Welcome to the blog of the Compassion Institute! We hope to make this blog an active forum for community discussion. We welcome your contributions and look forward to having contributions from CCT teachers around the world. If you would like to write for the blog, please contact me, the Institute’s program associate, at [email protected].

 

For our first post, I want to profile an innovative idea that is being spearheaded by Senior Teacher Margaret Cullen. Margaret is in the early stages of designing a program that will enable certified Compassion Cultivation Training teachers to provide free CCT courses in low-income communities and to marginalized groups and their allies. Ideally, this program, called the Compassion Corps, will help bring compassion education into greater public consciousness, and beyond the more academic environments where it originated. The Corps could also provide rich opportunities for research on CCT’s impact across a wider variety of cultures and populations.

 

In Margaret’s conception of Compassion Corps, any certified CCT teacher would be able to apply for a grant to cover the expense of offering classes free to specified communities of need in his or her geographical area. Exactly how these communities of need would be identified, and how instructor grantees would apply for and receive funding, has not yet been decided. But we are excited to announce that Thupten Jinpa has endorsed the program and authorized Margaret to pilot with a research study involving two initial classes for underserved communities in East Palo Alto, California and Miami, Florida. As these trial classes move forward, we will be developing the Compassion Corps program and the board will be working on financing the efforts as part of the budgeting and development of the Institute’s business plan.

 

Any suggestions or expressions of interest regarding the Compassion Corps are welcome—you may provide your thoughts either directly to Margaret at [email protected], or to me at [email protected].