Programs in Development
Center for the Advancement of Heart-Mind Education
Inspired by the Dalai Lama's strong interest in education, the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education is working to advance education that addresses the full capacities of children. As an important part of this initiative, the Center is planning to establish a continuing program to support expert knowledge, public awareness and specific initiatives promoting the emotional, social and intellectual development of youth. This educational resource will aim to ensure that in British Columbia, and beyond, the teaching of mindful awareness and compassion is embedded as a basic component of the primary and secondary school curriculum.
CAHME will work collaboratively with school boards, universities and other educational institutions. It will engage with researchers, school authorities, teachers and parents with the goal of developing educational programming and enabling the exchange and dissemination of relevant ideas, techniques and best practices.
The Center will consult with local and international advisory groups, complementing the work of other agencies. It will be distinctive in its local attention, by seeking to stimulate the emergence of the Vancouver area and British Columbia as a world centre in employing educational approaches that emphasize the heart-mind connection. It will be international in its reach and connections through association with prominent researchers and with agencies such as the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in the U.S.
The center, and the resulting diffusion of research demonstrating the linkages between emotional and cognitive development, may lead forward to the creation of a collaborative school that will model heart-mind education throughout its curriculum.
XIV Dalai Lama Global Scholars and Fellows Program
The Dalai Lama has personally endorsed a new program that will advance the universal human values for which he stands. The 14th Dalai Lama Global Scholars and Fellows Program will create a Global Learning Community, building on the work of young professionals associated with leading international service organizations and undergraduate scholars at select colleges and universities worldwide.
The program will be driven by values that the Dalai Lama has taught across the world: the interdependence of all beings; the need to come together as a human family; the benefits of compassion to both personal well-being and the common good; and the importance of inquiry, education and learning in opening the possibility of a more caring and peaceful world. For undergraduate Scholars, the program will encourage learning and social service through projects that incorporate these values. Early-career professional Fellows will receive a gift of time to advance learning that will help deepen their commitment to compassionate action.
Each year, at the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education in Vancouver, Canada, Scholars and Fellows will come together along with others in the Global Learning Community to share their knowledge, insights and common purposes. All participants will have opportunities to learn from leaders who model values-driven lives and livelihoods.
This generative cycle of open-minded inquiry and open-hearted action will build a self-sustaining community of commitment that values individual initiative and enhances the collective sense of global responsibility. The Program’s goal is to create a growing circle of proven and prospective leaders whose vision and actions are reinforced through an environment that models compassion and respect for all the peoples and living systems of the earth. The Program will emphasize four pressing global challenges identified by the Dalai Lama: the improvement of cross-cultural and inter-religious understanding and cooperation; the mitigation of wealth disparities between the rich and the poor; the diminishment of violence; and enhanced environmental sustainability.
The undergraduate component of the Program, modeled on the successful five-year-old prototype at the University of California, Irvine, will include invited colleges and universities throughout the world. Each institution will manage an annual competition, choosing a student Dalai Lama Scholar to be funded for a year-long mentored compassion-in-action project. At the young professional level, each participating international civil society organization (CSO) will annually designate a Dalai Lama Fellow, who will be funded for a year’s worth of professional development activities that may include service, study, writing and contemplative practice.
The program will be governed by a consortium of participating universities, civil society organizations and major funders, through a representative Board. The Board will oversee the program and provide for continuity with the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education and the New York-based Dalai Lama Trust, which will serve as fiscal agent. The program planners are currently assembling the founding consortium, with the expectation that preliminary operational elements can be in place in 2011. It is anticipated that additional campuses and CSOs will join the program in ensuing years, and that it will grow over time to attain a distinctive identity, stature and scope, creating a lifelong community of compassionate learning and engagement that benefits its members, their home institutions and the broader society they have chosen to serve.
To contact the 14th Dalai Lama Global Scholars and Fellows Program, please write to us at scholarsandfellows@dalailamacenter.org
Future programs and initiatives
The Dalai Lama Center believes that the peace is advanced through the engagement of a broad and diverse community, locally and globally. Hence, the Center will develop community and global programs that engage people through education, dialogue and research.
The Center also has a long-term goal to establish a physical Center which will provide a home for its programs and function as a special gathering place and focal point for people of all walks of life from near and far. When built, this will be the only Center in the world that bears the Dalai Lama’s name. Like the Carter Center and the proposed Tutu Peace Center, the DLC will radiate positive social change not just in Vancouver, but throughout the world. This unique institution will be an important global legacy providing a permanent home for the secular commitments of the Dalai Lama: to advance his twin goals of personal growth and acting for the greater good. Currently we are considering locations in the downtown core of Vancouver.
