Our People
2018-2020 Advisory Council
Wanda Swan
Wanda Swan hails from the “Hospitality State” of Mississippi and has been embedded within the Violence Prevention movement in Higher Education for over eight years. She began her career in this field while still a graduate student at Mississippi State University (MSU). Her work with the university's Sexual Assault Services department eventually led to extensive collaborations with the Mississippi Coalition Against Sexual Assault. The mentorship she received from the coalition and the former director of the university's department solidified her passion for engaging student populations in violence prevention strategies. Before leaving MSU, Wanda gained experience securing and managing federally-funded grants and serving as a prevention educator, community collaborator, and co-creator the university's Sexual Assault Response Team.
Wanda began work at Vanderbilt University shortly after MSU and served as a Program Coordinator and Advocate within the Margaret Cuninggim Women's Center. In this capacity she served as the university's sole 24-hour on-call advocate and provided direct support and accompaniment to university students, faculty, staff, and Medical Center employees as well as a lead facilitator for the Green Dot Bystander Strategy. Before leaving Vanderbilt, Wanda served as a Prevention Educator & Victim Resource Specialist and dedicated her time and expertise to the creation, staff expansion, and branding of the Project Safe Center for Sexual Misconduct Prevention & Response, the university's first free-standing center dedicated to campus violence prevention and advocacy.
Wanda is currently employed at Emory University’s Respect Program (under the umbrella of the Office of Health Promotion) and serves as the program's inaugural Director and Survivor Advocate, working with members of the student population who have been directly or indirectly impacted by sexual and relationship violence. She advises a peer advocacy student organization, Emory Sexual Assault Peer Advocates, and provides training on Title IX and constructing communities of care. She is excited to serve on the advisory council for Soulshine!
Danielle Melnick
Danielle is a soft spoken activist with a fiery agenda for creating cultural change centered on empowering communities and sharing holistic practices that integrate the creative and healing arts. Danielle earned her bachelor’s degree in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a Health Studies certificate from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. During this time she worked with Dickinson’s Prevention Education Advocacy Center and invested her time to giving quiet voices a space to be heard. She recently completed studies at the Teachers College at Columbia University, earning her master’s degree in Clinical Psychology with a concentration in Spirituality Mind-Body practice through the Spirituality Mind Body Institute (SMBI). While at Columbia she worked at the University’s Sexual Violence Response Center as the Prevention Intern. Danielle recently accepted a position of Violence Prevention Coordinator at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is excited about everything this transition brings! In her spare time she loves doing yoga, painting, drawing, and Face-Timing her dogs, Carmel and Rascal.
Rachel Kruchten
Rachel Kruchten is originally from Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and beautiful lilacs. Passionate about comprehensive sexual health and relationship education, she found herself confronted by the enormity and impact of sexual violence in college, surrounded by countless survivors and working towards her own healing. Since then, she has been involved with research focused on understanding the links between intimate partner violence and suicide and depression. While she has cherished the opportunity to engage with survivors in this setting, the visible gaps in services and systems available to survivors has gotten her ready to roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty in work that will reform systems and provide more holistic healing to survivors and families. She is pursuing a dual degree in social work and public health at New York University, with the ultimate goal of being trained to deliver trauma informed therapy for survivors and influence community healing through prevention and intervention efforts. Rachel is excited about community building and working to center those who are most marginalized. She is a queer Jewish woman who cherishes the opportunity to engage in spiritual practices, be outdoors, create, and be with close family and friends. She intends to bring love, hope and openness to Soulshine, and is passionate about a world where survivors are heard, understood, and supported.
Laura Masgalas
Laura Masgalas has been a leader in community building and sexual assault prevention and advocacy fields for over a decade. She played a vital role in growing and supporting Sexual Assault/Rape Crisis Services of Cumberland County, a program of YWCA Carlisle, where she served as Director for 11 years. Laura has also worked as Contract Liaison for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape (PCAR), where she provided oversight and support to rape crisis centers statewide. She currently serves as inaugural Director of the Shippensburg Community Resource Coalition, ensuring accessible resources and a programming hub in the Shippensburg, Pennsylvania community. She is a licensed social worker in Pennsylvania and is deeply invested in community-wide wellbeing. Laura is currently enrolled in a PhD program in Administration & Leadership. When not working or studying, she likes to read a good biography, watch a Netflix series or two, cook up something good in the kitchen, and spend time with her family. She is passionate about advocacy and activism and strives to create a safer world for her children.
Shaashawn Dial
Shaashawn “The Voyce” is an award-winning radio broadcaster, thrice published passionate poet, multi-sensory workshop facilitator, edutaining mistress of ceremonies and seasoned event planner.
Shaashawn is the Founder of Voycetress Media, LLC: Putting Your Voice in the Foreground. Voycetress Media LLC, provides services that affirm and empower individuals and organizations via workshop facilitation and training on diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion in addition to tailored social justice topics. Voycetress Media, LLC: is committed to the liberation of all human beings beginning with a lifelong commitment to raising awareness of our stereotypes and prejudices followed by the acknowledgement of how systematic / institutional discrimination perpetuates racism, heterosexism, anti-Semitism, lookism, ableism, ageism, classism, sexism, eurocentrism, islamophobia, and transphobia. Voycetress Media, LLC believes there are no quick solutions to an organization’s diversity, multiculturalism, inclusion growth (wherever individuals and the organization are on spectrums); solutions are multilayered and require the investment of resources continuously. Voycetress Media, LLC puts your voice in the foreground by creating spaces welcoming to intersections of multiple identities while advocating for the closing of disparity gaps.
Shaashawn's greatest passion is creating outlets for all persons to discover their voice. To Shaashawn, “voice” is the tool for which people take holistic ownership of their mental, physical, spiritual, and economic health and wealth.
Read more about Shaashawn & check out what she's up to at www.shaashawn.com
Caroline Culverhouse-Neithamer, MSS, LSW, E-RYT
Caroline Culverhouse-Neithamer, MSS, LSW, E-RYT is the co-founder of hOMe Psychotherapy, Yoga and Meditation--a holistic healing center in Reading, PA. She is a psychotherapist, yoga instructor and meditation teacher specializing in women's holistic health, developmental trauma, and the integration of somatic psychotherapy, relational psychoanalysis, and mysticism. She founded and facilitates the hOMe Women's Healing and Transformation program, which helps women heal-- mind-body-spirit-- from developmental trauma and the effects of emotional, physical and sexual trauma. Caroline also founded and co-facilitates the hOMe PYM 200 hour yoga teacher training program. Since 2009 Caroline has facilitated over fifty mind-body-spirit healing retreats. In addition to offerings at hOMe PYM, you can find her leading workshops and retreats across the country from Hawaii, Sedona, NYC, to Philadelphia! More info can be found at www.homepym.com. Follow her on Instagram @culverhouseneithamer and on the hOMe PYM facebook page!
Sofina Odero
Sofina Odero has always found community in the people who surround her. Motivated to build strong connections with others and uplift marginalized communities, she has committed herself to the betterment of herself and others through community service, social justice activism and advocacy, and the fight for human rights for all. Drawing from the wise words of Black lesbian, mother, warrior, and poet, Audre Lorde, “without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist”. With those words cemented into her mind, Sofina strives to uplift her communities and others in the pursuit of liberation of all.
Finding that the start of uplifting others first comes with making spaces for them, their voices, and their experiences, Sofina is committed to making Soulshine the compassionate community needed to provide people with the tools for their healing and liberation. Healing takes on many forms and isn’t the same path for all, though with community, compassion, and understanding, Sofina believes healing can liberate us like flowers growing through cement pavement -- beautifully resilient.
Kelly Wilt
Based out of Tucson, Arizona, Kelly is a community organizer, writer, and a licensed counselor (LAC), with a focus on trauma and healing work. As warm as she is fierce, Kelly is passionate about supporting people and projects that work to create a better world.
Kelly has worked with colleges and universities, community-based advocacy organizations, national resource centers [such as the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, the Resource Sharing Project, the Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition, and the National Organization of Asians & Pacific Islanders Ending Sexual Violence] and private organizations and practitioners. Through these collaborations she's worked to bring creative strategies to support thriving individuals and communities. With a strong background in community building and healing work, Kelly has led transformative national projects, written numerous publications for healing practitioners, and has spoken on related topics around the globe. Her formal education includes a master's degree from Prescott College in Counseling Psychology and a bachelor's degree from Penn State University in Women's Studies and International Politics. She has received specialized training in sexual assault and domestic violence advocacy and attends regular continuing education courses at Southwestern College, AASECT, NSAC, and beyond. Her continued work with mentors, colleagues, and community members has always been her greatest teacher and continues to shape her knowledge and capacity to contribute to this work in meaningful ways.
Interested in the intersections of individual well-being and community support—food, movement, and mental health—creative expression, activism, and healing—and methods for building sustainable community-based initiatives, Kelly thrives working with topics that are often overlapping and nuanced. Committed to meaning-making, intentional living, and supporting others in living their truths, Kelly works to inspire people to live authentically and practice compassion toward themselves and others. Through curiosity, continued learning, and vulnerability, she challenges herself to do the same.
To check out more about what Kelly's up to: kellyjwilt.com