Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman is a coach, writer, and all-around passionate creative in many different mediums. Spot her paintings in The PDA Safe Circle™ branding materials! A late-diagnosed PDA Autistic mom of a PDA Autistic Kiddo, Rabbi Shoshana combines her lived experience and PDA coaching experience with decades of congregational leadership, pastoral care, and community organizing to host the transformative PDA Safe Circle™ community. PDA is her current special interest, and it is tremendously fulfilling to get to support others while engaging in her passion in a way that is sustainable for her PDA nervous system. Before diving into the neurodiversity movement, Rabbi Shoshana served congregational and educational roles in the Boston Jewish community, and was a leader in the interfaith climate movement – her previous special interest. Her writing on the spiritual dimensions of the climate crisis has been published in many venues including the New York Times, YES! magazine, Tablet magazine, WBUR's Cognoscenti, and several anthologies. She has two picture books coming out in SPring 2025! The Tide Is Rising, So Are We!: A Climate Movement Anthem, based on the song she and her husband Yotam Schachter wrote in 2015 that has gone viral in the climate movement; and Playground Count Along: For Young Children and Gestalt Language Processors, co-written with Brooke Ringler, SLP. Rabbi Shoshana's hidden disabilities happen to come with a lot of strengths that made school easy and joyful for her. She is an alumna of Oberlin College of Arts & Sciences, The Henry David Thoreau Fellowship, JOIN for Justice, and The Wexner Graduate Fellowship. She received rabbinic ordination from Hebrew College in 2014. For more on Shoshana's activism and writing, visit rabbishoshana.com.

Yotam helps purpose-driven leaders and teams align their minds, hearts, and bodies around leadership qualities that will bring them success. His systemic thinking and extensive personal experience living with PDAers have been instrumental in helping Shoshana articulate The PDA Safe Circle™ Approach. His expertise in Internal Family Systems and transformative group trainings informs the offerings of The PDA Safe Circle™. Yotam has spent 20 years trying to understand the dynamics of human change at all scales – from how individuals develop in courage, compassion, and wisdom to the twists and turns of cultural evolution in teams, organizations, and societies – and he brings that expertise to help his clients create bigger, more powerful transformations with less effort. ​ Yotam’s toolkit draws from a wide range of prior experiences. For several years, he was a leadership consultant and content expert at Mobius Executive Leadership, bringing cutting edge leadership development techniques to Fortune 1000 executives. Previously, he consulted with Dialogos International, surfacing insights about company cultures to support change and break deleterious cycles. Yotam has also been a massage therapist, an investment analyst, a sales operations supervisor, and a student of Jewish history and ritual. Coming from a family of Hassidic Rabbis, Yotam has in fact been steeped in Jewish wisdom on leadership and personal mastery his whole life. ​ Yotam and Shoshana are married, and live together in Boston with Kiddo and their doggy Lulu.

Kiddo is Shoshana and Yotam’s amazing 7-year-old PDA Autistic son, and The PDA Safe Circle™ would not be possible without him. Over the 7 years of his life, long before they knew the name PDA, Kiddo and Shoshana have worked together to help him thrive, eventually discovering the 6 Elements of the The PDA Safe Circle™ Approach together: For instance, The idea of bridging was born as Kiddo was recovering from burnout. Kiddo is proud to have come up with the name “radar box” to describe everything on a safe circle sketch. He says, “I think it was my Autistic brain being very literal when I looked at the computer screen where we had the PowerPoint slide. It looked like a box!” Kiddo helps Shoshana design PowerPoint visuals and this website as part of his child-directed learning at home. His self-awareness about his own PDA from such a young age is impressive and helpful to many. Kiddo’s long term special interests are gaming and YouTube, with a current focus on My Little Universe, which is a 3-D resource gathering game, and the YouTube channel Be Amazed. He is unschooled full time, and is passionate about sharing his positive Autistic and PDA identity. If you’re lucky you may see him pop onto a community gathering or private coaching session!