Connect with Poonam
Resilience Consultants provide support to teachers and school staff, and work together to build a positive school climate for high-quality teaching and enriched student learning. As your Resilience Consultant, Poonam is available to you for confidential conversations that will not be used for evaluation of your job performance in any way.
Some of the ways in which our Resilience Consultants are helpful to teachers include:
Giving you emotional support as everyone adjusts to returning to their school community
Encouraging proven practices that support your personal and professional resilience
Sharing information and resources for increasing positive communication and strengthening connections at school
Brainstorming ways to respond to challenging dynamics at school
Facilitating social emotional learning lessons that focus on building student and classroom resilience skills
Observing students, as an extra set of eyes in the classroom, to help gather information on student strengths and needs for your own information, SST meetings, or parent conferences
Strategizing approaches to students, families, and colleagues with a focus towards improving behavior, relationships, and academic performance
Enhancing the social emotional practices of your classroom community with increased understanding of students’ social emotional needs
Engaging in strengths-based reflection, integration, and opportunity conversations with you, which is often the foundation for holding these conversations with your own students
You can contact Poonam by email at Poonam@AcknowledgeAlliance.org
Poonam Raj Singh (she/her) Ed.M, PCC is a coach, facilitator, theatre artist, yoga teacher, mother and doula. Poonam’s deepest intention is to hold a deep listening space for communities and individuals to tap into their own inherent nobility, creativity, and power, especially those on the margins.
Poonam focuses on collective healing through love. Through her training in Theatre of the Oppressed and Playback Theatre, Poonam uses play, story and movement in groups to process conflict and intergenerational trauma in order to work toward group healing and repair. Poonam is also trained in restorative justice (level 1,2, and 3 restorative justice certified), and draws from ancient indigenous ceremonial practices and her training by Oakland Unified School District and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth as a way to center conflict, meditation and healing in groups.
Poonam is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and Certified Facilitator, certified by the International Coach Federation and trained by the Coaches Training Institute. She originally learned the practice of Deep Listening through Thich Knath Hanh’s Plum Village community. She has achieved the highest designation of Master-Level Life Coach through the International Coach Federation.
Poonam draws from her indigenous lineage of yoga and mindfulness, certified from the Yoga Alliance as a 500-hour yoga instructor and trained by Art of Living Foundation, to teach yoga and mindfulness to both children and adults as a way of being and moving through life. She has been practicing her entire life.
Poonam has a strong grounding in community and direct service, with early-career roles as a community organizer, teacher on emergency credential, afterschool youth development worker, leadership coach and diversity, equity, and inclusion expert in the nonprofit sector. She founded a nonviolence & social justice leadership training program for youth called Soulforce Leadership that she ran for 8 years. She has a Masters in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and completed her undergraduate studies in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, with a focus on racial policy and immigrant identity politics. Poonam lives with her three children and her husband in Mountain View, California - the ancestral and unceded land of the Muwekma and Ramyatush speaking Ohlone people. Poonam is a first gen kid from LA who is indebted to her parent's sacrifice and love!
Acknowledge Alliance is a mental health agency that promotes lifelong resilience in children and youth, and strengthens the caring capacity of the adults who influence their lives. Since 1994, Acknowledge Alliance (formerly the Cleo Eulau Center) has used the power of fostering resilience to help build positive connections between teachers and students to open the doors to learning and wellbeing. The foundation of Acknowledge Alliance started with the belief that when a child has a caring adult in their life who holds high expectations and believes in them, they can succeed despite adversities. Acknowledge Alliance serves K-8 schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, integrating resilience into all levels of learning by coaching educators, counseling at-risk youth and teaching social emotional learning lessons for the whole classroom.