About us
About Us
While on tour with her book, Beautiful, Naomi came to realize that there was a pressing need to reach women and girls of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds to give them the tools to embrace their gender attributes and utilize those attributes to become positive role models and leaders within their families, communities, nations and throughout the world.
While sharing her observation of this challenge with other educational thought leaders, the development of a vehicle to bring this type of training to girls and women throughout the world began to emerge. Naomi founded HerWisdom, in collaboration with Dr. Robin Stern and Wende Jager-Hyman, to supply that solution through educational seminars, retreats, trainings, and community support.
Leadership team
Wende Jager-Hyman
Karla M. Jackson
Karla M. Jackson is a founder of Sine Qua Non: Allies in Healing, an Integrative Therapy Practice in New York City. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Women’s & Gender Studies Department and the Africana Studies Department at Rutgers, The State University.
Karla is a Public Speaking Coach, an Emotional Intelligence Coach, and a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainer. She has consulted for The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, The Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Coaching & Training Program, and Tara Mandala Buddhist Retreat Center. Karla is currently the President of the Board of the Woodhull Institute.
​Kim is an experienced executive and a veteran training facilitator with over 20 years’ experience. Her areas of emphasis have been developing and delivering courses in change management and behavior; customer service excellence; and diversity and inclusion. She is a certified Development Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) and Vital Smarts trainer. Kim has provided leadership, expertise and management for both Princeton and Rutgers Universities in New Jersey.
Kim E. Jackson
Advisory board
Robin Stern, PhD
Robin Stern, Ph.D., is the associate director for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and an associate research scientist at the Child Study Center at Yale University. She is a licensed psychoanalyst with 30 years of experience treating individuals, couples, and families. Robin is the co-developer of RULER, the Yale Center’s approach to bringing emotion intelligence to school communities and to the workplace; she is a co-developer of RULER for Families and a lead trainer for the Center’s Institutes. Robin is also on the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University and the author of two books: The Gaslight Effect and Project Rebirth.
Robin was a founding member of the Woodhull Institute, where she spent 15 years creating and facilitating development programs for women leaders. Robin regularly consults to schools and companies around the world, and for the last 5 years has worked with Facebook to develop tools that help adults and children develop emotional intelligence and resolve online conflict. Currently, Robin consults to Smilow Cancer Hospital in New Haven, helping physicians and nurses build emotional intelligence. In 2014-15 she was a fellow in the Yale Public Voices Fellowship, and her popular pieces appeared in Psychology Today, The Huffington Post, Time.com, The Washington Post, The Hill, and Harvard Business Review. She has been a guest on many local and national radio shows and has traveled widely to lecture on emotional intelligence and relational bullying. Robin is a member of the Emotional Intelligence Consortium and the serves as an advisor for Think Equal, Crisis Text Line and I’ll Go First.
Robin lives in New York and treasures her relationship with her son, Scott and daughter, Melissa who are following their own passions.
Jacqueline Nelson
Jacqueline Nelson is an educator and director of diversity and inclusivity at The Hewitt School, an independent K-12 girls’ school in New York City. With almost ten years of classroom teaching experience, Jacqueline is committed to empowering girls and young women to be fierce self-advocates and agents of change. Her work includes K-12 student programming focused on anti-bias education, identity development, and social-emotional wellbeing, as well as parent education, culturally responsive faculty and staff professional development, and strategic planning.
As a dedicated diversity practitioner, Jacqueline is a member of the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) Diversity Committee and participated in the inaugural Race, Equity, and Leadership in Schools Institute, offered through the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is trained as a National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project Leader and has presented on both national and global platforms including the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools (NCGS) Educating Girls Symposium, National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) People of Color Conference, and the NCGS Global Forum on Girls Education.
Kelly Rawlings, PhD
Kelly Campbell Rawlings, Ph.D. is an associate professor (teaching) with the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California where she designs, develops, and teaches courses on organizational behavior, public and nonprofit leadership and management, philanthropy, and strategic planning. Dr. Rawlings’ is a co-author of the text Managing Human Behavior in Public and Nonprofit Organizations and her research has been published in Administration & Society, Administrative Theory and Praxis, the Journal of Public Affairs Education, and in the book Government is Us, 2.0.
​
Prior to academia Dr. Rawlings worked in the nonprofit sector as a prevention education specialist for the Center Against Sexual Abuse and as a policy advocate for the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She also worked as an academic associate for Arizona State University’s Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation, where she conducted research on the nonprofit sector and developed and coordinated projects designed to build the organizational capacity of nonprofits. Dr. Rawlings provides consulting and facilitation services to individuals and organizations looking to strengthen their leadership and governance, strategic planning, participatory decision-making, mindfulness, and public engagement.
.jpg)
Julie Sims
Julie Ann Sims has spent more than 20 years working in communications and marketing. She began her career as a reporter before transitioning into politics, where she oversaw public relations for a state senator in San Francisco and later became chief of staff for his district office. After that, she worked at Robert Half, a global specialized staffing firm, holding a number of roles, including vice president of communications strategy. Recently, she transitioned to the nonprofit field and now oversees marketing and communications programs for Room to Read, a global nonprofit that seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in low-income countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Daly City Youth Health Center. Previously, she served as board president for Dress for Success’s San Francisco chapter and volunteered at 826 Valencia.
Wende has an extensive background in both the worlds of education and business. She gave years of service as the Executive Director of a major private independent school on Long Island, NY, with an enrollment of over 700 students. Prior to serving in a not-for-profit educational environment, Wende’s entrepreneurial spirit led her to be the founder and owner of a personnel recruiting firm. Her experience extends into finance, budgeting, program development, fund development and marketing in both the public and private sectors.
​
For the last 15 years Wende has been the Executive Director of a non-profit institution that was dedicated to training women in ethical leadership skills and helping them to bring their voices into the public sector. She has been instrumental in empowering and honing the leadership skills of thousands of women throughout the United States.
Naomi Katz
Naomi Katz is an author and educator and has been working with young women for over 20 years. She is the author of Beautiful: Being an Empowered Young Woman, and the visionary behind Her Wisdom.
​
Naomi works with educators, parents, mentors and young people. Her work is a call to attention, to recognize that we are the creators of our culture. She focuses on empowering ourselves to take action into our own hands, to understand that we are the builders of our culture and that we drive the changes that we wish to see, beginning with ourselves and echoing into our communities.
​
Her work is deeply inspired by Carmen Vicente, a women's leader carrying the indigenous wisdom of the peoples of the Andes Mountains. Together with Carmen, Naomi is working with women around the world, with a particular focus on our relationship with our menstruation.
​
Naomi holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from University of California, Berkeley. Originally from New York, she now lives in northern Israel and has worked with young women and their mentors in a wide variety of settings in the United States and abroad. Beautiful, published by Bricktower Press, is a compilation of the writings of many young women who have participated in the Beautiful Project.
​
To read more about Naomi and her work, visit www.naomikatz.com.