Meet The Romi's Way Board

Co-Founder & CEO, Board Member
Sari Bernardo (BA, MA)
Sari is a mother, a yoga teacher, a founder of SAKA Self-Sourcing practised and a Humanitarian and d consultant Aid expert and consultant with 14 years of experience working with the most vulnerable people, mainly children. She has managed programmes and operationas in some of the most challengeing conditions in the world, from conflict frontlines to acute natural disaster contexts in Afghanistan, India, Haiti, Iraq, Georgia, Kenya, Turkey (NW Syria boarder) and the Middle East region. She has worked with some of the best reputable organisations and the European in senior management roles and has spent the last years as an independent NGO consultant.
Sari is a life-long lover of animals and Nature. She is a Board Member of European Equine Welfare Committee (EEWA) and was the owner of Romi- the horse who showed her the way of kindness, compassion and Good Life in a way that harms no humans, animals or environment.

Chair of the Board
Lucy Strickland (BA, MA, PhD)
Lucy has over fifteen years of international development and humanitarian experience in countries with complex and fragile socio-political and multilinguistic settings. Lucy is passionate about early literacy, language, teacher education and community-based education. She brings comprehensive practitioner experience working across the education lifecycle with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other international aid organisations She’s trained as a classroom teacher, teacher educator, bi-lingual and bi-cultural curriculum design and developer, program manager and having served as a technical advisor to Ministries of Education in the advocacy for access to and inclusion of the most underserved and underrepresented groups in education systems. Her field-based experience is reinforced by a consistently strong academic backbone in linguistics and post-graduate studies in Humanitarian and Development Aid. Her Doctoral research is in mother-tongue based multilingual education and literacy development in low-resource settings.

Vice-Chair of the Board
Ana Pinto- Rodrigues (BA, MA, PhD)
Ana is a Portuguese neurodevelopment researcher and a psychologist who received her degree in Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra in 2004. In 2005, she integrated a women NGO (Movimento Democrático de Mulheres - MDM) and collaborated in a European financed project targeting violence among young couples. In that project, she helped to develop different materials related to this problem to be used by teachers at schools. After this experience, she started to develop her work mainly in neurosciences research. She finished her PhD in Biomedical Sciences in 2018, with a thesis addressing a neuro-developmental condition, neurodevelopmental dyslexia. Since 2018 she continued her work in the field of neurodevelopmental disorders, collaborating in several national and international research projects.
Ana is a mother since 2017 and an activist of the researcher’s labors rights (member of ABIC – Associação dos Bolseiros de Investigação Científica) and gender equality (member of MDM).

Secretary of the Board
Vera Guerreiro (BA, MA, PhD cand.)
Vera is a Portuguese Psychopedagogy specialist holding a BA Hons Visual Arts, PG Perceptual Psychopedagogy and M Science of Emotions.
She is a certified trainer since 2004, specialised in Conflict Mediation and Educational Coaching, and from 2005 to 2019 teaches English, Integrated Artistic Expression and Psychosocial Development, for young people at risk, in Santa Casa daMisericórdia de Lisboa.Vera is currently working as project manager in Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Cascais, working towards educational innovation, and developing programmes in education through art and psycho-educational and socio-emotional intervention supported by Cascais City Council.

Board Advisor on Sustainability, Green Care and and Social Farming and a Co-founder of Romi's Way
Claudia Brites (BA, MA, PhD)
Cláudia is a Portuguese co-founder and board advisor of Romi's Way. She has a long curriculum in Green Care and Social Farming areas. As a sustainability professional, Claudia has been an active and enthusiastic advocate for this field of study, both through her own work and developed projects. Acting as a lobbyist in Europe for many topics under the umbrella of sustainability, Claudia has been participating in countrywide and international projects, as an evaluator and coordinator, firmly believing in the need to promote and support the continuous professionalisation of the sustainability area.
The proximity of academic research to the corporate world has been a drive in Claudia's career.She regularly delivers keynotes, seminars, workshops and consistently publishes the results of her research in edited books and peer reviewed journals. With more than 20 publications in the past decade, Claudia currently acts as a consultant to agricultural activities and sustainability services as Head of the Sustainability department at ECOINSIDE – a Porto, Portugal, based tech company specialized in delivering energy saving and sustainable solutions to the industry and agribusiness companies.”

Board Advisor - Media, Communication, Advocacy, Campaigns
Mina Sharif (BA, MA,)
Mina Sharif is an an Afghan-Canadian communications consultant based in Canada. Her background includes over a decade of childrens content development and public service information campaigns in Afghanistan. Her focus on children and Afghanistan offer a unique perspective into developing new holistic approaches towards how we use media to communicate.
Mina is a passionate advocate of networking opportunities empowering Afghan diaspora and her love for the people (children and women in particular) shines through her social and digital media presence.

Board Advisor - Human and Animal interactions and Awareness
Noora Ehnqvist
Noora is a Finnish national, a world-known human-horse trainer, who teachers clinics around the world. Noora teachers body awareness and communication between horses and humans that is based on the subtle wisdom of horses.
She a licensed 500-h RYT Yoga Teacher, Embodied Flow™ inspired instructor and has countless hours behind (and ahead) of holistic body studies with wise teachers. Noora is also an educated FISAF Aerobics instructor and she has always worked with holistic healers. She has over 20 years of teaching experience.