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! 

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, one of her previous special interests. 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 is the author of two picture books; 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.

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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 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. 

Kiddo is Shoshana and Yotam’s amazing 7-year-old PDA Autistic son, and The PDA Safe Circle™ would not be possible without him. 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 Minecraft. 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 on a Zoom session!

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 Rabbi 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™.
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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.

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Yotam and Shoshana are married, and live together in Boston with Kiddo and their doggy Lulu.