Samantha Gleisten
Co-Founder
Samantha Gleisten is an award-winning educator with 25 years of experience. She is the current Head of Innovation at Rogers Park Montessori & is a co-founder of HeyBodhi.
About
We built what we needed and didn't have.
HeyBodhi exists because we lived the depletion — and we wanted a way to stay.
The story
Seven Years Ago, Sam was sobbing on a staff bathroom floor.
Crushed under the weight of her students' trauma with nowhere to turn. Years before that, at the beginning of her career, Neesha had fled social work after handling one of Texas's worst child abuse cases. Both had left careers they loved — not from lack of passion, but because these caring professionals were navigating overwhelming emotional weight alone.
In that shared understanding, Sam & Neesha came together to co-found the solution they needed: HeyBodhi.
Sam went back to the classroom, because she found a way to stay. HeyBodhi is our way to help others in similar positions.
Why HeyBodhi
The moment when exhaustion becomes breakthrough.
The Bodhi tree is where Buddha found enlightenment after nearly giving up. We named HeyBodhi after that moment — when the person who almost left finds a reason to stay. When the leader who was carrying it alone realizes they don't have to.
That is the moment we are building for. Every tool, every conversation, every feature exists to create more of those moments — for teachers, for counselors, for principals, for paras, for every adult who walks into a school building and gives everything they have to the children inside it.
The team
The people behind HeyBodhi.
Neesha Nanda
Co-Founder
Neesha Nanda is a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience reimagining K-12 education, specializing in making complex, emerging challenges accessible for schools.
Cliff Schenkhuizen
CTO
Nationally recognized leader with 25+ years of experience shaping technology strategies and advising C-level executives in top organizations across Southern California.
What we believe
These are not aspirations. They are the design brief.
Every feature, every conversation, every decision we make about what HeyBodhi does and doesn't do comes from these six beliefs. We write them here so you can hold us to them.
01
The adults in a school need care as much as the children do.
This is not a soft idea. It is structural. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and empty cups don't fill themselves. A school that doesn't care for its adults cannot sustainably care for its children. That is not a values statement — it is cause and effect.
02
Support that builds dependency isn't support.
The goal of every interaction with HeyBodhi is to give you something you carry with you — a skill, a phrase, a way of seeing — long after the session ends. We are not trying to maximize your screen time. We are trying to make ourselves unnecessary, one skill at a time.
03
A school is a community, not a collection of individuals.
You cannot fix a building one teacher at a time. Culture change requires everyone — the principal who models it first, the counselor who shows it's safe, the para who sees that someone thought of them too. HeyBodhi is built for the whole building because that is the only unit of change that actually works.
04
AI should make humans more human.
Technology earns its place by pushing people back toward each other — toward the conversation they were dreading, the colleague they'd been avoiding, the student they almost gave up on. HeyBodhi is a bridge to human connection, not a buffer from it. If we ever find ourselves pulling people away from each other, we have failed.
05
The people who care most are the most at risk.
The teachers most likely to burn out are the ones who care most deeply. The principals most likely to be depleted are the ones carrying the most for their staff. This is not irony — it is a design flaw in the system. HeyBodhi exists to address it directly, not to celebrate resilience as a substitute for structural support.
06
Joy is not a luxury in education.
It is the condition under which great teaching happens. A teacher who has lost the joy is already halfway out the door — and the students in front of her feel it before she's made the decision. Bringing the joy back is not a wellness goal. It is an academic outcome, a retention strategy, and a matter of basic human dignity for the people who choose this work.
Our stance on AI
We use AI. We are also skeptical of it.
That is not a contradiction. It is the only honest position for a company building AI tools for people navigating emotional labor, difficult conversations, and the weight of caring for children.
We have seen what happens when AI is designed to maximize engagement — the loneliness it produces, the parasocial relationships it encourages, the dependency it builds in people who came looking for connection. We are consciously designing against that.
We don't want HeyBodhi to become your best friend. We want it to make your real relationships — with your colleagues, your students, your family — better.
This means we make choices that are not always commercially optimal. We explain the research behind what we're asking you to do, because informed users build real skills. We design exits into every interaction, because the goal is always for you to put the device down and go back to your life more capable than before you picked it up.
AI in education is not going away. The question is whether it will make educators more capable and more human — or whether it will replace the judgment, the relationships, and the irreplaceable presence that makes teaching work. We are building for the first future.
How we put this into practice
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The AI never pretends to feel
HeyBodhi is honest about being AI — always. We are a tool in service of human relationships, not a participant in them.
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We build toward human connection
Every Conversation Lab interaction ends with you more prepared for the real human conversation — not as a substitute for it. We push you toward your colleagues, your principal, your family. Not toward us.
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We explain the research
When we ask you to try something — a breathing technique, a reframing exercise, a way of approaching a conversation — we tell you why it works. Informed users build real skills. Uninformed users build dependency.
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We track capacity, not usage
Our measure of success is not how often you open the app. It is whether you are becoming more capable, more regulated, and more effective in your work and relationships. If you use a tool once, learn a skill, and never need to come back for it — that is exactly what we hoped for.
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Your data belongs to you
We do not train AI models on your conversations. We do not share your data. Administrators cannot see individual staff conversations — ever. What you say to HeyBodhi stays with you.
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Student data in service of students. Never anything else.
HeyBodhi is built for adults. Any student data collected is anonymized and used only in service of the students — by design, not just by policy.
Privacy & trust
We built the privacy architecture before we built the product.
Trust is not a feature you add at the end. It is the condition under which everything else works. A teacher who isn't certain her conversations are private will never use HeyBodhi honestly. An honest HeyBodhi session is the only kind worth having.
So we made it structural. Administrators cannot access individual conversations — not in a report, not in a summary, not in any form. That is not a setting. It is an architecture decision. It cannot be changed by an administrator, a district, or a contract clause.
We made this decision because we know what happens when the people who most need support don't trust the system designed to give it to them. They don't use it. And another teacher walks out the door.
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End-to-end encryption
All conversations are fully encrypted. No one — including us — can read your individual sessions.
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Admin firewall — by architecture, not policy
Administrators see anonymized, aggregate insights only. Individual conversations are structurally inaccessible to anyone but the user.
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Student data in service of students. Never anything else.
HeyBodhi is an adult platform. Any student data collected is used in service of the student and personally identifiable information is redacted in our system.
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We do not train on your conversations
Your sessions are never used to train AI models — by us or our AI vendors.
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FERPA-aligned data practices
Our data handling is designed to align with the privacy expectations of K-12 school environments.
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Your data belongs to you
We don't sell it, share it, or use it for anything other than making your HeyBodhi experience better.
Stay in the job
you love.
For educators who need support right now. For school leaders ready to build something that lasts. HeyBodhi is here for both — because the adults in your building deserve the same care they give every day.
Pilot access is free for 3 months · Eligible for Title II & Title IV · No commitment required for the demo