Deep Gratitude to Our

Beloved Board Members

The Genesis Healing Institute is spiritually held and lovingly guided by three of the most extraordinary beings imaginable! In early 2018, Luana, Tobirus and Riana made the decision to generously offer their time, energy, wisdom and love in order to allow the Genesis Healing Institute to come into existence.

Luana Morales

Board member

Hands of Gaia

Luana Morales is a Birth and Bereavement Doula, Death Midwife, Circle keeper, Officiant, Reiki Master Teacher, and Herbal Apprentice devoted to reclaiming our birth, death, and Afro-Indigenous healing practices. She  creates containers that support  reflection, experimentation, healing, learning, collaboration and joy for our individual and collective liberation be it through an individual sessions, group facilitation, workshops, or  retreats. Prior to her current work as a full time healing arts practitioner and facilitator, she dedicated 18 years to working in human services with individuals in a variety of settings including  residential long term treatment, outpatient, and supportive housing with individuals and families struggling with mental health issues, trauma, addiction, chronic health conditions, and homelessness. She also dedicated 11 years to community based parenting education supporting families affected by substance abuse, mental illness, and trauma. In 2017 she founded Seeds of Our Ancestors, a mobile interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and multi-lineage healing squad.

Tobirus Newby

board member

UC BERKELEY

Tobirus M. Newby (he/him or they/them) is a licensed clinical social worker and the director of the Social Services unit at UC Berkeley’s University Health Services. His clinical practice blends the wisdom of ancestral, indigenous healing with “western” psychotherapeutic interventions. He is an educator with UC Berkeley Extension and the University of San Francisco. In his private consulting practice, Tobirus offers organizational equity and inclusion services and life coaching. He received his Masters of Social Work degree at UNC Chapel Hill and has been practicing curanderismo under the teaching and guidance of Tereza Iniguez-Flores for the last six years.

“What we cannot imagine cannot come into being”

- bell hooks

Riana Elyse Anderson

board Chair

University of Michigan

Riana Elyse Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. She earned her PhD in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Virginia and completed a Clinical and Community Psychology Doctoral Internship at Yale University's School of Medicine. She also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Applied Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania supported by the Ford and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations.

She uses mixed methods in clinical interventions to study racial discrimination and socialization in Black families to reduce racial stress and trauma and improve psychological well-being and family functioning. She is particularly interested in how these factors predict familial functioning and subsequent child psychosocial well-being and health-related behaviors when enrolled in family-based interventions. Dr. Anderson is the developer and director of the EMBRace (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race) intervention and loves to translate her work for a variety of audiences, particularly those whom she serves in the community, via blogs, video, and literary articles. Finally, Dr. Anderson was born in, raised for, and returned to Detroit and is becoming increasingly addicted to cake pops.