The Elder Advisory Council serves as a voice for the community and honors the wisdom of our elders whose guiding principles direct the Institute’s activities and development. The Council provides input into better ways to fulfill our mission and works to ensure that our strategies respect the values and philosophy that guide the Institute.
Members of the Elder Advisory Council are representatives of different sectors of the community who have demonstrated the art and wisdom of working toward a meaningful Aging and for betterment of aging conditions.
Our Elder Advisory Council:
Elizabeth Bugental, Ph.D.
Ken Dychtwald, Ph.D.
John L. Levy, Ph.D.
Beth McLeod, M.S.W.; LCSW
State Senator Jackie Speier – CA
Richard Wiseman, Ph.D – Emeritus Board member
Board of Directors
Nader Robert Shabahangi, Ph.D., President & Founder
Nader R. Shabahangi, Ph.D., received his doctorate from Stanford University and is a licensed psychotherapist. His multicultural background has made him an advocate for different marginalized groups of society throughout his adult life. In the 1980's he worked with abused children and teenagers and led anticipatory bereavement groups for Coming Home Hospice. In 1992 he founded the non-profit organization Pacific Institute with the purpose of training psychotherapists in a multicultural, humanistic approach to counseling and to provide affordable therapy services to the many diverse groups living in San Francisco. In 1994, noticing the often inhumane treatment of the elderly living in institutions, he started to develop an innovative Gerontological Wellness Program in order to provide emotional support and mental health care services for the elderly. In 1997, together with his two brothers, Nader opened a residential care home for the elderly in San Francisco called Hayes Valley Care, where he could along with the Pacific institute Internship team implement the Gerontological Wellness Program.
Nader continues to create programs with the purpose of caring more comprehensively for the elderly. In 2002 he helped found Pacific Institute Europe in Warsaw, Poland, in order to bring gerontological and comprehensive care services to the European continent. He was also inspired to explore new ideas for community living and began design of a 'village' concept for older adults he calls 'Elders Academy'. In 2003 he co-founded Elders Academy Press, a publishing program of Pacific Institute and Pacific Institute Europe, specifically dedicated to promoting writings of and for elders.
At the same time Nader also began a program of conflict resolution between Russians, Germans and Poles. Last year - combining his passion for the elderly with his love for photography and philosophy - Nader wrote Faces of Aging as a tribute and celebration of being an elder. He continues this exploration through teaching 'eldership' workshops in Europe. These meetings explore the difference between getting 'old' and growing into the role of an elder and have the purpose of preparing us for old age and eldership.
Alan Klaum, Ph.D. cand., Vice President
Alan brings international expertise to organizational and business development. He is co-author of In Our Fifties: Men and Women Reinventing Their Lives (1993) and is president of the Board of the San Francisco Mental Health Association. In his private practice, Alan brings cross-cultural experience and focuses on adult life transition issues, organizational development and conflict resolution.
Sonja Saltman, M.A., Board Member
Sonja has also been in private practice for 20 years in Las Vegas, Nevada, after training extensively in various humanistic modalities such as Gestalt, Existential, Re-decision Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Group Therapy and Imagery. She is co-founder of Therapy Institute, an organization offering continuing education seminars in principles of the humanistic-existential tradition featuring well-known presenters in the field. Therapy Institute also offered an employee assistance program to local organizations in Nevada.
Sonja, together with her husband Michael, a lawyer, is currently involved in establishing a Center of Conflict Resolution at the Law School of University of Nevada, Las Vegas (a center which intends to combine both law and psychology in offering students knowledge in conflict negotiation. The Center will serve both local and national organizations).
Richard Wiseman, Ph. D., Honorary Member
Professor Wiseman continually searches for innovative links between literature and other disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. Most of all he is interested in how literature whether in the form of prose, poetry or philosophy has relevance for the concrete task of living our everyday lives, a topic he addresses specifically in his book The Therapies of Literature. R. W. Wiseman has traveled widely and studied in New York at Columbia and Hunter College, receiving a Certificat from the University of Strasbourg and a Diplome d'Etudes from the University of Caen. Back in the U.S. he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with postdoctoral study and research at the Sorbonne, Paris, the Thomas Mann Archives and the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich. He later received an M.A. in Psychology at the Professional School of Psychology in San Francisco.
Professor Wiseman's teaching includes the University of Washington, U.C. Berkeley, the C. G. Jung Institute at Küsnacht/Zürich and San Francisco State University where he was Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures as well as Department Chair of World and Comparative Literature. He has also offered extensive private seminars and workshops and has worked with Visiting Nurses and Hospice and Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute as a volunteer. He is a long time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area.
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