Crossings Collective

The story

For more than 20 years and in six continents, Crossings Collective founder Nelson has worked in philanthropy, tech, research, and public policy to foster innovation for social/environmental impact in AI/Quantum, governance, climate, population health, learning, community development, and spirituality. With the founding of The Crossings Collective, Nelson is turning his attention from large-scale systems change using technology, capital, and policy to an effort that translates his lifetime of work various spiritual lineages and with numerous teachers, to local community building for resilience that centers sacred practices.  He is on the path to ordination in the Soto Zen lineage of Suzuki Roshi through the San Francisco Zen Center. He completed his Bhakti-focused yoga teacher training with Janet Stone, which included time engaged with devotional practice in the main Shiva Temples of Tamil Nadu. He is a student of Dorothy Hunt, one of ten people to receive transmission from Adyashanti, with whom he integrates his Christian, Zen, Vedic, and Shamanic lineages, and Robert Hopcke, the most senior queer interpreter and practitioner of Jungian psychology into spiritual direction. Seeking to translate between scientific and contemplative epistemologies, he is the founder of a study group on Buddhist concepts of dependent origination and agentic AI. He has lived in San Francisco for 15 years, worked at or with numerous Bay Area focused or located philanthropies (The Evelyn and Walter Hass Jr. Fund, The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, The Stupski Foundation, the Stuart Foundation, and the Asia Foundation), served on the Board of PRC, volunteered with the local chapter of the Mankind Project—an initiation-based global men’s movement—for more than a decade, at the Stonewall Project at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation for six years.  He has been a member of the Episcopal Church of St John the Evangelist in the Mission, which focuses on outreach to the unhoused (it houses the Gubbio Project), advocacy for harm reduction, and protection of immigrant rights.  A native Colombian, he works with an elder shaman in his ancestral region of Antioquia.