Our Leadership Team
Devoted to Service
Jennifer Alyse Kryder
Board President
Jennifer Alyse Kryder is a seasoned portrait photographer, Kundalini Yoga Instructor, and Creativity Revivalist offering multi-disciplined Somatic Creativity tools for professionals wanting consistent access to their creator flow.
Her blend of artistry, and study in relational neuroscience, nervous-system regulation, movement therapy, and ancient practices is condensed into tangible tools designed to open channels into energy and inspiration – two crucial forces for riding the waves of adversity and creation.
For more than a decade, Jennifer Alyse has photographed celebrities, thought leaders, artists, speakers, and entrepreneurs (and often, random, beautiful strangers) from around the world. A percentage of proceeds from her Artist Portfolio go to support Women’s Rights Organizations.
She specializes in Kundalini Yoga and nervous system regulation through the fascia, has developed a comprehensive 300 hour yoga teacher training that has been accredited by the World Yoga Federation. She’s been a student of yogic philosophy and practices for over twenty years, and a facilitator of movement and creativity workshops since 2007.
Jennifer Alyse has taken full advantage of her business degree and entrepreneurship focus from Arizona State University. She has lived up and down the East and West Coasts, and has recently come full circle, returning to her home state of Arizona with her husband, Kevin and dog, Arlo.
Jennifer shares:
Growing up, I was never taught that I had any “life-needs,” let alone that my personal life-needs mattered, and I didn’t have the skills to set healthy boundaries.
The tools I have cultivated from doing this work under our Steward, Vika Miller’s guidance continue to bring me the ability to face any conversation and relationship with greater peace, awareness, and understanding, and to free me to fulfill my greatest potential, including my ability to contribute to a world where we evolve consciously as a species.
Through this work I have developed the tangible ability to remain anchored in a grounded, calm state while navigating misunderstandings with curiosity, ease, and grace. This has deeply impacted the well being of my marriage and relationships, both personally and professionally.
The ripple of these skills extend to all I interact with.
I strongly believe that when we have the skills to know our internal landscapes, and have tools to be in a shared space that honors others, we can truly cultivate peace on Earth.
Tom Sem
Board Treasurer
Tom Sem is a semi-retired mechanical engineer who’s deeply aligned with Thriving World Community’s purpose of accelerating personal and collective healing, and cultivating a more compassionate, interconnected, workable human world.
He’s inspired to bring his lifelong commitment to creativity, disciplined inquiry, and wise systems design to his service on Thriving World Community’s Board of Trustees.
Tom has more than four decades experience working with complex mechanical and environmental systems, including designing, testing, and bringing to market advanced technologies to reduce emissions and support greater environmental sustainability.
His career has included senior engineering roles at Thermo King (Ingersoll Rand), international leadership as the North American Representative for Proventia Emission Control—a Finnish company focused on developing green exhaust systems—and founding his own green engineering firm, New World Engineering, LLC. He is also the inventor or co-inventor on six U.S. patents, and has authored multiple peer-reviewed technical papers.
Many of Thriving World Community’s core teachings have made a profound difference in his own life, and Tom is honored and excited to support TWC’s work making these teachings more widely available in the world, in service to the long-term well-being of people, communities, and the planet.
Victoria Curtis
Board Secretary
Victoria Curtis is a visionary leader with two decades of experience in live-action commercial production. As the founder of Line by Line, she has worked alongside renowned production companies to guide teams in securing hundreds of high-profile, award-winning advertising campaigns globally.
She has particular expertise in building collaborative teams, fostering ethical leadership, and delivering exceptional results that honor both creative excellence and human values.
Thriving World Community’s transformative mission and education has been foundational in shaping Victoria’s personal and professional moral compass. Under Vika Miller’s guidance, Victoria embraced the language of reciprocity—the understanding of our shared rights to thrive within ourselves and in relation to others.
In addition to her extensive work in production, Victoria is the founder of Align Alliance, a collective dedicated to mutual support and the promotion of ethical practices in artificial intelligence applications across creative industries. She is committed to responsibly integrating AI tools to amplify human creativity, preserve individuality, and contribute positively to a future where technology enhances our shared humanity.
As a founding board member of Thriving World Community, Victoria brings her passion for ethical innovation, her dedication to intentional relationships, and her drive to support TWC’s mission of empowering individuals to reclaim their right to thrive. She is honored to contribute her skills and vision to an organization focused on building a more inclusive, compassionate, and sustainable world.
Audrey Schwartz
Board Member
Audrey Schwartz, LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker who’s drawn to communities and practices that value authenticity, mindfulness about how we affect one another, and mutual care. She deeply aligns with Thriving World Community’s emphasis on living with integrity, cultivating emotional truth, and acting in ways that meaningfully reduce harm, both personally and systemically.
She brings nearly 20 years of experience in counseling and nearly a decade of experience in palliative care, hospice, and grief work, supporting individuals and families through trauma, serious illness, loss, and major life transitions. Her professional path has consistently placed her in emotionally complex spaces where steadiness, nuance, and thoughtful engagement are essential. She has an extraordinary capacity to listen deeply, hold uncertainty with care, and support people in navigating difficult conversations with clarity and respect.
Audrey has a particular gift for attunement—tracking nuance, sensing what is unspoken, and offering steadiness in moments of uncertainty or strain. Alongside her clinical expertise, she contributes a creative sensibility: noticing patterns, synthesizing ideas, and communicating with clarity in ways that feel accessible and human.
She’s honored to support TWC’s work of cultivating spaces where depth, mutuality, and healing can take root and blossom.
Vika Miller
Steward
Vika Miller’s deepest devotion and Calling has always been to help (re)create a world where we can all genuinely thrive.
For her, it’s our birthright — both personally and collectively — to thrive in a sustainable, attuned dance of connection with the Community of Life on Earth.
Vika’s journey into this Stewardship began when she was 8 years old. Her 11 year old brother had “crossed the line” with a deeply hurtful betrayal, and in her pain and outrage she retaliated by calling him a cruel name, deliberately intending to hurt him back.
And then fell to her knees with the predictable agony any empath feels, when causing hurt.
But her life was changed forever by what happened next.
A Voiceless Voice spoke to her, saying, “You don’t pass on to others, the hurt that’s done to you.”
The Voice also showed a Vision of her speaking before 20,000 people, sharing these and other fundamental truths, and offering a way to live in the wonder of attuned, responsive connection with Source, Self, Others, and the Community of Life on Earth.
This has remained the purpose and Calling of her life, ever since.
Vika began her “formal” study at age 12, just after learning the scientific method in her 7th grade science class. She immediately recognized that, if she told herself the truth about everything, including anything that was “wrong” with her, she’d be able to discover how Life was meant to work, how she could be truly happy with other humans, and how we can fulfill on the vision of Heaven-on-Earth that she Knew in her bones was our birthright.
(Understanding that, as a 12-year-old, all she could see of the unworkability of the modern world was the hurt-passing relationships all around her, at home, at school, and in her neighborhood’s families.)
Although she read the bible at age 9, Vika couldn’t connect with the notion of a punishing God who — if human — would be jailed for abuse. Vika has always been guided by a deeply felt sense of what is and is not Aligned with Source.
It is this Felt Sense that is the Source of the extremely rigorous standards and feedback that dictate her personal integrity, and is the Source of her spiritual insight and discernment.
Sadly, there was no pre-set path for her to follow, no wise adults around her, no institutions that could offer greater guidance or wisdom than her own inner Felt Sense, as she sought how to learn what she needed in order to be able to fulfill her Calling.
She encountered her first spiritual teachers when she was 16, in books: M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled; Further Along The Road Less Travelled, and Hugh Prather’s Notes on Love and Courage.
As she continued on her path, learning not only how to thrive but how to create thriving in the world, she attended Carleton College, where she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and Education, with distinction honors for her senior thesis. She went on to earn a Master of Arts Degree in Economic Development and Social Policy from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs — an important part of her search for ways to help our institutions contribute more effectively to human thriving.
At Carleton Vika fell in love with a Jewish man, and quickly felt deeply at home with Judaism’s belief that not only our thoughts but also our words and actions are an essential component of our spiritual characterr and what we create in the course of our everyday lives.
She began studying The Course in Miracles around 1993. Then in the midst of her second cycle of the Course, in 1995, a friend introduced her to Conversations with God (Book 1). In these, Vika began to find her true spiritual home.
In her mid-20s, Vika served as Vice President of Operations for a startup behavioral health consulting firm that grew into a nationwide organization under her direction. It was here that Vika discovered her gift for empowering people to do extraordinary work, as she directed up to 36 staff executing complex innovative projects (380 programs over 82 locations processing 10,000 pages of data per month, to support clients’ development of more effective mental health and chemical dependency programs). Many of her staff praised her management skills, saying Vika was “the best person I’ve ever worked for.” (Some became part of her heart’s family, and are still in her life today.)
During this period she also became a partner in The Himmelman Consulting Group, a public/private/nonprofit collaborative facilitation consulting company helping to close gaps and improve access to human services in Minnesota. Her clients included the Minnesota Head Start Association and Minnesota Community Action Association.
Vika found her first in-person spiritual teacher in Rev. Ken Williamson, in 1997 at Unity South Church in Bloomington, MN. It was a stunning, transformational experience for her to hear her deepest truths being spoken live from the front of a room for the very first time.
It was (not coincidentally) around this time that Vika began to learn how to fully accept and embrace her own humanity, and to be open and real with other people about it. (Before this time, she’d been white-knuckling trying to be “perfect,” both to avoid doing anyone harm and to try to be worthy of belonging.)
Ever since then, she’s been devoted to living with shared humanity, transparency, and self-compassion alongside her lifelong devotion to being accountable for her direct impact on others.
Then around the later 1990s, lightning struck: Vika encountered Nonviolent/ Compassionate Communication (NVC) for the first time. NVC contributed essential missing elements that powerfully illuminate how we human beings are designed to connect, and how conflict can be resolved at its roots, and transformed into greater trust, effectiveness, and joyful connection.
Vika reinterpreted some key elements of NVC in a groundbreaking way, making a major contribution to the global NVC community by recognizing that NVC’s “needs” are every living thing’s pathways to thriving; changing the order of NVC’s 4 steps (because who can make a genuine observation when they’re upset? — which is when we most need NVC!); and recognizing that thriving is the goal of everything any living thing ever does. Vika has integrated and practiced these thriving-focused and –adapted core NVC distinctions in every aspect of her life and work, ever since.
In 2011, Vika became a partner in Rose City NVC, and within 4 months grew that practice into the largest NVC training organization in the state of Oregon.
Vika has taught NVC to residents serving life sentences in Oregon’s State Penitentiary (a maximum security prison) and Columbia River Correctional Institution. She’s proud to be a former Executive Director of the Oregon Prison Project.
In 2013, Vika founded the Thriving Life Institute, LLC, through which she developed her thriving-based educational materials and offered coaching, mentorship, personal development, and relationship literacy skills to individuals, couples, families, organizations, and communities.
In 2013, Vika began studying the integration of NVC, Neuroscience, and Attachment with Sarah Peyton and Susan Skye. Discovering what’s behind the harmful behavior and momentary lack of choice that arises when our human brains are alarmed and reactive (fight, flight, appease, or freeze) provided the revolutionary paradigm that made it possible to not only fully understand and heal past harm, but charted the pathway to truly effective, full-spectrum human thriving. Vika owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Susan and Sarah – they have made Heaven on Earth relationships and thriving possible, not only for Vika, but for all of her clients, students, and community members.
Most people who experience the teaching Vika shares claim that, “every person on the planet needs to know this stuff.”
Vika agrees! And for many years, she’s longed to be able to offer the teachings she’s discovered to as many people as possible — regardless of their financial circumstances.
With the formation of Thriving World Community, she’s now deeply honored, humbled, and excited by the outpouring of partnership and support from her students to fulfill her lifelong Calling — to create a modern world where everyone THRIVES, without dominating, objectifying, or exploiting people, animals, ecosystems, or the Earth.
When she’s not sharing her passion for midwifing thriving lives, amazing relationships, and life-sustaining policies and systems, you can find Vika joyfully biking the Minneapolis chain of lakes; dancing Argentine tango and country 2-step; cooking delicious grain-free food (that’s dramatically expanded her thriving healthspan); kayaking down Minnehaha Creek; and communing with cetaceans and fuzzy mammals as often as possible.
You can connect with Vika in Minneapolis, MN; Portland, OR; online; and nationally and internationally by invitation.