3rd Annual Native Youth School and
Community Wellness Conference
November 17-19, 2021

Kara Bobroff is Navajo/Lakota and began her career as a Special Education teacher in Albuquerque, teaching students with behavioral disorders. She served as Assistant Principal of a low-income school in Albuquerque and a middle school in Marin County, CA. As Principal of Newcomb Middle School in New Mexico, Kara worked with 250 Navajo students and seven reservation communities. She facilitated more than 50 community conversations that led to the founding of the Native American Community Academy (NACA) in 2006, and NACA-Inspired School Network (NISN) in 2014. Under her leadership, NACA has been recognized as a model for effective indigenous education by the New Mexico Indian Education Sub-Committee and has been invited by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to participate in national strategic reform for Indian education.

Dr. De Coteau is a Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) practitioner. TBRI is a therapeutic model that trains caregivers to provide effective support for at-risk children. She is also trained in various other trauma treatment modalities including EMDR, somatic processing, attachment intervention, NMT (neurosequential model of therapeutics), and TF-CBT. Dr. De Coteau has extensive experience working with patients who suffer from complex trauma, neurodevelopmental disorders, grief, anxiety, depression, and suicidal thinking.

Dr. DeCoteau has worked in a variety of outpatient settings and with a diverse patient population, including Veterans and Native Americans. She received the Indian Health Service 2009 Health Professional of the Year Award for outstanding service and the American Psychological Foundation 2010 Early Career Award for providing culturally competent practice techniques for Native Americans and for developing training programs in rural, underserved areas. This year Dr. DeCoteau was appointed by a member of the U.S. congress to serve the Commission on Native Children to help address the challenges faced by Native children.

Aside from clinical work, Dr. DeCoteau has given numerous lectures on how trauma impacts attachment and brain development, in-school strategies for working with traumatized children, and historical trauma. She is a long-standing member of the American Psychological Association, an enrolled member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation and a descendant of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

Teresa LaFromboise is counseling psychologist by training and a professor of education in Developmental and Psychological Sciences in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Her research has focused on efforts of non-dominant racial/ethnic groups to thrive in the face of adversity including acculturation demands, discrimination, and major life challenges.  She has extensive experience in developing and testing school and community-based psychological interventions with AIAN adolescents, as exemplified in the American Indian Life Skills Curriculum (AILS).

Shane Safir is a leadership coach and facilitator who creates brave spaces for tackling educational equity. Shane was the founding co-principal of San Francisco’s June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE), a cutting-edge national model quoted by leading scholar Linda Darling-Hammond as having "beaten the odds in supporting the success of low-income students of color." For more than 20 years, Shane has worked as an award-winning teacher, school founder and principal, and coach, developing hundreds of leaders at every level of the school system. She is the author of the award winning book, Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy School Transformation