Tea Sefer, PMP is an arts-loving, policy advocacy nerd, with a strategy for digging people out of burnout. Tea is well-versed and spoken on topics ranging from genocide denial to strategies for inclusive trans healthcare at an array of conferences and events including those hosted by the Open Society Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Center for International Human Rights, Folx Health, and CNN Newsmakers. They recently completed the Reproductive Health Rights and Justice Fellowship with Rockwood Leadership Institute and have worked in the reproductive rights, health, and justice movements for 15 years. Tea believes in creating sustainable and accountable organizing communities. In 2020, they founded Breathe with Tea, a trauma-informed coaching program for social justice advocates and change-makers looking to develop self- and community-care practices for the long-term fight for healing, justice, and joy in our communities. They come from a line of multi-generation genocide survivors, and in 1992, were forcibly displaced as a baby from Bosanski Novi, Bosnia, and Hercegovina during the war and genocide. Tea currently resides on occupied Nacotchunk Land and aspires to build interdependent communities centered on justice and liberation.

String teacher Octavia Reese, MHI began with the Suzuki method in 1985 at the Detroit Center for Creative Studies. Classically trained and performing for more than 35 years, Octavia has expanded her musical accomplishments to include winning concerto competitions, performing internationally with more than five touring ensembles, appearing as a featured artist on multiple albums, and performing cello for her talent as Miss Michigan at Miss America 2006. Octavia is also a composer and has scored a film, which was featured at IndieNight Film Festival in Hollywood in 2020. Octavia is a published author of sci-fi fantasy young adult series, The Hibouleans, and wrote the “book score” for the series. Octavia is a summer 2023 artist-in-residence at Chateaux d’Orquevaux in France, where she will continue to blend music, art, and writing.

While music is one of Octavia’s many passions, her career is in global health care technology. She is the founder of a digital health startup, holds a master’s in healthcare informatics administration from Northwestern University, and has most recently been accepted into the global health care leadership program from Harvard Medical School.

Octavia is also a mom of three and her family resides in Logan Square, Chicago.

Crystal Oostema is a mother of 5 and has been working with people and their bodies for more than twenty years.

She's a practitioner of Structural Integration (certified in the Rolf method) and has found SI work to be the most intuitively profound and effective avenue to help people re-discover how good living in their bodies can feel! She's also a registered yoga teacher who focuses largely on the therapeutic, alignment-based practice through her training Yoga Works in Los Angeles. She started her alternative healthcare journey at the Chicago School of Massage Therapy in 1999.

Through her professional and personal development she's evolved her work to include a special area of focus in how to nurture and support people who have birthed babies (and people who also have those parts but may not reproduce) to become well-informed in how to treat our bodies well... so they keep serving us in all that we desire for ourselves. Readers note: this is the opposite of whipping your body so it gains visual approval, or so that you can perform to simply serve others through your labor.