Ilana Nankin

Ilana Nankin was in the middle of a Pre-K classroom in San Francisco when she noticed something nobody talks about in teacher training: the stress in her body was living in her students' bodies too. A tense teacher means a tense class. A burned-out educator means a classroom that runs on survival, not growth. She didn't read this in a journal. She felt it every day.

A roommate suggested yoga. She tried it. Something changed. She started bringing breathing exercises into her classroom - not as a wellness add-on but as the substrate of learning - and watched her students' behavior shift in ways that standardized curricula had failed to produce. Social-emotional regulation. Focus. Calm. Not because of a program, but because the adult in the room had finally found one.

So she went back to school. UC Berkeley degrees in Psychology and Education in hand, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study the academic question that had been nagging her since that first yoga class: what actually happens to students when their teachers are not okay? Her dissertation followed first-year teachers longitudinally, tracking how educator stress cascaded into the classroom and how wellness interventions reversed the damage. She finished the Ph.D. in 2015. Her students had already been waiting.

"Train us, Ilana. We need more, this is just the beginning." That's what they said after her wellness workshops. Not a business plan. Not a market gap analysis. Just 34 teachers in Madison, Wisconsin, asking for what they actually needed. Nankin listened, co-founded Breathe For Change with Michael Fenchel, and started what would become the world's only 200-hour Mindfulness, SEL, and Yoga Teacher Training designed specifically for educators.

A decade on, over 15,000 educators have been certified. The programs operate nationwide. A research study by Learn Platform confirmed what Nankin's instincts suggested all along: her programs measurably reduce educator burnout, improve emotional regulation, and strengthen the social-emotional outcomes of students.

The numbers behind teacher burnout make Breathe For Change's existence feel less like an entrepreneurial venture and more like an emergency response. 55% of teachers report they are considering leaving the profession because of stress. The profession loses tens of thousands of trained educators every year - people who spent years in credential programs, student teaching, and early-career classrooms, only to walk out depleted. The pipeline leaks at the most expensive possible point.

Nankin's insight, grounded in her research, is that the system offers teachers mandates without tools. "Be trauma-informed." "Practice SEL." "Build restorative culture." The instructions arrive without the capacity-building to execute them. Breathe For Change exists in that gap - teaching teachers to embody the practices they are asked to model, rather than just perform them on schedule.

The 200-hour training is FAFSA-eligible, which signals something important: this isn't a wellness retreat. It's treated as education. As legitimate professional formation. The training sits alongside a 13-week Human Intelligence Certification and a full Master's in Human-Centered Education, developed in partnership with William Jewell College - a 30-credit, online, FAFSA-eligible degree that Nankin also teaches in as Professor of Practice.

In 2024, she and Fenchel launched "A Work of Heart: Human Intelligence in Education," a podcast that continues to extend the conversation into schools, leadership teams, and the people who train the people who shape children. The show operates as both advocacy and professional development - making the case that human intelligence (the emotional, relational, somatic kind) is the missing layer in education reform.

Nankin's personal practice informs all of it. She's a yogi, a mother of two daughters in San Francisco, and someone who has talked publicly about surviving a 44-foot rock-climbing fall - the kind of story that shows up in a conversation about resilience and vulnerability in ways that no leadership framework can manufacture. The movement she's built is grounded in the specifics of her own life: what broke, what healed, what she went looking for, and what she found when 34 teachers in Madison told her to keep going.

There is a version of education reform that talks about systems change at the level of policy and budget. Nankin operates in that register too - she testified, she published, she built partnerships with districts and colleges. But the center of her argument is intimate: a teacher who knows how to breathe will teach differently than one who doesn't. Start there. Scale from there.

Breathe For Change is also a serious organization. Over 160 people in its orbit. Venture-backed ($340,000 latest round). Annual revenue estimated at $74 million. The model combines teacher certification with professional development contracts, district partnerships, higher education degrees, and direct-to-educator programs - stacked to reach every entry point in the educator career arc, from first-year classroom teachers to senior administrators.

The Sesame Workshop fellowship Nankin held during her doctoral years is a telling credential. Sesame has always operated on the belief that learning and emotional development are inseparable - that you can't teach a child to count without also attending to how the child feels. Nankin is applying the same thesis to the adults in the room. The logic holds in both directions.

In the company's own words: "When you thrive, your students thrive - and together we build a future worth living in." It's a sentence that sounds like a tagline until you realize it's also a peer-reviewed research finding dressed in plain language.