ChI Staff & Board

LaShonda Lewis currently resides in North Carolina. She is a 2019 graduate from North Carolina Central University where she earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees. Ms. Lewis holds degrees in Political Science with a concentration in Pre-Law and Theory and Mass Communications with a concentration in Broadcasting. In her previous positions, she operated in the roles of: Social Media Manager, Oral History Coordinator, Administrative Assistant, Customer Service Representative, and Video Production Assistant. In her free time, she enjoys creating visual content on YouTube and working as an Entrepreneur. Ms. Lewis is excited to serve as the new Communications and Media Specialist for the Chaplaincy Institute.

Shae has begun her journey with ChI in taking on the role of the Administrative Specialist. She has earned both her Undergraduate degree in Organizational Management and her Master’s in Public Administration. Her professional experience consists of work in both the private and not for profit sectors. Shae’s previous work experience ranges from having been an Administrative Coordinator (Sr.), to utilizing her education and knowledge of government and non-profit systems as a Program Consultant, to having been a Program/Project Coordinator and grant lead. Shae feels called to serve others utilizing known and developing gifts, and brings with her an array of experience, a heart to show the world around her love through kindness and service, and the desire to work to provide a quality experience to all of those who are in some way or another a part of ChI’s vast community.

Wren is a white, queer, non-binary Jew witch living on Amah Mutsun Tribal band land known now as Santa Cruz, California with their amazing partner and senior mixed breed dog.  They are grateful to join the team at ChI as they complete the joint MDiv and Interfaith studies track on the path to ordination. Their work as a community movement shepherd, spiritual accompanier, land tender, youth educator and musical prayer leader all shape the ways that they show up to life.  They are blessed daily by the ocean and redwoods that sustain their being and heart to center justice and collective healing.  

The Reverend Ineda P. Adesanya, MA, MDiv, DASD is an ordained American Baptist minister and spiritual director. Her divine call is to make the world better by using her spiritual gifts to help others live more abundantly and to experience truth, joy and justice by surrendering all to the Spirit. Rev. Adesanya’s theology of ministry seeks to assist others to lift themselves up through knowledge, encouragement, and spiritual guidance. With an inner conviction that spirituality and justice go hand-in-hand, the goal of her ministry is to communicate the ideals of the faith, enabling Christians to mature and become confident disciples, spiritually healthy, able and willing to follow Christ in providing and advocating for those who are oppressed and marginalized. Rev. Adesanya is a follower of Jesus Christ—one who subscribes to Christ’s greatest command—to love unconditionally. Under that persuasion, she opens wide her ministry, ecumenically and interreligiously, to love and the serve all who would come.

Rev. Adesanya received both her Master of Divinity with concentration in Christian Spirituality, and her Diploma in the Art of Spiritual Direction from the San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California. She earned a Master of Arts in Religion and Psychology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California where she is currently earning a PhD in Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion. Rev. Adesanya holds a BA in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley and worked as a land-use planner, facilities professional, and construction industry executive for twenty-five years. She serves as a pastoral counselor for the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary.

As Minister of Spiritual Life for the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, Rev. Adesanya provides individual and small group spiritual direction, leads contemplative retreats, teaches seminars and short courses on various aspects of Christian spirituality, and authors a weekly blog for the congregation and community. She is editor and co-author of Kaleidoscope: Broadening the Palette in the Art of Spiritual Direction published in 2019 by Church Publishing, Inc. Discover more about her scholarship at inedaadesanya.academia.edu.

Rev. Adesanya is founder and proprietor of WJoy – A Spiritual Care Ministry providing spiritual direction and care for faith-based institutions, clergy and lay members of the community at-large. Wjoy.org.

Don has served as an Executive Director in 3 social service nonprofit organizations, one of which tripled in size over 5 years employing over 400 people, and serving thousands of families in 6 San Francisco Bay Area counties.

Don’s commitment is to build the daily practices, capacity, and resiliency of people and organizations to more naturally thrive through times of growth and change. His unusual mix of senior management experience, spiritual leadership roles, and personal mindfulness practices of over 20 years, gives him special skills to partner with leaders to evolve their organizations into greater effectiveness and profitability.

He has served as an ordained minister in both Unity and the Centers for Spiritual Living. He is a certified counselor and coach with extensive experience speaking, teaching, and facilitating retreats. He has served in interim senior director roles creating effective transitions for several organizations.

Don presently works with Simplicity Partners, A consultancy applying the principles of simplicity to bring increased effectiveness, profitability, and ease into the workplace and personal life.

Marcus joins us after 11 years of applying his ever-growing knowledge about communications and storytelling to help various schools, universities, businesses, and individual professionals achieve success in their communication endeavors.

Having been raised by a friend’s warm-welcoming family, Marcus learned the importance of inclusion, humility, and charity early on. It was this foundation that helped him to excel in communications giving rise to a need to bridge learning and understanding of differences with those he worked with throughout the years. He understands without great communication an interfaith community cannot exist. He is excited to be with us and contribute to the ongoing conversation about transforming the world for the better.

The Chaplaincy Institute Board of Directors welcomes Rev. Scott Railsback, M.A., a member of the March 2006 ChI clergy cohort. After ordination he earned an M.A. in

East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Scott worked as a chaplain from 2006 – 2019, including ten years at Kaiser in palliative and acute care. In the past 25 years his spiritual journey has continued to honor his Christian roots and deepening his spiritual perspective through travels on shamanic, Hindu and Buddhist paths. A lover of the arts, he is among other things, an accomplished and formerly professional Yidaki (didgeridoo) musician and improvisational musician playing a range or world instruments.

Previously, as an executive and business owner, Scott focused on developing new business opportunities and leading the development and implementation of

large-scale information systems and business change initiatives. He says, “I enjoy change projects that integrate human, business and technical systems… I believe to fully realize the creative power of Divine presence, one must engage both the rational mind and the creative spirit, which I experience through music, poetry and writing.”

As a member of the board, Scott hopes to foster ChI partnerships with healthcare providers and organizations.

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Todd helps leaders and organizations turn toward the world with a keen mind and a soft heart. After witnessing first-hand the way in which ChI graduates turned open-hearted toward the community and its needs, he enthusiastically agreed to serve on its board of directors.

Todd has devoted his work life to creating a more equitable and compassionate society. At the center of this work are three core beliefs: that people on the ground are the most astute judge of the help they need, that we live out the inequalities in society in the way we structure our communities and alliances, and that each of us has a responsibility to see the suffering in the world, turn toward it and step forward to do something about that suffering with an open heart.

This work has come to life in a variety of forms, including 

• Helping grass-roots organizations establish solid organizations that increase their capacity to make their voices heard (as a Founding Board member of the Rainier Valley Corps. and as a Fellow and then chair of the PLACES Advisory Board of The Funders Network, an association of 175 foundations in the US and Canada).
• Fostering a reimagination of public space that emphasizes the inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations, (as board member of The Funders Network, as co-founder of the International Sustainability Institute and as founder of the Northwest Sustainability Collaborative)
• Encouraging philanthropy in the community (as chair of the Board of Social Venture Partners, Seattle, co-founder of the Puget Sound Cohort on Equity, Environment and Infrastructure, and in 2004 as co-founder of Loom, a foundation focused on projects at the intersection of the environment and social equity.)

In 2017, he was recognized by the Sullivan-Henningsgaard Family Service Award, for demonstrating “community leadership by engaging fellow citizens to powerfully address” community needs and “inspiring others to deepen citizens’ civic engagement.”

Prior to working in the non-profit world, he chaired the American Studies program at Trinity College, Hartford, CT, where he taught about the centrality of race and class in American culture. He has published articles, encyclopedia entries and two books on the topic (The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (1999) and Rewriting White: Race, Class and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth Century America (2004), both by Rutgers University Press). At Trinity, he co-founded the Trinity Institute for Urban Learning and Action, an organization that trained nearly 50 coalitions of academic institutions and community organizations around the country to connect for community good.

Early in his career, he was a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, where his work won awards for investigative journalism, and a Correspondent and then Bureau Chief for BusinessWeek Magazine. His journalism also has appeared in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe and has been anthologized in business and journalism books.

He has a Master’s degree from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2021, he successfully finished the year-long Applied Compassion Training from the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research in the Stanford Medical School. A meditator for more than two decades, he also has received mindfulness training from the UK-based Breathworks.

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