Joody Marks

SF Program Director

Joody Marks is the program director of Gateway Mountain Center's Whole Hearts, Minds, and Bodies program in San Francisco. She has a diverse background in scaffolding operations, strategic planning, and program development that is driven by a strong commitment to health equity, skillfully addressing complex trauma, meditation, and nature-based therapeutics. Joody has over a decade of professional experience steering projects in nonprofit and higher education settings, including at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Farm to Crag, Alchemy Community Therapy Center, California Institute for Rural Studies, and UC Merced’s Health Science Research Institute. She loves collaborating with networks of therapists, educators, public health professionals, and social workers who are representative of the communities they serve. She spent years leading groups of Central Valley youth, much like herself, on life-changing backpacking trips in Sierra Nevada wilderness areas, and worked as a Yosemite Park Ranger for 7 years. 

Joody has facilitated outdoor leadership skill-building and nature connection, as a backpacking guide, youth counselor, and facilitator of sliding-scale wellness retreats in wilderness areas and on farms. For over two decades, she has studied healing justice lineages and trauma-informed modalities, including somatic nervous system regulation, and is a certified meditation and yoga instructor and biodynamic cranio-sacral therapist. One of her favorite things is to go to wild places, give thanks to the land that feeds her and the more than human world, and find ways to share this healing beauty with others.