YES! faculty bios  

Jenna Granger graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2008 with a B.S. in Anthropology. Since then she has been focusing on becoming a YES! teacher and learning all she can from the students she teaches.  She has taught YES! in high schools in Toronto and Newark, NJ and is beginning a program in the middle school she attended in Tahoe City, California.

Julee Lee has a B.A. in Psychology and Art from the University of Nevada, Reno. She's worked with autistic children for almost four years before becoming a YES! teacher. After Hurricane Katrina, she became a Breath Water Sound for Trauma Relief teacher in New Orleans in 2006 and 2007 . She has recently taught YES! in Toronto, ON and California High Schools.

Rekha Kodialbail, a Systems Engineer by profession, with over a decade of experience in the IT Industry. She is currently a trained yoga, meditation and YES! instructor with IAHV.  Rekha teaches regularly in her home city of Milpitas, CA. She also serves as the National Coordinator for IAHV YES! programs across the United States. She is often invited to teach workshops at local universities like San Jose State for faculty, staff and students & at various San Francisco Bay Area landmark corporations.

Rohit Gupta is a registered Civil Engineer with the state of California. He holds an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Cornell and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from USC and is a partner in a boutique real estate investment group, specializing in student housing. Rohit currently coordinates and teaches IAHV Youth programs in the San Francisco Bay Area including UC-Berkeley and San Jose State University.

Clarke Weatherspoon currently teaches History at the Urban School of San Francisco, an independent secondary school that focuses on art, technology and community service. Clarke holds degrees in History and Black Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also earned NCAA Water Polo Academic all-American honors in 1998. He also served as a head coach at the Santa Barbara Water Polo Foundation, Marin Water Polo Club and the Stanford Water Polo Foundation. Clarke teaches IAHV Youth Programs throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Matthew Scharpnick has been a teacher with IAHV since 2002.  He has taught hundreds of participants in a variety of settings from inner-city high schools and third-world slums, to University students and working professionals.  He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) for his undergraduate education.    Upon graduating from UCSC Matthew moved back to Orange County to help with his family’s vocational rehabilitation business.  While pursuing his MBA, he first worked in a nonprofit specializing in resources for residents of low income housing, and then became the Director of Marketing and Communications for THINK Together, one of the largest providers of after-school programs in the United States. 

Ryan Vega attended Purdue University where he majored in Communications in Advertising graduating in 2005 with a B.A.  He has been active in the International Association for Human Values (IAHV) since 2004 and teaching programs since 2006. In the summers of both 2006 and 2007 he began teaching Breath Water Sound (BWS) courses in New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina victims.  Currently Ryan has focused on teaching Youth Empowerment Seminars (YES) to youths of high school age throughout the New England area and in Toronto, Canada. 

Bill Herman was born in Chicago in 1952. In 1975 he received his BFA, teaching credentials, and later his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For over twenty years, Bill taught photography and art in various high schools and colleges around the United States. In 2001, inspired by working with youth, he began  the Youth Leadership Training Program (YLTP) in North America with IAHV. Since then, Bill has initiated and taught YLTP residential training and community development fieldwork programs in India, the United States, Mexico, Belize, and Haiti.  In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bill and a team of teachers went to New Orleans and offered trauma and stress relief programs and YLTP. He recently began a collaboration of IAHV and Friends of Petit Anse to host the ongoing Haiti YLTP Reforestation project which  focuses on empowering Haitian youth to take responsibility for the deforestation problem in Haiti by planting trees. Inspiring and training young people to teach Youth Empowerment Seminars (YES!) in the curriculums of High Schools of North America is his most recent passion.  

Dr. Hiteshini Jugessur  has a Ph.D. in Surgical Research from McGill University, Montreal. Upon completion of her Ph.D. she went to Pakistan on a joint internship program between CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) and CESAF (Centre d'Excellence pour la Santé des Femmes), a Canadian non-governmental organisation (NGO). There, her research involved studies on the accessibility to healthcare of Pakistani women living in the inner-city slums. In 1999, Hiteshini joined the South Asian Women's Community Centre, a Montreal-based NGO dedicated to serving new immigrants and refugees from South Asia and helping women in difficulty. In 2001, Hiteshini became a full-time teacher and volunteer with IAHV and has since been travelling across Canada teaching the programs to youth and adults and initiating development projects.

Zaccai Free utilizes his creative talents as a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and musician to connect communities around the globe. Zaccai has authored numerous magazine articles, runs the Thoughts Magazine blog and is the author of “Mbutu's Mangos”. As the Vice President of Solar Publishing, he is a pioneer in the field of eco-education. Zaccai taught history, media-awareness and English in several Washington, DC private schools. He currently co-hosts talk show, The Verge, serves as a board member and Omni-Media Director for One Common Unity, Inc, and is a member of Pacifica’s WPFW 89.3 FM Listener Station Board, and Pacifica’s National Board. Zaccai is a Youth Empowerment Seminar (YES) teacher for IAHV. He has taught YES! and Youth Leadership Training Programs in  Belize, Canada, Haiti and inner cities of USA for the past six years. Zaccai appeared on BET’s “Meet the Faith” speaking on behalf of green education and holistic lifestyles for African Americans. He was also a guest on several television news shows featuring his book, “Mbutu’s Mangos”. Zaccai is currently producing a documentary based on the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Emily Lifton graduated in 1984 from Sierra Nevada College in Psychology and Body Therapy. She worked as a ski instructor, massage therapist, and yoga teacher at Lake Tahoe, CA. interspersed with extended periods of world travel.   While raising her daughter Tika, Emily has taught  IAHV youth courses, ART Excel and YES!  Along with Tika and her husband Bill Herman she has participated in YLTP community service programs in Belize, New Orleans, and Haiti. Since moving to Chicago in 2003, Emily has taught youth in elementary and high schools in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. 

Marisol Mendez is currently a high school English teacher in Houston, Texas, working with ESL and at-risk students. She has taught all levels, ranging from day-care to college graduate students for the past 7 years. While a student at the University of Houston, she happily discovered the YES! workshop and its parent organization, and was so swept away by its sincerity to make the whole world smile, she immediately began volunteering for a happier, healthier youth. She has taught the YES! program in Houston and surrounding areas and more recently for the Orange County, California, Department of Probation for young people.

Annelies Richmond is an international teacher and teacher trainer of stress management, yoga, leadership and human values programs for IAHV. Before teaching Ms. Richmond danced professionally for 15 years, spending the last half of her career with the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. She has been teaching in New York City for 8 years, and has taught specialized groups from psychiatrists to university students, public school teachers to lawyers, from patients with severe depression to public school suspendees.  She has been a guest speaker and teacher at Columbia University, Barnard College, Cornell University, City College of New York, Baruch College, Pratt University, at the United Nations, and the U.S. Department of Education.  She taught trauma relief courses for the general public for the year following 9 / 11 in New York City.  More recently, she organized an ART Excel for 180 4th grade students at Public School 161 in early 2005.  Since then, she and her team have had great success implementing the Youth Empowerment Seminar (YES!),in public high schools in New York City, which is now being offered as a high school credit elective in several schools, reducing student stress and violence.

Natalie Kaharick became the director of the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts for the International Association for Human Values (IAHV) at the age of 23. Natalie has since taught stress and trauma relief workshops to thousands of affected citizens throughout Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region. As an instructor of the Youth Leadership Training Program, Natalie has trained youth from some of America's most prestigious universities to teach specialized trauma relief workshops. She also has spoken at the United Nations' Youth Conference in 2006 and 2007. Natalie holds a Bachelor's Degree in Art History and is an alumna of the Semester-at-Sea program. She was previously employed by the Carnegie Museum of Art.  She now is the director of IAHV Youth Programs at their National Headquarters in Washington, DC.

Jeff Knepper is a YES teacher & State of California credentialed General Ed and Special Ed teacher. He first worked for his parents’ business teaching children gymnastics.  This carried over to working with special education youth and coaching the Special Olympics Gymnastics team and currently is a certificated schoolteacher, teaching Math classes for General Ed and Special Ed Students at Los Angeles High School.  He has a BS in Marketing and a Masters in Education.  He holds a seat on the School Based Management team for Los Angeles High, where the YES program has been uplifting LA’s inner city students for over 10 years.