Meet our team
Founder
Corey L. Martin, MD
Certified Dare to Lead Facilitator
Corey Martin is a Yale-trained family physician driven to change the delivery of healthcare and improve the mental and physical health of our communities. He is a founder of the Bounce Back Project, practicing private group physician, former Bush Fellow, Chief Medical Officer, and lead physician in response to clinician burnout. Driven to do this work by the loss of two colleagues and friends, Corey strives to create an environment of opportunity in which all of us can do the deep, heartfelt work of changing the way we show up and interact in each other’s lives. One of the ways he does this is by facilitating resilience retreats across the United States and throughout the world. He is both a Certified Dare to Lead Facilitator and Center for Courage and Renewal Facilitator and facilitates workshops based on the work of Brené Brown and Parker Palmer. In his free time, he enjoys working on his farm which he has recently turned into an event center. He lives in Maple Lake, MN with his three daughters. He is a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring “good enoughist”.
Facilitators
ROBERTA CASSIDY, PHD, RN
Roberta Cassidy is a highly experienced leader who has served in various healthcare capacities and settings. Currently, she works as a coach and consultant partnering with individuals and organizations on relationship-based approaches to wellbeing. Roberta’s true passion and path in life is in service to the journey of personal and professional healing and its role in organizational and community wellbeing. Devoted to substantive, sustained change she seeks to inspire healing within to transform ourselves and our communities in service to the greater good.
Certified as a Holistic Nurse, Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, and Forest Therapy Guide, she provides wellbeing consultations and services including guided Nature and Forest Therapy walks for individual, group, and corporate events. Roberta lives in Minneapolis and spends her time outdoors sauntering, bicycling, and kayaking in nature, in addition to her favorite pastime of cheering on her #1 basketball player, her son Gabe.
KIM SCHWARTZ, NCC
Kim Schwartz, MA, NCC is the former, founding CEO of Roanoke Chowan Community Health Center, a Federally Qualified Community Health Center in Eastern North Carolina and a National Board Certified Counselor. As a consultant, Kim works with leaders and organizations nationally creating authentic space for reconnecting to the joy of their vocation. Her focus as a Courage to Lead retreat facilitator is in nurturing supportive communities giving participants the space to explore meaning and purpose. Kim has been an active participant in CCR programs nationally since 2011. Kim has many professional affiliations and frequently presents at national and regional conferences. She is also known as Mimi to seven grandchildren!
JOSH WHITMAN, phd
Josh is a curious heart-centered leader with an entrepreneurial spirit working to live a more examined life. He leverages his rich professional and inner-work experiences to support others as they work to better understand themselves and their impact on their world. While he has always been a spiritual seeker, his focused and intentional journey kicked into high gear after the birth of his first child 13+ years ago.
Throughout his professional life, he has worked in the broad fields of public policy, politics, education, and non-profit administration. Most recently, Josh was the Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Courage & Renewal, which brings Parker Palmer’s body of work into the world. In fact, Josh and Corey became fast friends while working on their facilitator training to lead retreats using CCR tools and techniques. Josh has a Ph.D. in Public Policy & Administration. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife and two boys. He enjoys traveling, time with his family, time outdoors, hiking, photography, and lots of dad jokes.
MARY MESSINA
Mary has been privileged to have a successful career that empowers people and performance. She is a business engagement leader with proven success across a diverse range of experiences. For twenty years Mary has delivered leadership training and practices that consistently deliver results.
Mary is a passionate, energetic innovator committed to the idea that business can be a force for good in the world. Described as a thoughtful and accountable leader, she successfully leads across the organization to influence partners and deliver tangible results.
She is known for her ability to engage individuals and build teams people want to be on.
Collaborators
DR. DON DREW, PhD
Don is a professor and scholar with over 20 years expertise in the field of human enterprise development. His goal is to help others learn to thrive despite personal or career crisis or burnout. Don has experienced a lot of loss during his life and brings a special awareness to others experiencing grief of all kinds. He is a partner in re/MIND LLC, an organization designed to help others find personal meaning, integration, navigation, and development, and is certified as a Three Vital Questions (3VQ) trainer. He is also an adventurer having served a career in the military, traveling to over 50 countries, and being certified as an underwater rescue diver. These days his activities are more limited to cycling and hiking.
He is the Merrick Award winner for teaching excellence and holds two master’s degrees in human Relations and Theology, and a doctorate in Education. Don lives in Edmond, OK with his wife Christy, and is the proud father or “Poppy” to 14 others. He is all about finding peace for himself and others.
AUGUSTA AND DAVID KANTRA
Augusta and David Kantra, married for almost 40 years, are co-founders & co-owners of the Center for Calm Living in Fairhope, Alabama. There, along with their two grown daughters, who are also therapists, they practice psychotherapy and provide a variety of groups & workshops in yoga, mindfulness, personal growth, and life improvement. Both Augusta & David are psychotherapists, advanced Yoga Teacher Trainers (E-RYT 500), and Certified Professional Mindfulness Teachers (CPMT). The Kantras have conducted yoga and mindfulness trainings at their CALM Living Studio, also in Fairhope, Alabama, for over 10 years.
Trained by Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Rolf Gates, Martin Seligman, Phillip Moffitt, and Pema Chodron, the Kantras bring together teachings from psychology, mindfulness, business, and Eastern philosophy to illuminate and instruct others in ways to open the heart and connect the mind, body, and spirit.
CHRISTY VINCENT, phd
Christy is a communication specialist with years of experience in organization development and conflict management. She coaches individuals to increase their interpersonal effectiveness by supporting them as they identify and create the outcomes they desire. She accomplishes this by bringing openness, acceptance, and curiosity to her coaching sessions. Christy is certified to administer several assessments designed to increase clients’ self-awareness, and she is an ACE Certified Coach and a Three Vital Questions (3VQ) facilitator. She has a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Oklahoma and a Certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolution from the Straus Institute at Pepperdine University School of Law. Christy is also an award-winning university professor. Her life's work has been spent helping people to bring the best of who they are to what they do every day. She and her husband Don live in Oklahoma with a wonderful group of “yours” and “mine” who have become “ours” children and grandchildren.
David Freeman
David Freeman is currently the Senior Pastor of First United Methodist Church of Little Rock. He has been in pastoral ministry since finishing seminary at Emory University in 2003. In an attempt to face his own bedevilments of perfectionism and people-pleasing, he began studying the work of Brene’ Brown which continues to challenge and transform him.
David became a Certified Daring Way Facilitator in 2017 and shares this work with other clergy and laity around the state of Arkansas mainly through retreats and workshops. He is married to Katie, who is a therapist, and together they are trying to show their two daughters as much of the world as possible before they leave for college in a few years. After many years of being an avid marathon runner, David’s joints asked him to slow down and spend more time hiking, which he loves. He also loves hanging out with his two best friends, Charlie and Slider.
Kate Ryan Reiling, MBA
Kate has a background in coaching, entrepreneurship, and education. She likes to make sense out of chaos, to synthesize disparate parts into a unified framework. She is a creative pragmatist, an optimistic realist who likes to dream big but can get stuff done (first born, enneagram 3). Kate loves the space between the strategic plan and the detailed implementation, that interstitial world where the work is multi-faceted, the destination unknown and where the next steps require both imagination and systematic decision making.
Kate loves coaching people because she believes in nurturing an individual’s own capacity to lead, to wonder, to dream and to build possibilities beyond what they originally thought they were capable of doing.
She holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a BA from Macalester College. She lives in Minneapolis with her daughter, two dogs, a hamster, three fish and two snails.
