Our Staff

Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Project Staff

Cynthia Jurs, Executive Director

Cynthia is an authorized Buddhist teacher of “engaged Buddhism” who received formal Dharmacharya transmission from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh in 1994. She has studied with many great Buddhist teachers and has spent much time in retreat practicing in both the Tibetan Vajrayana and Zen Buddhist traditions for 30 years. In 1990 she was introduced to the hermit and meditation master Ven.  Kushok Mangden, Charok Rinpoche, a 106-year-old lama living in a cave in Nepal and received the practice of the Earth Treasure Vases – a practice she has been carrying out ever since. She directed and produced the film, Turning Prayer Into Action: Indigenous Grandmothers Meet the Bioneers. She is president of the nonprofit organization, Alliance for the Earth, and directs the Open Way Sangha in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she practices meditation with others and leads retreats, rituals, classes and ceremonies.

Raji Mandelkorn, Media Manager / Spacebridge & Youth Communication Council Coordinator

Raji grew up in an Integral Yoga Ashram celebrating the beauty and truth in all religions. She maintains her yoga and meditation practice and is a certified Integral Yoga teacher. She received a BA in Documentary Studies at the College of Santa Fe with a focus on film production. Her senior thesis documentary film project, Amateur in Technoland, explores the pervasive environment around communication technologies, an environment in which the young adult and youth generations of today are living and growing up in. For this project, Raji conducted extensive research on new media platforms, social networking, community appraisal, and information distribution via cell phone and internet. She has since collaborated on television shows and independent feature films including The Last River, an environmental documentary about water challenges facing the Southwest. She hopes to continue to create conscious media that educates and inspires change.

Christian Leahy, Communications Support

Christian spent her childhood seeking refuge in the beauty of the Great North Woods of New England. A fierce love of the wild has been her guiding passion since. Currently, she is a professional writer, activist and the outreach coordinator for Split Estate, a feature-length documentary that maps a tragedy in the making as citizens in the path of a natural gas drilling boom in the Rocky Mountain West struggle against the erosion of their civil liberties, their communities and their health. Leahy is the former executive director of the New Mexico Women’s Foundation. Prior to that, she served at the leading edge of progressive social change at Bioneers. In addition to work in communications and development, Leahy created two media-based programs at Bioneers, the Bioneers Moving Image Festival and Reel Change Agents: young people + cameras = changing the story.

Judy Herzl, Organizational Development

Judy is thrilled to be part of the team bringing the Earth Treasure Vase Project into fruition. Judy is an artist, a designer, and a marketing specialist. Being able to use her marketing and outreach expertise in service to empower communities in their own healing brings her great joy. Judy has designed marketing and development strategies for businesses involved with eco-tourism, individual entrepreneurs, as well as for a local economy-based non-profit in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has produced materials for cultural and environmental organizations and designed books on water, art, film, and Hopi children’s stories. She has been a student of meditation for over 30 years, and is greatly moved by the universality of the practice and ritual of the Earth Treasure Vase, as it touches communities all over the globe.