Care Lab Collective is led by veteran parent-advocates committed to building the support and infrastructure their community needs to feel less isolated, overwhelmed, and exhausted.
Care Lab’s founders and moderators have backgrounds in social work, education, healthcare, trauma-informed mindfulness, non-profit management, and organizational capacity-building and technical assistance.
Their lived experience and professional expertise make them uniquely qualified to build the care infrastructure countless parents across the country need.
Raising neurodivergent and disabled kids in a world that isn’t built with them in mind isn’t easy — but it’s easier when caregivers who know what it’s like have your back.
About the Founders
First and foremost, Jessica and Rachel are the proud moms of two amazing neurodivergent kids. They’re also social workers, advocates, and program designers with 15+ years of experience building schools, classrooms, and programs that support young people, caregivers, and educators.
They met at a social justice meet-up for local moms, and quickly came to realize they were getting the same kinds of calls about the “red flags” observed at school and aftercare—and started searching for schools, doctors, and service providers that didn’t treat their developmental differences as problems to fix.
Care Lab grew out of a peer support group (PSAN) on Facebook Jessica started for her and her fellow local parents to build community around having children with IEPs, 504s or early intervention support. That grassroots community became a trusted resource for ~600 caregivers across South Orange and Maplewood, NJ. After years moderating the group together, they started getting requests from parents all over the country that realized parents all over the country were looking for that same kind of connection, practical support and place to grapple with the adversities their families faced navigating communities and systems that weren’t built with disability accessibility, equity, inclusion, and belonging in mind.
Combining real life necessity with decades of experience designing workshops, training educators, and leading organizations, they founded Care Lab in 2024. Amidst all the joys and challenges of everyday life, they’ve been building the support they need most: a soft place to lower their shoulders and grow together as parents, advocates in a nationwide caregiver network that is proudly disability-affirming, diverse, inclusive and rooted in care — for their kids, their families, each other and themselves.
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Co-Founder
Jessica is a social worker, writer, organizational leader, and mom to a neurodivergent 7-year-old. She is the Co-Founder of Care Lab Collective, a national caregiving platform created by and for parents of neurodivergent and disabled children, and the Executive Director of Community Meditation Center.
For more than 15 years, Jessica’s work has focused on building and sustaining systems of collective care—particularly within schools, nonprofits, and community-based organizations. Her leadership integrates healing-centered practice, socially engaged mindfulness, and organizational strategy to support caregivers and young people navigating harmful systems, and to guide institutions through periods of growth, crisis, and transition.
In 2021, after encountering significant gaps in support as a parent herself, Jessica founded the SOMA Peer Support and Action Network (PSAN) for IEP families in her local community. What began as a grassroots peer support group grew to nearly 500 members and became the prototype and guiding inspiration for Care Lab Collective.
Previously, Jessica spent seven years leading the programmatic work of Lineage Project, a New York City nonprofit that provided trauma-informed mindfulness programming to thousands of system-involved youth, educators, and caregivers. Across her career, her work has reached thousands of families navigating education, caregiving, and community systems.
Jessica is a trained Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher and co-hosts weekly meditation gatherings for a global community of practitioners. She is currently writing Healing-Centered Parenting: Caregiving and the Practice of Staying Human with Each Other in a World on Fire, a book that explores caregiving as a relational, political, and collective practice rooted in disability justice and interdependence.
She holds a B.A. from Princeton University and an MSW with honors from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.
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Co-Founder
Rachel is a social worker, school and parenting consultant, mom and parent-advocate whose work centers around the intersections of systemic oppression and wellbeing. For more than two decades, Rachel has been supporting parents, educators and organizational leaders in exploring deeply held beliefs about behavior, achievement, power, and hierarchy - and how they impact the type of environments, policies, and responses that become “standardized” and accepted.
in 2020, Rachel started her own consulting practice, Rachel Henes Consulting, supporting parents and leading professional learning in K-12 schools and offering individual and group mindful parenting coaching.
Rachel has been featured in Psychology Today and in the best-selling book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It..
Rachel has pursued extensive anti-racist and gender-based violence prevention training from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, the Center for Racial Justice in Education, and A CALL TO MEN. She has received training and/or certifications in Mindful Parenting, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, The Whole Brain Child Approach, Beyond Behaviors (with Dr. Mona Delahooke) & Collaborative & Proactive Solutions, Lives in the Balance Training.
Rachel co-moderates the SOMA Peer Support and Action Network for IEP Families (PSAN), started by co-founder Jessica Mingus, a community of hundreds of compassionate and fierce advocates and parents of neurodivergent and disabled kids, and the inspiration for Care Lab Collective.
Rachel holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MSW with honors from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.
About Our Moderators
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Parent-Moderator
Sarah Díaz, LMSW is a psychotherapist and consultant who integrates psychodynamic, relational, and anti-oppressive approaches to support individuals and organizations. Sarah is deeply influenced by critical race theory, which centers the influence of oppressive ideologies and systems on ourselves and our experiences; and the work of third- and fourth-wave feminists, which emphasizes our connections to one another and finding opportunities for liberation within those systems. She is especially interested in helping those she supports build capacity for the smaller acts that can help them feel more aligned with their values and more engaged in their communities, moving toward the world they want while living in the world we have.
Sarah received her MSW from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and her BA in American Studies from Wesleyan University. She currently practices individual therapy as part of Critical Therapy Institute. Sarah has a decade of experience studying healthy and liberatory practices for youth development, with a focus on supporting parents and educators, and is the co-author of From the Inside Out: The Hallways Handbook for Raising Emotionally Healthy Adolescents.
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Parent-Moderator
Nicole Josey (she/her) is a wife and mom of 2 children. She has been a special education advocate for 8 years volunteering her time on various PTAs, Hsas and SEPAC. She is the current President of SEPAC SOMA for this current school year. Nicole is passionate about inclusion programming and has brought that passion her current role at a local non-profit organization. In 2025, she received an UnSung Shero award for her work in advocacy in South Orange and Maplewood.
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Parent-Moderator
Jennifer Petit-Frere (she/her) is a single parent of one child. First half of her 25 years as a Project Manager in Healthcare IT space. Currently focused on managing IT sourcing contracts in healthcare. Parent advocacy was formed out of necessity but something that I want to share with other families trying to navigate the New Jersey special education system.
Jennifer enjoys volunteering for local community events, travel, and creating bracelets. She is a member of the Parent Teacher Organization group that her daughter attends.
All of our neurodivergent children have a place in this world, and Jennifer want to be part of the change that creates space for them to strive!
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Parent-Moderator
Meghan is the proud parent of a 12-year-old neurodivergent kiddo and thrilled to be a part of the Care Lab community! She believes deeply in peer-to-peer support and that as parents, we are each other’s greatest resources when it comes to raising our children in a world that was not built for them.
Her professional background is in public health, specifically sexual and reproductive health education. Over the course of her career, she has created and led training programs that support parents and educators in talking openly and confidently with
young people about sexual and reproductive health.
Meghan lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and son. She is a lover of travel and
enjoys supporting families in crafting neurodiversity-affirming wanderlust adventures.
Creative writing is also one of her favorite ways to recharge and find joy.