Michael Mendizza
Founder & Executive Director of Touch the Future
1685 Copenhagen Dr.
Solvang, CA 93463
www.ttfuture.org
www.nurturing.us
michael@ttfuture.org
Michael is an author, educator, documentary filmmaker, founder of Touch the Future, a nonprofit learning design center, the executive producer of the Nurturing Project, a revolutionary approach to parent-mentoring and support, and co-owner in ZFolio Gallery in Solvang California.
The inspiration for this work emerged from personal and collaborative relationships with physicist David Bohm, philosopher J. Krishnamurti, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Ashley Montagu and a wide range of scientists, authors and educators.
Michael’s passion is in applying research on optimum states of learning and performance, what Athletes call the Zone, researchers call Flow and children call Play to parenting and education. Learning and performance are state specific. Optimize the state and great performance flows naturally. This is especially true in the adult-child relationship.
Michael’s book Magical Parent-Magical Child co-authored with Joseph Chilton Pearce, describes optimum states and how these states impact learning and performance. If being in an optimum state is important to professional athletes, imagine what this could mean to parents, childcare providers, educators, coaches and the children they love.
Michael founded Touch the Future, a nonprofit learning design center, to apply this model of optimum experience to parenting, coaching and education. The primary focus of Touch the Future is The Nurturing project a system that revolutionizes the way local communities support and mentor parents and the people who car for young children.
Michael has over twenty-five years of professional experience producing film, video, print and interactive media programs for public education, medical research, corporations, national and international television broadcasters, UNESCO and private foundations.
He writes and speaks on varied topics including Media and the Brain, The Next Frontier in Education, Birth, Bonding & Brain Development, Transcendent Mentoring of This and Future Generations, Who Do We Think We Are (on the origins of self and its limitations), Science, Story, and Creativity (on the critical importance imagination and its development), The Origins of Love and Violence and The Intelligence of Play.
At ZFolio Gallery Michael contributes his artistic vision in the form of large format, limited edition ‘giclèe’ (canvas) images of natural patterns, colors and textures, often contemporary, abstract floral images reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe.