General Session - Closing Plenary

Superintendent/Executive Director
Chair, CCSA Member Council; CCSA Board Member; Superintendent, Achieve Charter School
Casey Taylor is the founder and Executive Director of Achieve Charter Schools of Paradise. After the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire, Casey led her team in reopening schools in temporary facilities in Chico, while building a permanent school facility there. In the 2021-22 school year, Achieve opened Achieve Charter School of Chico at the new facility and reopened Achieve Charter School of Paradise at the original campus in Paradise. She and her team are now working to reopen Achieve Charter High School in Paradise in the coming years.

KEYNOTE: "Becoming a Bridge Builder for Beloved Community"
Meena Srinivasan is a contemplative leader, celebrated speaker, accomplished author, and visionary edupreneur with over two decades of experience at the intersection of education, equity, and wellbeing. A lifelong educator-activist, Meena is known for weaving together Mindfulness, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and Belonging to support leadership development and systemic transformation grounded in compassion.

She is the Founding Executive Director of Transformative Educational Leadership (TEL), a fellowship that cultivates equity-driven, heart-centered school and system leaders through a transformative blend of inner work and outer impact. Meena also leads Karuna Consulting, LLC, a nationally certified Minority Business Enterprise, offering keynotes, professional learning, and coaching to foster healing and justice in education systems.

Her TEDx talk on Tenderness, viewed over 2 million times and one of the most popular TEDx talks of 2024, has sparked a growing body of original research in partnership with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. A National Board Certified Teacher and former district SEL leader, Meena has worked across public, private, urban, and international school contexts, offering deep expertise in creating school cultures that prioritize connection, inclusion, and care.

She is the author of several influential books and resources for educators, including Teach, Breathe, Learn: Mindfulness In and Out of the Classroom and SEL Every Day: Integrating SEL with Instruction in Secondary Classrooms, which was honored by the Greater Good Science Center as one of 2019’s Favorite Books for Educators. She has also taught graduate-level SEL courses at UC Berkeley.

In 2022, Mindful Magazine named Meena one of the Ten Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement. A dedicated practitioner of yoga and meditation for over 25 years, she is an ordained Buddhist Teacher in the tradition of Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh. Meena serves on the Board of the Thích Nhất Hạnh Foundation and is a co-founder of the Thích Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing, a new educational initiative rooted in spiritual practice, sacred service, and beloved community.