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Who We Are
Board of Directors

Josh Underhill, President

Many of you recognize this face and know that Josh Underhill has been with OHOM for 10+ years as a participant in our programs but is now on the other side! “I said early on in my participation with OHOM that I would continue and get involved with the organization that made such a difference in my life. I want to continue this legacy, Johnny’s legacy, and become more. My passion is the theater program but expanding everything within the arts is the goal. I bring a unique perspective of real experience to OHOM that I know will be invaluable.”

Lauren Scher, Secretary

Lauren is thrilled to join the board at OHOM. Lauren currently serves as the Program Manager for a statewide non-profit and has a MPA from Baruch College. She is committed to the arts and is excited share her passion with the entire OHOM community.

Barbara Chen, treasurer

Barbara Chen is a retired CFO who believes art is essential “soul food” for all of us and supports the arts by sharing her finance and administrative skills with arts organizations.  She enjoys landscape design and growing as much food as possible.

Prabu profile pic

Prabu Muruganantham

Prabu grew up in a small village near Madurai in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu. He considers himself lucky for the rich and vibrant childhood that his village nurtured through its numerous myths, rituals and traditions. Russian novelists, German philosophers, American naturalists have all influenced and shaped Prabu as much as his Indian culture. He aspires to write fiction.

Prabu is creator/director of “In the Beginning”.  

Dick lounging on a park bench with a big grin on his face, arms and legs crossed.

Dick Willis

Dick’s goal is to expand our mentorship services through the Alumni Network and ‘In Time of Need’. He is a long term care ombudsman for the state of Oregon and delivers Meals on Wheels daily. He’s currently working with his grandkids and great grandkids on computer applications development.

Staff & Program Leads

Carla Grant, Executive Director,
Up a Creek Theatre

Due to her life-long love of theater and devising shows, Carla Grant was offered an opportunity to create a performing arts program at Coffee Creek in 2014. She accepted. She became the Executive Director of Open Hearts Open Minds in 2019. She relishes the process of finding empathy and creating opportunities to share because of enrichment, enlightenment and most of all loving it.

DENISE BARE, COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR

Denise Bare was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest living in the Portland Metro Area for the last 32 years. Resurrecting her life from the ashes of previous mistakes, OHOM has a deeply personal connection for her as she found her joy in theater while serving a sentence at Coffee Creek. Today she spends her time mentoring women in recovery. She loves hanging out with friends and family, enjoys doing art and her biggest loves are her 6 grandchildren and her puppy, Carter Romeo McNoodles.

Don Kern, Uke 'N Play

Don Kern is co-director of Up A Creek Theatre. He’s been involved in many local theater productions, working on tech, performing, producing, writing, directing.  He’s also a long time community activist, volunteering on environmental issues, gay rights, workers’ rights, economic justice.  Prison theater is the perfect blend of those two passions. 

Jude Russell, Dialogue Group

For work: professional artist for 25 years doing commissioned art for The Smithsonian Institution, Boeing, First Interstate Bank, among many others; English teacher to at-risk high school students. For helping others: mentor to at-risk teens for 7 years; English tutor to adult Hispanic learners 6 years; volunteer with Habitat for Humanity to five different states in the south; co-facilitator of dialogue group at TRCI since 2015.
For play: serious bike rider, hiker, skier, snowshoer, and stand up paddle boarder.
What she loves most: going to prison.

Kristen Sagan in a red cap

Kristen Sagan, Dialogue Group

Kristen attended her first performance at TRCI in 2013. In the Q&A session after the performance she heard the men using the word “love” with each other and knew she had something to learn from them. She became a Group Dialogue facilitator in 2014 and continues to find this the most rewarding volunteer work she’s ever done.
 
Outside of OHOM she enjoys walking, dancing, practicing yoga, exploring spirituality, connecting with friends, and crunching numbers for small businesses.
All smiles in the dappled sun

Hanna Gentile, Dance & Movement

Hanna is a multidisciplinary movement and visual artist who is passionate about facilitating accessible arts education to welcome self-reflection, collaborative storytelling, and community care. She believes everyone can find joy and confidence in dance and loves to explore the power of movement as personal and community ritual. Hanna brings over twenty years of dance experience and has spent the last several years developing dance curriculum that seeks to empower adults with physical and intellectual disabilities. She also holds degrees in Theatre Arts, Art Practice, and Arts and Letters from Portland State University. In her free time, you may catch her hiking, reading, drawing, or trying seemingly every food cart in Portland.

Marina smiles into the camera. Paintings on the wall behind her.

Marina Watson, Creative Writing

Marina is a recovering perfectionist that is passionate about living authentically as her creative self. She loves cultivating honest conversations, is committed to living whole-heartedly, and has a large appetite for art in all its forms—with a particular taste for reading classic English literature, getting down on some popcorn while watching indie films, and rap.
After graduating from Harvard and a whirlwind career in tech, she has recently started to pursue a long-standing interest in creative writing and to take action on social justice causes that matter most to her. Marina finds nothing more beautiful than people living as and expressing their real selves and is honored whenever she gets to bear witness to it.

close up of TJ, huge smile, holding an ice ax on a beautiful sunny day on the mountain

TJ Jaffe, crci music

TJ enjoys the strange and beautiful properties of letters and numbers. For example, when she
wrote the date “2/22/22” on the whiteboard of the high school classroom where she was
teaching English, she also wrote “Desmond Tutu Day,” which, unfortunately, doesn’t exist yet.
Nevertheless, on that date she honored the late great theologian and human rights leader from
South Africa by teaching dialogues from The Book of Joy. The joy Archbishop Tutu and the
Dalai Lama describe in that book is an important companion to the revolutionary love that
guides TJ’s life. Her good luck began in Salem, Oregon, where she was born. It increased in
Talbot, Portland, and Eugene, where she graduated from South Eugene High School. It
increased again in Chicago, where she went to college and graduate schools, taught, and
raised her five children. She likes to read, write, play music, and climb mountains when she’s
not teaching Lyric Writing at CRCI. The most dangerous people TJ knows are not incarcerated.

Troy looking into the distance while standing in the woods

Troy, Scripts for Screen & Stage

Troy is a writer of fiction and poetry. They are also an all around theater person with degrees in theater and writing. Troy believes in the transformative and freeing powers of art and creative expression! And that everyone can add vibrant substance to the conversation.

When Troy isn’t workshopping stories at CRCI or typing up scripts for AICs, he is working, shooting hoops, skateboarding, reading, writing, and/or watching football.

Project Leads

kYLE YOSHIOKA, GRANTs Manager

Kyle has an extensive breadth and depth of experiences from nonprofit arts management to health equity research to yoga teaching and many areas in between. As a grant writer, he has helped numerous mission-driven organizations and individuals alike win funding for community-based projects. When he isn’t helping OHOM acquire grants for their life-giving work, he is a ceramicist and creative writer.

Deb DesLaurier headshot

Deb DesLaurier, Alumni Network liaison

On July 16, 2011, Deb was sentenced to 64 months to be served at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, OR. Approximately 14 months into her incarceration, she lost the love of her life to cancer. As a result of her loss and her desire to heal the pain, she signed up for a program offered by Open Hearts Open Minds. It was there she fell in love with her life once again.

“OHOM gave me a voice in an open circle where my voice did not exist within the walls of prison. My story is an amazing story of love and compassion.”

PRASANTH MURUGANANTHAM, Video Engineer

My name is Prasanth Muruganantham. I am a Freelance Audio Engineer from India. I am passionate about sound scape designing for any audio-visual media, whether it is films, music albums and videos or games. I have worked as Sound Effects Editor and Sound Designer for several Bollywood films.I enjoy collaborating with music directors on songs and albums. I have also worked on a few North American projects, including the sound design for IN THE BEGINNING, produced by OHOM.

Plus the mountain of volunteers that make it all happen.
Are you or someone you know interested in joining our board?
nominate someone

Are you or someone you know a social justice advocate with an interest in helping Oregon’s incarcerated men and women? If so, OHOM (Open Hearts Open Minds) would appreciate your nomination for individuals to join our board of directors. Board members serve critical roles for OHOM including:

  • A champion for our mission, values, service, and story to the community

  • A steward of key relationships between OHOM and the communities we serve

  • An informed collaborator and inquisitive partner with our leadership team in making decisions on policies, practices, and other organizational matters to achieve our goals

In addition, we hope your nominations will consider the current need of the board in the areas of nonprofit leadership, human resources, and fundraising. Diversifying the perspectives and skill sets of board members is central to ensuring that we have a board that can support our work, provide mentorship, and stand beside us as we move into the next chapter of OHOM’s story. We would like to expand our board to include people with lived experiences (former Adults In Custody), people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian or other members of the global majority and young adults.

If someone comes to mind for you, please use this form to make your nomination. Nominees do not need to have prior board service experience, but if they do, it’s important that they understand OHOM is a place where we expect folks to roll up their sleeves and be part of the team.

Thank you for helping us in our search! We will invite nominated individuals to formally apply to join the board.