The Speakers

Ananta Ripa Ajmera is founder and CEO of The Ancient Way, an Ayurveda practitioner, Yoga instructor, and spiritual teacher. She serves as Director of Ayurveda at THE WELL, an urban wellness retreat center in New York City that brings world-class doctors and master healers together for a more balanced you. Ananta is author of the award-winning book The Ayurveda Way: 108 Practices from the World’s Oldest Healing System for Better Sleep, Less Stress, Optimal Digestion and More. Her work has been featured on Fox News, ABC News and in Forbes Magazine, Vogue Magazine, Yoga Journal, Reader’s Digest, Spirituality & Health Magazine, New York Magazine, MindBodyGreen, and Elephant Journal.

Ananta deeply studied Ayurveda, Yoga, and Vedanta in a traditional Vedic Indian lineage for 9 years. She presently studies Vedanta with the world-renowned philosopher saint Swami Parthasarathy and Kalari, India’s most ancient form of martial arts, with Baiju Mohandas of Bodhi Kalaripayattu Center in Kerala, India. Ananta has a long family lineage of renowned Ayurveda healers on the maternal side of her family, whose healing legacy she feels grateful and proud to carry forward.

Ananta believes that everything truly worth having in life lives within you and that loving others begins with loving yourself. Her second book is on her own journey of spiritual empowerment and trauma healing through the ancient goddess wisdom of the Vedas. It will be published by Penguin Random House's TarcherPerigee imprint in September 2022. She is also working on a spiritual cookbook full of seasonal Ayurvedic, mentally uplifting versions of your favorite foods.

Getting Grounded: Caring for Your Five Senses

Ayurveda, the world's oldest system of health and healing, has many practices that support you in helping you get grounded by caring for your 5 senses. Join Ananta Ripa Ajmera for an inspiring session that will support you to embrace the power of practice with sustainable, efficient wellness practices for your 5 senses:

* A 30-second practice evoking the sense of smell to help you come back to the present moment when your mind wanders to past traumas or future anxieties

* The art of mindful eating to empower you to digest your food, emotions, information and experiences

* Spiritual practices involving the sense of sight that take only 1 minute and support you to overcome fear and resistances

* A 5-10 minute practice to help you sleep at night, overcome stress and anxiety and practice self-love in a tangible and tactile way

* Special mantras that evoke the power of sound healing

Alex Counts is the author of Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons from Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship (Revised edition) (Rivertowns Books, 2021) and When in Doubt, Ask for More: And 213 Other Life and Career Lessons for Mission-Driven Leaders (Rivertowns Books, 2020), an independent consultant to nonprofit organizations (including the India Philanthropy Alliance), and an affiliated faculty of the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

In 1997 he established Grameen Foundation with the support of Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus and became its President and CEO. He did so after having worked in microfinance and poverty reduction for 10 years, mostly spent living in rural Bangladesh. He served as the President and CEO of American India Foundation in 2016-2017.

Counts was a founding member of the Advisory Council of the Center for Financial Inclusion, and served for 12 years before becoming an member emeritus in May 2020. He has served as the chairman of Fonkoze USA and co-chair of the Fonkoze Family Coordinating Committee. He was a founding member of and served as co-chair of the Microfinance CEO Working Group (which today is the Partnership for Responsible Financial Inclusion). He is a Court Appointed Special Advocate for foster children in the state of Maryland. His blog covers topics related to excellence in nonprofit management and beyond.

Practical Tips and Powerful Ideas to Help Make You a Better Fundraiser

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to empowering and powerful ideas and practical tips about how to fundraise from individuals, family foundations, large foundations, and corporations and then have opportunities to apply them to their own current fundraising challenges and opportunities. Some of the material presented to FFH grantees in a recent webinar by the workshop leader will be quickly reviewed and then built upon, to ensure that both those who participated in that webinar and those who did not can benefit. Making direct appeals to individual donors as well as grant-writing to institutions will be covered in an engaging, fun, and substantive style.

Anya Dillard is an 18-year-old activist, philanthropist, social entrepreneur, content creator, and aspiring filmmaker. She is also the founder of The Next Gen Come Up – a nonprofit organization that encourages young people to explore activism, pursue community service, and raise awareness through creative expression. Anya is best known for helping to organize the largest civil rights protests in her hometown’s history (which garnered an audience of over 3,000 people and over 26,000 social media viewers), co-organizing her town’s first-ever public Juneteenth Celebration, and being appointed as the 3rd black female Student Council President in her high school’s history.

​Following the massive Black Lives Matter protest she and her peers organized in 2020, Anya sat in on meetings with her town’s mayor and helped to review and edit ordinances pertaining to anti-bias training and the behavior of law enforcement officials, racial discrimination in schools, and economic disparities between predominantly black/Latinx elementary schools and predominantly white elementary schools. In addition to that, Anya continued organizing Black Lives matter rallies in partnership with other elected officials and town leaders including former Congressional candidate Akil Khalfani, and West Orange’s first black town councilwoman, Tammy Williams.

When she isn’t organizing, giving back to communities in need, or creating content about social issues, Anya works as a youth mentor and public speaker. She has served as a keynote speaker on dozens of political forums such as The Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative. She has also spoken at countless schools worldwide – from middle schools in New Jersey and Missouri to Universities all the way in the UK – teaching other young people about creative activism, social entrepreneurship, and becoming a leader.

As a result of her many accomplishments and extensive work in the community, Anya has been featured by major media publications, including The Washington Post, CNN, Antiracism Daily, Elle, Seventeen, and Glamour Magazines. While closing out 2020, she was named one of the first-ever Conversationalist Human Rights Award Honorees, was one of the 3 recipients of the BLACK GIRLS ROCK Social Justice Grant, and was named the 2021 New Jersey Association of Student Councils’ Student Leader of the Year.

Since 2003, Judit has been guiding people into the sublime realms of the soul through different healing modalities. A yoga teacher for many years, she now focuses full time on Sound Healing with Tibetan Singing Bowls as she has connected to this beautiful practice at a profound level. Judit is certified by Atma Buti International Sound Healing & Vibration Institute located in Boulder, Colorado, and she has also trained with Katherine Hamer in New York City. In 2021, she has incorporated Tuning Forks into her sound healing practice, making her sessions truly magical. She is certified by The Acutonics Institute of Integrative Medicine. She is also a practitioner of Chinese Reflexology and Crystal Therapy, and teaches Yoga, Meditation and the Five Tibetan Rites.

Judit integrates all her knowledge and passion for helping clients reach their full potential. She feels very fortunate to have had the opportunity to travel to India, Nepal and Tibet to deepen her practice and to experience the the East's mysticism.

She sees clients privately at her home studio in NJ and offers workshops in the USA and internationally with the sole intention that people reconnect to their own hearts and souls' missions in this lifetime.

Sound Healing Session with Tibetan Singing Bowls

We rush through our days as if we are in a race. We barely take time to stop and ponder what is working and what is not in our lives. We often forget about ourselves. We give to others but dismiss our well-being. During this Sound Healing Session, we will take time to pause, go within, and nurture ourselves. It will be a journey inward to reconnect with our essence. It is time to let go, relax and renew.

Using the power of breath, a guided meditation, and the enchanting sounds of the Tibetan Singing Bowls Judit will take you on a journey inward and beyond, inviting you to be your authentic self, happy and free.

Tibetan Singing Bowls have been used for centuries for healing and meditation purposes. They will clear your mind and aid in the process of releasing deep layers of tension and stress stored in the physical and energetic body.

You will receive a handout with some breathing and meditation techniques that you can use at home on your own.

April Lov is a yoga instructor who is registered with Yoga Alliance at the 200 hour level (RYT-200). She has been practicing yoga for over nine years and completed her yoga teacher training and certification in March of 2020 at Honor Yoga in North Brunswick, NJ. She teaches hatha and vinyasa yoga.

Shortly after surviving a then rare cerebral brain aneurysm, April became deeply depressed. She lost hope and her desire to live. That’s when she discovered the healing power of yoga and it’s ability to not only relieve depression, but nurture childhood wounds and trauma, such as, sexual (molestation), physical, mental and verbal abuse, abandonment, disease and insecurities that give way to feeling not enough, unworthy, rejected, unloved and unlovable. Yoga united April to her authentic Self, where love and peace abound.

It was that self discovery that intensified April’s passion to assist others in seeing the value of their worth, the power and the peace they possess and the love they innately are. April desires to help people push pass their past to fearlessly live freely in the now and future.