Rafi Haham
Rafi Haham is the co-founder of Position Purple and current Leader of Position Purple International. He is also the owner of Nomadic-Mind – training solutions. He graduated with excellence from the Israeli Navy Officer Academy, served as an officer in the navy, and was a ship commander and instructor in the Academy. Over the years he trained many of the instructors in the Israeli Navy Academy.
He has extensive experience as an international organizational consultant, working with business organizations and academies. Rafi consulted for years on projects in the Technion (Israeli Institute of Technology), designed training programs for Intel Corporation and led seminars in over 12 different countries and dozens of business and non-profit organizations. He’s also an instructor for the American Management Association for the past 6 years.
He now resides in New York with his wife and daughter. He’s also an enthusiastic amateur astronomer and explorer of the ‘anatomy of the human mind’.
Eileen McGowan
Eileen McGowan has been an instructor and team member of Position Purple since 1997. She is also a founder member of Feminenza International – a women’s organization. As part of her volunteer work for Feminenza, she traveled a few times to Kenya to work with Community leaders and also with traumatized adolescent girls. She developed and led a two-year leadership program for high school girls in New York and is a champion of Women’s Leadership. She has conducted Position Purple courses in the U.S. Germany and Israel. She brings to Position Purple her valuable experience as an Occupational Therapist, applying ways to unlock the natural wisdom that is encoded in the body, spirit and human faculties.
Eileen lives in NY with her husband and daughter and having been born and raised in Colorado near the mighty Rockies, she loves nature and still enjoys skiing from time to time.
Iskander Sheikh
Iskander Sheikh is the Co-founder, a teacher and a trainer at the Balanced Education Network School in Toronto Canada. The aim of this school is to pioneer a new model of education for children in the Elementary School years.
Prior to this, he worked in finance and was employed by some of the largest multinational companies in France and Canada, but then he decided to follow his heart and commit to the field of education.
Hildreth Grace Rinehart
Hildreth Grace Rinehart is Director of Education and Equine Facilitator at Patch of Diamonds Ranch in Vermont https://www.patchofdiamondsranch.com/ . Grace’s main focus in the P.O.D is on fostering well-being, communication and leadership skills for youth and adults, all through connection with horses and the planet. She has 14 years experience with horse communication, training and riding with a solid foundation in natural horsemanship. Certified as a CHA riding instructor and Vermont Elementary Educator, Grace has been teaching for 20 years in a variety of ways – as a classroom teacher, theater arts and choir instructor.
Although she’s participated in only a few Position Purple activities, Grace recognizes the mutual potential between The Position Purple Approach and Philosophy and the Equine world, and is now developing new Position Purple activities through working with horses. These activities are aimed towards achieving better balance, increased awareness, inner cohesion and many other benefits and are part of the Position Purple Leadership Program. Grace grew up in Toronto, Canada and now lives with her husband in Vermont, spending most of her time at the P.O.D Ranch amidst the beautiful green mountains with their extended family of horses, dogs, cats and abundant wildlife. We are truly joyful she has joined the team.
Kat Patterson
Kat started working with people into Personal Development in the mid 1990’s and created her Personal Development consultancy, Vital Arts in 1998. www.vitalarts.ca She has worked with people of all positions and cultural backgrounds, from executives to youth. Once up on a time, her education took her to McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she explored the fascinating combination of Religious studies, Political science and Philosophy and discovered her acute need to penetrate beyond the limits of academic learning. That passion has taken her around the globe in pursuit of those rare gems of understanding that can allow a person to perceive truth and get connected to deeper meaning in life. Kat considers herself supremely lucky to have benefited from extraordinary mentors and teachers, and it committed to lifelong personal refinement. Kat has a great love of theater and music which permeates all the work she does, infusing it with creative energy. She loves language, is fluent in English and French, and has retained some remnants of Japanese from a time many years ago when she spent a season in Nagano teaching skiing and hitch-hiking around to ancient temples. Kat lives in Toronto with her husband and two children, who always keep her to her promise of continual refinement and development.