About us Root and Bloom Institute – Mission, Story & Leadership (2025)

About Root and Bloom Institute

Root and Bloom Institute is a project of Vision Walkers Collective, a non-profit organization founded in 2024. Our mission is to cultivate spaces of healing, growth, and connection, transforming trauma into embodied wisdom and empowering people to thrive and give back through innovative practices in the healing arts.

Our vision is to plant a global constellation of community-rooted “medicine nodes” that make healing somatic and expanded states accessible, safe, and celebrated.

Founding Spark

The seed for Root & Bloom began with founder Jo Wunderly’s journey into somatic therapy and psychedelic healing, and the reclamation of the Rudramandir building in 2023. What began as a personal path has blossomed into a collective movement to restore access, equity, and integrity in healing practices. Learn more about Jo’s story.

Culture and Aspirational Vows

Our community is guided by shared values: transparency, authenticity, reciprocity, honoring nature and mystery, and ensuring access for all

Radical Transparency

Trust in the Unfolding

Rooted in Relationship

Reverence for Mystery

In Deep with Nature

Access is Sacred

Our values guide us, and our 10 agreements help us live them every day. We invite others to join us in this shared practice.

Why Root & Bloom exists

Root & Bloom Institute is a home for healers, students, and seekers. Here, somatic therapies connect with broader states of mind in trusted, accessible, and contemporary ways.

We draw upon wisdom traditions, expand access to healing, and evolve with the changing field. We believe healing should be done by many hands, from diverse paths. We honor the profound insight of traditional psychotherapists, the body knowledge of somatic guides, and the wisdom of earth keepers.

We gather in a circle. We slow down to the rhythm of the body.

Why Root & Bloom exists

Root & Bloom Institute is a home for healers, students, and seekers. Here, somatic therapies connect with broader states of mind in trusted, accessible, and contemporary ways.

We gather in a circle. We slow down to the rhythm of the body.

We choose relationship. We choose reciprocity. We honor healing that welcomes the mystery. Root and Bloom Institute is where the sacred meets the practical. Where community is the container.
Where healing ripples outward.

Root and Bloom Institute. It is not just a center. It is a movement.

Come walk with us.

Leadership Team

Vision Walkers Collective, a 501(c)(3) organization founded by Jo Wunderly, grew out of a vision to create healing spaces where trauma and separation are transformed into embodied wisdom and deep connection. Jo serves as visionary director, chair of the board, and primary funder, carefully tending to the heart of this work. She has a dedicated leadership team—including a committed board of directors and a chief strategy and operations officer—that collectively brings decades of experience in mental health, nonprofit development, somatic healing arts, and public health. The Leadership Team is supported by the Stewardship Circle, which provides perspective and guidance to drive the development of the Root and Bloom Institute, drawing on both internal and external wisdom from the healing arts.

Joko Wunderly
Founder and Curator of Programs

Joko Wunderly, (aka Jo), has benefited greatly from psychedelics, as well as somatic therapies and spiritual practice. She was introduced to psychedelic journey work in 2015. Her healing led to training in various somatic therapies and also in expanded states. She trained in Hakomi, Circling, Narrative as well as Somatic Enneagram, shadow inquiry, parts work, Zen koan meditation, continuum and other forms of movement practices. Joko received zen dharma transmission, Inka Shomei, in summer of 2025, and since then uses her zen name. Joko means, “accumulating good”. Central to all of Joko’s work is cultivating a regulated, emotionally and spiritually intelligent ground of being and connection with others, and with nature.

Joko’s ancestors made philanthropy a possibility. She believes in building healing ecosystems that allow individuals and communities to do meaningful work, and to become of service to others. She founded Vision Walkers Collective, a 501c3 in 2023, and took on stewardship of the former Rudramandir building in Berkeley, CA. The building is undergoing an extensive remodel and is poised to reopen its doors this summer, 2026, as Root and Bloom Institute (RBI). Besides getting RBI ready to be a state of the art healing and training center, Joko is co-designing an “Opening Series” that will showcase newer workshops and trainings. She’s also lining up regular spiritual, community building, and art-making practices, and is incubating a somatic foundational and a leadership program with a group of elders for current and future medicine guides, that’s centered on sacred feminine ways of being and working.

Curt Beckmann
Director of Finance Operations

Curt has decades of experience managing high tech and non-profit programs. He co-founded and serves as a director of the Appropedia Foundation, focused on sharing practical wisdom, as well as serving on the board of Nevada County’s ColorMeHuman.org. He is service oriented and passionate about improving access to expanded states therapy. At VWC, he works to ensure that the administrative and infrastructural aspects of holding a safe and healing space run smoothly and unobtrusively.

Lori Ashcraft
Board Treasurer

After a full career creating and managing programs that promote healing and recovery from mental health and substance-related challenges, Lori now focuses on training and consulting with behavioral health agencies to develop strength-based services that support self-determination and personal growth. She is an author of several books and articles and continues to write about recovery and program design. She also hosts Viva La Evolution, a podcast featuring personal recovery stories and experts in the field.

Lori has become increasingly interested in sacred medicine as a way to deepen understanding of human potential and trauma healing. She believes in Post Traumatic Growth and feels fortunate to have found a community aligned with healing trauma and supporting the earth.

Kate Flore
Board Secretary

Kate Flore is a bodyworker, movement therapist, and Gestalt facilitator. She lives and practices at Moss Village where Vision Walkers Collective was conceived in Nevada City, CA. She is inspired by people and the many paths we take and is engaged in supporting, connecting, and creating learning communities for practitioner skill development.
She has masters’ degrees in public health and occupational therapy, worked in public health policy for a decade, is trained in the Gyrotonic and Feldenkrais Methods, Pilates, and is a certified Esalen massage therapist. In addition to serving as board secretary for Vision Walkers Collective, she teaches at the Esalen Institute, and is developing a student community clinic for low-cost bodywork. She is also in long-term study of Gestalt Relational Therapy with Dorothy Charles and Chris Price. Learn more about Kate here.

Javiera Köstner (she / her / ella)
Operations Director & Community Engagement

Javiera A.K.A. Javi (ha-vee | she/her) brings over two decades of experience in marketing, communications, and community building to her role as Director of Community Engagement & Operations at Root & Bloom Institute. Originally from Chile and bilingual in English and Spanish, she transitioned from leading digital growth initiatives across wellness, beauty, and consumer industries into the healing arts, where operations and human connection meet.

Javi is an Advanced Therapeutic Yoga Teacher (RYT-500), breathwork facilitator, integration coach, and graduate student in Somatic Psychotherapy at CIIS.

At RBI, Javi brings together strategy, operations, and embodied practice to help cultivate a welcoming community and a thriving ecosystem for healing, learning, and connection.

Sebastian Beca (he / him / el)
Strategist Technology Advisor

Seba supports the technology and operational systems that keep Root & Bloom Institute running smoothly. This includes digital infrastructure, audio/visual setup, booking and communication tools, event coordination, and overall workflow and process design. He brings a practical, strategic lens to making technology clear, useful, and aligned with the needs of the space, while retaining a human-centered vision of care for the community at its core.

Originally from Chile, Seba is a licensed MFT and founder of Natural Bridges Therapy, where his practice draws on Gestalt, somatic practices, EMDR, and Ecotherapy. His background spans psychotherapy, operations, technology, and building community-based healing spaces, and his work is grounded in a long-standing interest in personal and collective transformation.

Beyond his clinical practice, Seba has helped develop community offerings through Green Magic Yoga and the Santa Cruz Psychedelic Society, including integration circles, breathwork journeys, educational talks, retreats, and nature-based gatherings.

Seba lives in Oakland with his wife, Javi, and their three cats. He enjoys yoga, meditation, music, DJing, biking, and time in nature.

Stewardship Circle & Advisors

Kylea Taylor, M.S., LMFT
Stewardship Circle

Kylea is a licensed California therapist who founded InnerEthics®, a self-reflective, self-compassionate, approach to relational ethics, a model she has taught in many psychedelic practitioner trainings. As CEO of three companies for decades (counseling, publishing, and training), Kylea does consulting based on her professional and lived experience with issues such as relational ethics, business, therapy, creativity, and education. She is the author of Peer Consultation Groups & Ethical Awareness Tools for Psychedelic Practitioners (2024), The Ethics of Caring: Finding Right Relationship with Clients (2017), and several books about Holotropic Breathwork®. InnerEthics.com

Allison (Alli) Feduccia, PhD
Stewardship Circle

Alli is a neuropharmacologist, psychedelic researcher, and educator. She is the Co-Founder + CEO of Psychedelic Support, a platform for education and connection to psychedelic practitioners and community groups. She serves as a scientific advisor to nonprofits advancing psychedelic research, innovative treatments, and advocacy for equitable, responsible access to psychedelic therapies. She began researching MDMA in 2004 and has worked on mental health studies at UT Austin, UCSF, NIH, and MAPS. Through her work, Dr. Feduccia bridges rigorous science with compassionate, earth-honoring wisdom to illuminate the transformative power of expanded states of consciousness.

Ariel Clark
Legal Advisor

Ariel (she/they) is a licensed attorney advising business and non-profit clients in highly-regulated and emergent fields. She is Of Counsel for Calyx Law, and is a co-founder of the Psychedelic Bar Association. She has a Bachelors of Arts from University of Michigan (2000) and a JD from Berkeley Law School (2005). Ariel is an enrolled Tribal member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians.

Logina Mostafa
Social Media Contributor

Logina is a public health practitioner, community organizer, and educator working at the intersection of somatic healing, expanded states, and liberatory community care. As founder of queering existentialism, she builds containers for embodied healing and harm reduction centered on communal well being and authentic identity. As advisor to the Psychedelic Yoga Research Collective, former Fellow at the Center for Psychedelic Public Health and member of the PAHJ (Psychedelic Alliance for Healing Justice), she brings both field expertise and a deep commitment to equitable access to this work. As Head of Community at violette, a community-centered, data-secure platform, she carries the same mission to cultivate communal values — relationship, reciprocity, and the belief that community and education makes liberation, not only healing, possible.

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