Amanda Lynch

Amanda Lynch is a trauma-informed leader, community healer, policy advocate, and author whose work sits at the intersection of racial history, public health, and healing-centered practice. For more than two decades, Lynch has shown up in the communities that systems were not built to serve as a classroom teacher, prevention specialist, doctoral researcher, and founder with one consistent conviction: healing requires addressing the root, not only the risk.

She is the founder of Rethinking Resiliency and The Safety Lab, a 501(c3) nonprofit, and the creator of the Soil Framework, supported by the AIR method (Awareness, Intention, Response). Lynch holds a BA in African American Studies and an MA in Teaching from Mary Baldwin University and is completing her EdD in Community Care and Counseling: Traumatology at Liberty University.

As a homicide survivor who lost her husband Marcus to gun violence, Lynch has walked the long and nonlinear road of grief, and that journey informs everything she builds. Her work inside correctional facilities brings healing-centered practice to those navigating their own experiences of loss and survival.

Lynch is the founder of Find Your Float, a healing-centered family aquatic literacy program designed to address the intergenerational transmission of aquatic fear and exclusion in Black communities.

She is the author of more than a dozen children's titles with over 26,000 copies sold, including "Off the Deep End," "Breathe Baby Breathe," and "My Ancestors' Wildest Dreams." Her adult memoir, "The Soil That Holds Us," is forthcoming. Lynch's work has been featured on CBS 6, NBC12, WRIC, VPM, and "Inside Edition." She is a Yale National Initiative Fellow, YWCA Richmond Outstanding Women in Education honoree, and Style Weekly Top 40 Under 40 recipient.