Jin Ong Co-Director of the ROOT Fund
WHY ATTEND
Experience Wellness
Take a break and get some dedicated time to prioritize yourself. Experience multiple moments of respite, warmth, connection, inspiration while actively practicing healing strategies.
Fill Your Toolbox
Fill your wellness toolbox with practical, everyday tools and strategies you as an individual can fold into your workday to support your wellbeing. Build your wellness muscles with physical, mindset, and framing techniques that will create wellness ripples outward to your colleagues, friends, family, and communities.
Connect & Learn
Hear from peers and experts who've brought wellness strategies and practices into their workplaces without overextending their finances or capacity. Learn how you can create a culture of well-being through practical and inspirational approaches.
THE SCHEDULE
Day 1: Tuesday, April 14th (Virtual)
9:30 am - 1:00 pm
This session will be centered around learning more about meditation and practicing together to create a meaningful moment of pause to begin your day. The session will include active participation with short guided meditation by Jasmine Johnson, Co-Founder of Black Zen.
Black Zen is focused on incorporating wellness in communities that currently bear the brunt of social, economic and political injustice, yet this movement is about all people finding more peace. In a society of increased social tensions that seek to divide, this is an effort to share the benefits of meditation to create a more thoughtful and just society. Black Zen is not another self-help initiative, but a social movement dedicated to changing the course of human tolerance and interaction.
How do we stay focused on mission-driven work when the ground keeps shifting beneath us? Right now, human services nonprofit professionals aren't just navigating typical workplace tensions—we're managing overlapping crises, impossible tradeoffs, and a level of uncertainty that makes it harder to see the path forward. Every decision carries higher stakes. Every conversation requires more care. And the old playbooks for driving change and protecting our capacity weren't built for conditions like these.
In this session Melanie Ho, Founder of Strategic Imagination will offer practical frameworks for building three essential skills. These skills include: understanding how to navigate common roadblocks to change among our stakeholders, recognizing the internal patterns that keep us reactive when we need to be strategic, and developing the strategies to stay grounded—and even find room for imagination—when everything feels urgent and the answers aren't clear. Participants will leave with a robust toolkit of resources and worksheets to apply these frameworks in their own contexts.
Learning objectives:
Who should come:
Working in caring organizations requires sustained emotional labor, decision-making under pressure, and constant availability. Marlee James, Founder and CEO of Reviving Roots will help us reframe wellness as a workforce skill rather than a personal add-on.
Using a liberation-focused lens, we explore how stress and responsibility live in the body and how human services workers can support their own nervous systems while modeling healthier, more sustainable organizational culture. The session includes light, guided practices we can all use immediately and share with our teams.
At MACC we believe that joy is a key part of wellbeing, and that art is a source of beauty and joy. With that in mind we have a tradition of incorporating short, artistic performances to create moments of joy and respite throughout our Summit. This session will feature a local artist, performing a spoken word piece for attendees.
Day 2: Wednesday, April 15th (Virtual)
This singing bowl meditation, led by Tonisha Wagner, from MACC member Avenues for Youth offers a gentle, restorative experience designed to calm the nervous system and support relaxation. Participants are guided through a meditative sound journey using resonant tones and vibrations that encourage presence, stress relief, and mental clarity. No prior meditation experience is required — just an openness to pause, breathe, and reset.
This session explores the deep connections between wellbeing, equity, and community within nonprofit human services, emphasizing our shared interdependence during uncertain and turbulent times. Participants will examine the forces—such as power, policy, and funding structures—that challenge equity- and wellbeing-centered work, and practice reframing common challenges through an equity and wellbeing lens.
Ashley Oolman, Founder and Equity Strategist at Allied Folk and former Chief Equity Strategist for the State of Minnesota, will guide us through reflection on individual and organizational roles, to support staff, managers, and leaders in strengthening their capacity to lead with care and purpose. Participants will leave with at least one practical strategy or guiding question to sustain equity and wellbeing efforts amid resistance, burnout, and shifting conditions.
Learning Objectives:
At MACC we believe that joy is a key part of wellbeing, and that art is a source of beauty and joy. With that in mind we have a tradition of incorporating short, artistic performances to create moments of joy and respite throughout our Summit. This session will feature a local musical artists sharing a moment of joy, beauty, and healing through music for attendees.
Join us for an exciting peer panel that will double as a LIVE recording our MACC podcast! Given the increased tension of ICE enforcement in Minnesota that has caused added stressors to marginalized communities served by the human services sector, it is important that the panel will be facilitated thoughtfully and with consideration to the issues most pressing to the attendees so they get the most out of it, and to leave feeling inspired, rejuvenated, and heard by their peer-leaders.
Facilitated by Sook Jin Ong Consultant, Changemaker, and Poet-Storyteller this session brings together MACC Network peers to explore how organizations are strengthening wellbeing, connection, and community even under pressure. This annual summit by MACC is well-loved, and the pivot to make this 2026 version fully online was one made out of necessity for safety. In line with that, Sook Jin will ensure the panel engaging, meaningful, and resonant.
Meet Your Panelists:
Close out the 2026 MACC Workforce Wellbeing Summit with expert facilitator Sook Jin Ong. This year has been chaotic, painful, and traumatic. AND our network and communtities have shown up over and over in a hundred incredible ways.
Sook Jin will leverage her incredible graphic recording skills and artistry to help us pull out key insights captured across both days and let us decompess together and make collective meaning as we wrap up our Summit time together.
Ashley (Storm) Oolman provides strategic direction to government agencies and nonprofits, advises executive leaders, and designs the integration of equity tools and strategies within core functions of the organizations she supports. In her work she leans into a multidisciplinary innovative approach, to remove barriers and solve challenges across the ecosystem. She is the Founder and Equity Strategist of Allied Folk and the former Chief Equity Strategist for the State of Minnesota.
With more than fifteen years leadership experience in advocacy, business innovation, and culture transformation, she understands how to navigate complex environments and provide actionable insights for reconciliation and visible forward motion. Ashley brings vibrant energy to everything she does, and an unwavering belief that we all have the ability to change the future.
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+ Learn more about Ashley
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Jasmine Johnson is the Co-Founder of Black Zen and has been an active meditator for over a decade. She received training from UCLA's Meditation and Research Center and has incorporated her training and personal meditation studies into Black Zen's editorials, former Weekly Wellness podcast and event programming.
To date she has worked with LA County EMT students, trained 600+ first year teachers in New York City schools, and has partnered with community centers, nonprofits and various organizations to conduct guided meditation sessions that help participants manage trauma, daily stress and anxiety.
Jasmine and her partner Stacey then set out to curate content, gather resources and build a wellness hub to openly share knowledge and experiences with others who have felt underrepresented in the wellness and meditation space. Black Zen is focused on incorporating wellness in communities that currently bear the brunt of social, economic and political injustice, yet this movement is about all people finding more peace. In a society of increased social tensions that seek to divide, this is an effort to share the benefits of meditation to create a more thoughtful and just society. Black Zen is not another self-help initiative, but a social movement dedicated to changing the course of human tolerance and interaction.
+ Learn more about Black Zen
Marlee James is a mental health therapist, certified trauma professional, and consultant with a focus on intergenerational trauma, social justice, and relational cultural work. During my time in grad school, I studied the impact of race and culture on mental health at the Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture (ISPRC) at Boston College.
She started Reviving Roots after working for a series of practices that I felt valued Black folks in words and not in action. So as soon as I was fully licensed, I filed for my LLC.
She is a person who strongly values openness and compassion. To my friends, I’ve always been the hippie, the awkward Black girl, the free spirit, and a proud introvert.
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Melanie Ho, Ph.D., is an independent keynote speaker, facilitator, and founder of Strategic Imagination LLC. Through her work with nonprofits, higher education, and mission-driven organizations, she guides audiences through messy challenges with clarity, candor, and curiosity, helping individuals and teams reconnect to what matters most and reimagine what's possible.
Across her career, Melanie has supported hundreds of organizational leaders on leadership, strategy, and organizational change. She previously served as Senior Vice President of Research at education consulting and technology firm EAB, where she led a team of over 100 researchers supporting more than 1,500 institutions worldwide. She also developed and currently teaches several professional development programs in partnership with The Chronicle of Higher Education, including Women Leading Change and the Leadership Transformation Collaborative.
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I am Sook Jin Ong (first name: Sook Jin; family name: Ong), and I come from the multicultural cosmopolitan city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I believe the complexity of my tanahair – homeland – in shaping my worldview. This foundation helps me grow in my own understanding of social justice issues locally and globally. I bring my curiosity and empathy in listening to the stories people carry with and within them. I love creating spaces for stories and people to blossom and thrive.
I have the privilege of using these gifts in the many roles I hold in life:
I have called Minnesota home since 2012. I am always a Malaysian at heart. I have a soft spot for the bumblebees who frequent my backyard. I play the fiddle at several traditional Irish music seisiún across the Twin Cities. I love poetry - both reading and writing them. I am obsessed with color-shifting, shimmering fountain pen inks. I am a food nerd at heart, especially stories of people and food. I grew up multilingual (English, Bahasa Melayu, and some Mandarin and Cantonese). I consider myself a city girl.
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Maisha Giles, PhD, LMFT, LICSW most recently worked as a consultant for the Build Initiative, focusing on advancing equity in government systems such as behavioral health, health, education, housing, and economics. Prior to her work at the Build Initiative, she served as the Vice President of Better Futures Minnesota, an organization that serves formerly incarcerated men and their children using whole family system approaches. Maisha also worked as the Behavioral Health Director at the Minnesota Department of Human Services. She holds a master’s degree in Community Psychology from Metropolitan State University, Graduate Certificates from St. Mary’s University in Marriage and Family Therapy and Addiction Studies, and a PhD from Hamline University in Management and Public Service, with a research focus in equity and leadership. Maisha is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker.
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Clara Haycraft joined Asian Women United of Minnesota as Executive Director in September of 2025, a domestic violence nonprofit working to end domestic violence by promoting safe and healthy relationships within the Asian Pacific Islander community, and beyond. Clara brings more than 17 years of public sector experience, guiding teams to achieve results by combining people-centered leadership, clear strategic vision, strong fiscal oversight, and a passion for building community engagement.
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As President and CEO of The Family Partnership, Emily Larson is responsible for fulfilling TFP’s mission and vision while also providing strategic oversight of its administrative, financial, and programmatic operations.
Emily is a seasoned and trusted executive leader with clear values and tenacious dedication to families and community. Emily has two decades of experience setting long-term vision, building high-impact teams, and establishing actionable steps to make meaningful change.
Most recently, Emily served as mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, where she managed complex budgets, fundraised millions of dollars for city improvements, and built deep relationships with stakeholders to coalesce around shared goals. Emily was also a social worker for 12 years, where she partnered with families who had low or no income, who were experiencing housing instability, and who were navigating mental and chemical health issues.
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