Our Origin Story

Care Lab is built off the proven success of a game-changing prototype: A 400+ member peer support group for local caregivers of neurodivergent and disabled kids that co-founders Jessica Mingus and Rachel Henes have moderated since 2022. 

Witnessing the transformative power of this group inspired them to enhance the platform so that caregivers all over the country can learn, grow, and heal from the trials, tribulations and traumas of everyday ableism.

Prior to founding Care Lab, Jessica and Rachel were trusted mom-friends who supported each other through the ups and downs of raising neurodivergent kids. They are social workers and trainers with 20+ years of experience as program designers, curriculum writers, and non-profit leaders anchored in social justice, anti-oppressive practice, and socially-engaged mindfulness. Their work has reached thousands of people across New York City—and positions them perfectly to lead Care Lab with unwavering conviction, compassion, and radical imagination.

  • Co-Founder

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

    Jessica founded the SOMA Peer Support and Action Network for IEP Families in 2022—the prototype and guiding inspiration for Care Lab—to fill the critical gaps in her parenting journey and home community. She co-moderates the group with Care Lab co-founder Rachel + 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.

    She is a Garrison Institute Fellow (2022-24), selected to be part of an incubator for socially-engaged contemplative leaders committed to building a more compassionate, interconnected and healed society. With their support, she is developing a contemplative framework for complex caregiving + a companion book, Healing-Centered Parenting.

    Jessica is a longtime Buddhist practitioner, who serves as the Executive Director of the Community Meditation Center of New York—a global community of lay practitioners seeking inclusive dharma study, contemplative practice and sangha (community) to live life with purpose, compassion, and interdependence.

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

    She is a Qualified Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher through the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care + Society at UMass Medical School.

    She 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.

  • 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 focus and research is on interrogating the ways that cultural norms and beliefs 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 workshops / trainings within high-achieving school communities.

    Rachel 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 violence prevention that have reached thousands of youth and adults nationally and internationally. She is the former director of Hallways, a substance use prevention and social-emotional wellness program that served 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 is the co-host of Parenting Breakdown, a podcast where she and her husband, Matt Borden, create a vulnerable and honest space that speaks to the realities of parenting in our modern culture, and offers practices for slowing down and shifting dynamics that don’t serve us or our children.

    Rachel co-moderates the SOMA Peer Support and Action Network for IEP Families, started by Jessica Mingus in 2022, a community of hundreds of compassionate and fierce advocates and parents of neurodivergent and disabled kids, and the inspiration for Care Lab.

    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.