Tending the Field: Monthly Connection Circle
March 12 | Virtual

Each month we gather virtually to connect, practice, and make space to listen together at the edge of what’s emerging.

In our March Tending the Field connection circle, we explore what might be possible when we act from this field together—and how might our time together in-person help that emerge?  

This is a place to reflect, speak honestly, and learn from one another. Two call times are offered depending upon your time zone: 

THURSDAY, MARCH 12

REGISTER: 7am PST / 3pm GMT

REGISTER: 4pm PST / 12am GMT

As youth develop self-awareness and emotional regulation through contemplative practice, they become more attuned to social inequalities and their own power to address them. This inner grounding enables them to build the relational capacities—empathy, conflict resolution, collective leadership—that traditional education often overlooks.  

Youth who define success on their own terms, lead community transformation, and step into community leadership roles rooted in compassion rather than reactivity. Outcomes range from reduced violence and improved academic outcomes to youth-led social ventures and civic engagement.

Engaging educators, parents, administrations, and communities support an ecosystem of collective leadership demonstrating that the quality of our work on systems and policies depends fundamentally on the internal state of the people advancing change. When we invest in the inner development of young people and the networks who support them, we create the conditions for lasting, justice-oriented transformation.

Our community of organizations working on contemplative approaches to education and youth are now meeting to explore connection, wisdom sharing, collaboration, and co-authoring a work sharing insights from their collective experience. If you too are working in this field and would like to join this community within the Conscious Change Collective, please let us know. We are also preparing to build similar communities working on climate, criminal justice reform, health, and democracy.

Our Community

The Spirituality & Social Change Program is working to help catalyze a generative field of organizations around the globe that integrate inner work, spirituality, or contemplative practice in the ways they advance social change programs. Called the Conscious Change Collective, the network now connects 400 organizations worldwide. By building community and making visible the deep wisdom already at work, the Collective hopes to co-create and scale deep, systemic transformation. Take a look and see which organizations are working in various fields, with which contemplative modality. And please help us expand and broaden our connections by referring organizations to join us.

The Inner Strength system was developed in recognition that contemporary adolescents face high levels of stress and mental health challenges due to the complexity of meta issues impacting our social fabric and our world. Teens are maturing under the shadow of climate change, pollution, increasing wealth gap, poor employment prospects, and violent conflict at home and around the world. These concerns, coupled with the rapid cultural, material, and technological shifts that have increased individual choice while diminishing traditional social support structures, has shown itself to be unwieldy for teens. The rising rate of teen mental health issues and negative coping behaviors demonstrate the need for a time-tested, evidence-based, and nuanced approach to supporting adolescent well-being.

ISE addresses these challenges by providing in-school, culturally responsive mindfulness training combined with systems thinking education that helps students understand their personal experiences within broader historical and developmental contexts. This dual approach is theorized to simultaneously develop individual emotional regulation capacities and cultivate the systemic awareness necessary for students to depersonalize their struggles and ultimately aspire to create more supportive cultural structures. Research conducted in partnership with Syracuse University since 2015 has consistently shown positive impact on a variety of youth wellness measures.

Inner Strength works in under-resourced schools – 100 percent of students in the School District of Philadelphia are categorized as “economically in need” and qualify for Federal free breakfast and lunch. Demonstrating support, respect, equitable access to wellness tools, which have been by-and-large inaccessible to these populations (due to cost and availability barriers) creates social change. It empowers these youth, who are bright and creative, yet many who also have a high degree of early childhood trauma or persistent systemic stress, to cultivate the skills of calm, curiosity, and care. Students learn how to work constructively with strong emotions, self-regulate, appreciate their strengths, and identify what brings them a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life.

Teaching these students about the universality of the human experience–how all people experience joy and suffering, happiness and grief–enables students from historically marginalized populations to move beyond limiting stereotypes. It empowers them to reach for their higher creative potentials and to discount restrictive or false beliefs coming from inside or out. Contemplative practice helps students become objective about their experience, while the second component of the program, systems thinking helps them see the environmental, historical, and evolutionary forces at play.

Through the systems work, students develop an appreciation for our interdependence. They also map how from cells to cultures, the world is in constant motion. If everything is changing, therefore they can change too. This individual connection to untapped possibility and potential is foundational to larger social change work. It gives students impetus and optimism to envision and work to bring their aspirations into being. Through regular contemplation, Inner Strength helps students cultivate a lifelong habit of reflection, fueling creativity and interest, balance and well-being as cornerstones of a life well lived. For learners aspiring to ameliorate the difficulties in our world, these positive habits counteract burnout and rage, which all too often accompany passion for social change work.

Inner Strength has served over 35,000 students and 5,000 educators across 29 Philadelphia public schools, serving youth primarily from Black, LatinX, immigrant, and low-income communities. The flagship 12-lesson school curriculum for grades 7-12 helps students: develop the practice of mindfulness and its relevance in their lives, practice evidence-based skills that support self-regulation and compassion for self and other, build positive relationship and communication skills, an understanding of basic evolutionary brain development and the way we are all part of and impacted by larger systems and forces around us. In addition, Inner Strength offers shorter programs, retreat and summer formats, online courses, audio library, card decks, and, currently under development, an innovative agentic AI Mindfulness Coach.

ISE’s goal is to equip a generation of young adults with both inner resilience and the contextual intelligence needed to address complex societal challenges while fostering personal and collective well-being. Learn more about Inner Strength Education.

The following profile is drawn from ISE’s contribution in our Conscious Change Collective map.

UNITY EFFECT’S Regenerative Evaluation Work
Bridging the Gap: A Methodology for Making Credible Claims in Complexity

Learn about this new evaluation methodology for credible claims and narratives in complexity, weaving together a regenerative approach to evaluation with the Impact Garden framework and Capacity Compass. Learn More

INNER GREEN DEAL
Global Resilience in Nature Walk: Friday, March 20

This free regenerative walk offers an opportunity to practice resilience, in connection with nature, with others, and with ourselves. Learn More & Register

CONSCIOUS FOOD SYSTEMS ALLIANCE
Conscious Food Systems Leadership Programme

This program will help participants cultivate the inner capacities needed to sustain and deepen the impact of their work on food systems transformation. The program includes six live online modules and will be offered for free to a global cohort of CoFSA members in May 2026. Information session on March 10, 2026. Learn More & Register

*The opinions expressed by our members do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Garrison Institute or its Board of Directors.