The Care Lab Collective community is held by experienced parent advocates and professionals who serve this community with care, skill, and years of lived experience.
Our co-founders and moderators bring backgrounds in social work, education, healthcare, trauma-sensitive mindfulness, and disability advocacy — alongside their own parenting journeys — to support the community with nuance, respect, and deep understanding.
About Our Founders
Care Lab Collective was founded by Jessica Mingus and Rachel Henes—social workers, community builders, and moms of neurodivergent kids.
They met as parents and became friends as they began getting familiar calls from schools and providers: their children’s differences framed as deficits—problems to fix rather than people to support.
Care Lab grew out of a local peer support group Jessica started for parents of children with IEPs. That grassroots community has grown to over 500 parents, revealing both the power of connection and the need for more sustained, collective support.
Together, Jessica and Rachel bring decades of experience designing programs and facilitating capacity-building across schools, organizations and caregiver communities. Care Lab brings that work together into a parent-led space rooted in disability justice, collective care, and shared wisdom.
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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.
About Our Team
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Social Media Marketing Strategist
Mika is a creative strategist, storyteller, and autism advocate. As Senior Creative Strategist at Fandom, she drives campaigns that connect brands with passionate fan communities. Her career includes roles at ABC Studios, Clear Channel, and ESPN, along with freelance work in comedy writing and digital content for Crypt TV and Blumhouse Productions.
Mika is a dedicated public speaker and autism advocate, inspired by her journey as a proud mother to an Autistic son. She serves as an Advisory Board Member for Together We Bloom, an organization dedicated to empowering neurodivergent families and individuals. She co-hosts The Bronx Couch, a gaming channel celebrating NYC culture, and These2Locas, a vibrant series where she highlights local businesses owned by underrepresented communities—engaging in conversations about pop culture, entertainment, and community impact.
Her insights have been featured on AMC’s Comic Book Men, TLC’s Cake Boss, and platforms like GLAAD, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, Scary Mommy, and Elite Daily. Mika’s work seamlessly blends marketing, advocacy, and media, driven by her passion for storytelling, community-building, and authentic representation.
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Evaluation Strategist
Sara Birnel Henderson, MPH (she/they), is a Brooklyn-based researcher, educator, and doula with over 15 years of experience in sexual and reproductive health. Her work is rooted in advancing social justice and improving health outcomes for historically marginalized communities.
She currently serves as the Associate Director of Research and Evaluation at Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), where she leads equity-driven evaluation efforts. In this role, she helps shape research initiatives focused on advancing health equity for Black patients and communities, and supports a broad range of health care and education projects in collaboration with PPFA affiliates and program teams.
Prior to joining PPFA, Sara conducted youth development and reproductive health research at Cornell University and worked as a sexual health educator in New York City communities most affected by HIV and AIDS.
Outside of her professional role, Sara is a doula with the Doula Project and serves as a case manager with the New York Abortion Access Fund. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, son, and their pit bull.
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Media Strategist
Ron is an award-winning, highly resourceful video editor and producer with experience in all aspects of social media management, video production, including ideation, logistics and shooting. Knowledgeable about music, TV, film, comedy, meme and pop culture, Ron has the ability to creatively integrate these into engaging social media content. He's a wizard at working simultaneously on multiple projects while maintaining a positive attitude towards clients, internal team members and vendors.
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Operations & Design Lead
Casey is a Denver-based Business Systems & Project Management Consultant who is passionate about helping mission-driven teams get organized and bring their unique ideas to life. With a background in nonprofit operations, fundraising, and communications, she brings a people-first, systems-savvy approach to her work—always with an eye toward clarity, creativity, and impact.
Over the past several years, Casey worked closely with Jessica Mingus at Lineage Project to manage trauma-sensitive mindfulness programs that support young people and adult staff inside NYC’s criminal legal, foster care, education, shelter, immigration, psychiatric, and school suspension systems. She is skilled in leveraging project management tools, CRM systems, and data platforms to create more efficient and sustainable workflows for small teams.
As a 200-hour certified yoga teacher, Casey is passionate about community care and making wellness and mindfulness more accessible. She’s excited to be collaborating with Care Lab Collective for their beta launch, offering operational and design support to help lay the groundwork for a product that reflects Care Lab’s thoughtful, community-centered mission.
You can reach Casey at caseygerberpowell@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseygerberpowell.