Who We Are

Before Jessica Mingus and Rachel Henes became business partners, they were trusted friends helping each other—and for the last several years, hundreds of parents in their local community—navigate the wide-ranging challenges of caregiving amidst constant messages that the way their kids look, sound, play and learn are deficiencies to be fixed. 

Care Lab Collective is built on the foundation of the 450+ member peer support group for local caregivers of neurodivergent and disabled kids that Jessica and Rachel have led and moderated for years. 

With decades of combined experience as social workers, program designers, trainers and facilitators, Jessica and Rachel have spent years co-building and fortifying communities of care that address parents and kids’ complex realities and needs.

The work they’ve done throughout their careers has reached thousands of people across New York City and beyond.

Care Lab Collective has emerged from this powerful intersection between their personal lives and professional worlds—and makes them a powerhouse team full of unwavering conviction, compassion, and radical imagination.

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  • Co-Founder

    Jessica is a mom, community advocate, seasoned organization-builder and social worker. Her work is all about building and sustaining systems of collective care, with a focus on reaching people inside big systems. She has twenty years of experience capacity-building, staffing, and sustaining mission-driven organizations committed to social justice, higher education, and inner/collective wellbeing.

    Jessica founded the SOMA Peer Support and Action Network for IEP Families (PSAN) in 2021—the prototype and guiding inspiration for Care Lab Collective—to fill the critical gaps in her parenting journey in her local community. She moderates PSAN with Rachel and an amazing crew of fiercely loving mamas.

    For 7 years, Jessica led and advocated for the programmatic work of Lineage Project, a beloved NYC non-profit that provided trauma-informed mindfulness programs to thousands of young people inside systems, and the adult staff and caregivers who support them.

    Jessica is a longtime Buddhist practitioner and yogi, and a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher through the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care + Society at UMass Medical School.

    She is the recipient of the prestigious Garrison Institute Fellowship for socially-engaged contemplative leaders committed to building a more compassionate, interconnected and healed society. With their support, she has developed a contemplative framework for caregivers facing complex challenges.

    She earned a B.A. from Princeton University, and an MSW with honors from the Silberman School of Social Work.

    Jessica is co-author of “Unpacking racism, poverty and trauma’s impact on the school-to-prison pipeline” in Strategies for Deconstructing Racism in the Health and Human Services (Oxford University Press, 2016) with child trauma expert Dr. Robert Abramovitz.

    Jessica is grateful for the infinite joy and inspiration of her precious son, family, and caregiving village. When she isn’t pouring herself into Care Lab Collective, she’s writing her first book, Healing-Centered Parenting: A Collective Call to Action….or at step class.

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  • Co-Founder

    Rachel is a social worker, mindful parenting coach, and seasoned facilitator with over two decades of experience consulting and capacity building with school communities. Rachel’s work centers on interrogating the ways that norms and beliefs about achievement, power, and hierarchy trickle down into the everyday decisions, beliefs and mindsets of parents and educators - and exploring ways of creating new possibilities in how we show up with young people and with each other.

    After almost 20 years of developing programs and partnerships as part of nonprofit organizations, Rachel started her own consulting practice, Rachel Henes Consulting, where she leads individual & group coaching with parents, and leads professional development with educators in K-12 schools.

    Rachel has been featured in Psychology Today and recognized as an expert in the best-selling book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It. She is the co-author of ”Preventing Substance Use & Addiction” in New Directions in Treatment, Education, and Outreach for Mental Health and Addiction Journal (2018), as well as multiple curricula on gender, consent, and sexual violence prevention that have reached thousands of youth and adults nationally and internationally. For 8 years, Rachel served as the director of Hallways, a social-emotional health program that reached thousands of students, faculty and parents in New York City’s independent schools.

    Rachel has pursued extensive anti-racist and gender-based violence prevention training from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, the Center for Racial Justice in Education, and A CALL TO MEN. She has received training and/or certifications in Mindful Parenting, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, The Whole Brain Child Approach, Beyond Behaviors (with Dr. Mona Delahooke) & Collaborative & Proactive Solutions, Lives in the Balance Training.

    Rachel co-moderates the SOMA Peer Support and Action Network for IEP Families (PSAN), started by co-founder Jessica Mingus, a community of hundreds of compassionate and fierce advocates and parents of neurodivergent and disabled kids, and the inspiration for Care Lab Collective.

    Rachel holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MSW from Hunter College in New York City. Her most treasured and important work is as mom to her two young children, and to the practice of consciously co-creating what home, family and community looks like.