List of Board of Directors
Since it's incorporation over the summer of 2015, the BAHVN now operates under the leadership of a formal board.
Current Board of Directors as of September 2022:
Advisory
Please see below for additional details on our board members as well as contact info.
Current Board of Directors as of September 2022:
- Ed Herzog (Board President)
- Heather Riemmer (Board Vice President)
- David Hallsted (Board Secretary)
- Ed Chiera (Board Treasurer )
- Tim Dreby (Board Member)
- Oscar Herrera (Board Member)
- Bret Fimiani (Board Member)
- Cindy Marty Hadge (Board Member)
- Kenneth Kozi Arrington (Board Member)
- Adela C.Y. Lee Hsu (Board Member)
- Valerie Chronis Bickett (Board Member)
Advisory
- Manton Hurd
- Nev Jones
- Al Weary
- Sederia Lewis
- Corinne Collins
- Dmitriy Gutkovich
Please see below for additional details on our board members as well as contact info.
Board of Directors
Ed Herzog
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Ed Herzog was one of the co-founders of the Bay Area Hearing Voices Network in 2014 and currently co-facilitates two Family and Friends HVN groups. He lives in Berkeley and has been a documentary filmmaker and labor organizer for 30 years, working primarily with labor unions. He got involved in the hearing voices movement when his son told him around ten years ago that he heard voices. Though he does not hear voices himself, he experienced trauma as a young boy and extreme visual and auditory experiences. He is on the BAHVN board of directors, the NAMI East Bay Board of Directors, and the HVN-USA board of directors.
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Ed Chiera
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Ed Chiera is a family member, community organizer and advocate for the Hearing Voices Movement. He lives in western Marin County. Now retired, Ed worked for over 20 years as a consultant to labor leaders nationally, creating joint labor‐management training programs to upskill union members to meet workforce changes, most notably in health care. Presently, as a volunteer board member, he is guiding BAHVN to gain state and federal recognition as a public benefit corporation, eligible to receive charitable donations and grants.
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Tim Dreby
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Name & Business: Tim Dreby, MFT
Contact Email: tim@specialmessages7.com Contact Phone :510-778-9194 Website: www.timdreby.com Licensed in the State of CA? Yes Clinical Licenses or Certificates: LMFT #45563 Willing to Work Via Videoconference? Yes, on the secure doxy.me platform Able to provide support with minimal use of medications, including tapering or discontinuation? Yes Familiarity with the Hearing Voices Movement? Yes Experience working with children 14 and younger? Some Background or Prior Training in Psychosis: I have 25 years experience working in community mental health and two years of lived experience living with psychosis. For the last twelve years I have been running professional groups that involve exploring psychosis across diagnostic categories in a collaborative manner. From these experiences I have developed a six-hour training for professional to help teach them to accept and explore psychosis. Moreover, I am the award-winning author of a memoir detailing my own experience. Current Approach to Psychosis: I have formulated my own system to address those in emergency. This is based on redefining psychosis into eight solvable components. While I have learned that people who endure what I like to call a special message emergency are extremely culturally diverse, I also have identified eight constructs to which I find most message receivers can relate.. I like to think these constructs form the basis of what might be considered our own inclusive culture. They encourage explorations and detail skills that can be gained to lead the kind of lives we choose. I don't believe in dividing up message receivers and excluding some. I believe we have enough collective experiences with being excluded already. In fact I find many people who experience trauma and other marginalizing circumstances often relate and learn from message receiving experiences. Insurance and Fee Structure: Beacan, Magellan, Medi-Cal, and Optum. I keep my fee low to be accessible to those with limited resources. Tim Dreby is an award-winning author and licensed psychotherapist who works on an urban outpatient psychiatric unit. Tim’s first publication was in 2015, entitled, Fighting for Freedom in America: Memoir of a “Schizophrenia” and Mainstream Cultural Delusions. It chronicles his mid career plight taking on a section 8 management company, police, and black market forces that intermingled to run things. The outcome has been a unique perspective on mental health informed by both sides of the broken tiled corridor. Tim became a social worker in 1993 and worked his way through. Over the past ten years, he developed an extensive training for providers to help them work with people who experience “psychosis” across diagnostic divides. |
Oscar Herrera
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Coming eventually.
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David Hallsted
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Name: David Hallsted
Gmail: mischiefmanagednow@gmail.com Blog: https://www.thevoiceinsidemyhead-myavatar.com/2015/01/ Website: Coming soon School: Associate of Arts degree in Machine Technology from Diablo Valley College, Bachelor Degree in Mechanical/Material Science Engineering from U.C Davis Continuous Improvement Facilitator for 6 years, Bronze level Work: EnergyLine Systems - testing, shipping, assembly for 12 years S&C Electric Co. - Producibility Engineer, QA, RMA, CI facilitator for 18 BAHVN: Board member, facilitate support meetings The voice inside my head - My Avatar. My story is of the love between me and my voice, Ibol. How she protected me when I was growing up to how we work as a team to figure out the universe. When I was young, she was the voice of my invisible friend. Ibol used my voice to sing-song me the things I need to know in the world of the human race. In my teens, she replayed music I liked inside my head to keep away the bad voices that often invade voice hearers. We would go out on adventures exploring the human world. I felt safe, because I was never alone. Throughout my life, I experienced unexplainable events. Ibol used clairvoyant thoughts to assure me to not obsess about the unknown, that later it would be explained. In my thirties, I finally heard her and her friends talk. Over the years, we communicated with each other and grew into friends. Our adventures became more complex as they helped me understand the human world. Ibol taught me how to make timeline records and to examine records to study the physical world. Now I am comfortable to say that I hear many voices and do work with them. In January of 2015, I started a blog of our adventure. At the end of September of 2020, I retired from work for a new adventure. Our current adventure is to decipher Dark Energy and Matter, DEM. My voice, Ibol, allowed me to use her eyes to clairvoyantly see the world of the DEM. With clairvoyant vision and record examination, the patterns of the DEM world interacting with our physical world can be scientifically classified. The future of the human race is to hear voices, because all of Dark Energy and Matter has its own voice. |
Bret Fimiani
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Coming eventually.
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Cindy Hadge
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Lead Trainer
Wildflower Alliance Cindy Hadge is a person who experienced physical, emotional, sexual and medical trauma as a child. She experienced voice, vision, and thoughts of ending her life. Currently Cindy has found the meaning, purpose and connection that she longed for and has made a way of making sense of the senseless and is transforming her tragedies into treasures by being healed when creating space for others to heal. Cindy is a lead trainer for The Wildflower Alliance, offering Hearing Voices Network Approach Trainings, Intentional Peer Support, Alternative to Suicide, Trauma and other trainings, and co-facilitates HVN groups and HVN Family and Friends groups. |
Heather Riemer
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Heather Riemer resides in Berkley California, but she is originally from Hawaii. She really enjoys the Bay Area and plans to continue living here, She is the mother of 3 adult children and one adorable grandson. She also has two sweet kitties. Heather is a person who has extraordinary experiences of many different kinds. It has made her sensitive to other people’s struggles. Besides being a facilitator for the hearing voices network a couple of nights a week, she works full-time at Peers Envisioning and Envisioning Recovery Project or PEERS as it is known, in Oakland California. She has been a long-time advocate of mental health services and envisions a world where people just don't suffer so much. She is honored to be a board member of The Bay Area Hearing Voices Network.
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Kenneth Kozi Arrington
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Kenneth Kozi Arrington is the Programs Outreach Coordinator for Peers Envisioning and Engaging in Recovery Services, aka PEERS, in Oakland, CA. In his role, Kozi reaches out to various Alameda & San Francisco County communities, organizations, agencies and learning institutions that serve and/or educate and provide care for people with mental health challenges.
On the job, he plays a lead role as an Advanced Level Facilitator of the Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) Groups. Other curriculums Kozi co-facilitates are, Buried in Treasure; a support group for folks that have excessive collecting or hoarding issues. A voice hearer himself, Special Messages which is a counterpart of HVN is another group Kozi co-facilitates on an ongoing basis. Mr. Arrington is the co-founder and lead chairperson of the Alameda County, Pool of Consumer Champions, (POCC), Sexuality & Gender Alliance Committee, (SAGA). SAGA is a peer support group and committee for LGBTQI2S Gender Non-Conforming individuals. |
Valerie Chronis Bickett
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Valerie Chronis Bickett is both married to and the mother of a person with lived experience. She started this journey a fan of the medical model and is now thrilled to see it going down. Seven years ago, along with Deborah Jordan, she helped found the Holistic Mental Health Network of Greater Cincinnati in order to have a place to talk about true mental health. A life-long writer and teacher of writing, she is interested in imagining
what some of her ancestors would say if they had left word. |
Advisory
Nev Jones
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Nev is a long-time HVN organizer, former director of Chicago Hearing Voices and Director of Research at Felton Institute in San Francisco. She has been involved in multiple areas of service user advocacy including discrimination in higher education and anti-police violence work. Nev's current research focuses on differences in the experience of hearing voices across cultures, early intervention in psychosis services and peer involvement in research. She recently completed a national survey of HVN facilitators.
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Manton Hurd
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Manton is a Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner working in the public mental health system. He has prior experience working with underserved populations in mental health as an advocate, counselor and nurse. Manton is particularly interested in applying innovative theoretical approaches to improve outcomes for individuals with severe and persistent emotional and mental distress.
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Al Weary
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Al Weary is a father, brother and advocate. Al’s earliest moment of helping others was in the form of his mom making him take bags of food to a neighbor’s home. From that moment Al knew he wanted to help others and over years he has made it his mission, his goal and his passion.
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Sederia Lewis
With a strong passion for her community, Ms. Lewis is an expert by experience. She has worked previously as a Community Health Specialist, and is active as a volunteer with a variety of community agencies. Ms. Lewis is also a student at Merritt College, pursuing a degree in alcohol and drug studies. In addition to BAHVN Voices, Visions and Beliefs groups, Ms. Lewis facilitates Wellness Recovery Action Plan, smoking cessation, and harm reduction tobacco groups.
Corinne Collins
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Coming eventually.
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