Sonya Shah
Director, Ahimsa Collective
Sonya Shah is a leader in the restorative justice field. She has trained hundreds of facilitators in trauma healing and restorative modalities, and helps communities design their own group healing processes nationally. She initiated the Ahimsa Collective in 2016, an organization that addresses harm in ways that foster wholeness for everyone by replacing systems of punishment with paradigms grounded in healing, relationship, and love. To get there, the Ahimsa Collective engages with deep trauma healing and restorative justice approaches while being grounded in anti-oppression. They work in deep community with people who have committed an act of violence, survivors of violence, and families impacted by harm. In all of their work, they center agency, liberation, dignity, and transformation. Learn more about the collective here.
Sonya Shah is also a faculty member of Interdisciplinary Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Central to her core values are nurturing community belonging and collective care, healing, compassion, love and transforming harm.
She is a Buddhist, a first-generation immigrant from the Northwestern part of India, and feels most at home in nature. She has two amazing children who remind her what it means to be in love all of the time, and currently resides in northern California.
