THE DALAI LAMA FOUNDATION

About the Foundation

The Dalai Lama Foundation was established in 2002, with the Dalai Lama's endorsement and advice, by a core founding group including long-time friends of the Dalai Lama and members of the Silicon Valley business community. Participation is open to all, and anyone who wishes to support the Dalai Lama's vision for a better world is warmly welcomed.

The foundation is a non-profit, charitable organization, with a board of directors and paid and volunteer staff. The foundation is international in scope, with a growing network of National Chapters that includes Japan and Russia. Foundation headquarters are located in Palo Alto, California, USA.

Programs

The Dalai Lama Foundation's main program focus is in the area of education, promoting and developing projects and curricula for ethics and peace. Efforts in the curriculum area are guided by an advisory board of professional educators. The foundation's initial offering was a Study Guide for the Dalai Lama's book Ethics for the New Millennium. This guide is available for downloading by anyone wishing to form a study circle to engage in their own exploration of values and ethics.

Website: www.dalailamafoundation.org

THE DALAI LAMA CENTER FOR PEACE AND EDUCATION

Mission and Values

“My religion is kindness,” says the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education embraces this ethos and the Dalai Lama's belief that each one of us has a responsibility to “develop the heart, cultivate compassion and work for peace within oneself and in the world.”

The Vancouver-based Center is an embodiment of the Dalai Lama's lifelong commitment to compassion and inner well-being. Founded in 2005, the Center is envisioned as a world-class institution, firmly grounded in Vancouver yet highly visible on the global stage. The Center will offer programs that tap into the myriad alliances and initiatives forged by the Dalai Lama over the last four decades. To promote international peace, the Center will translate the Dalai Lama’s principles into concrete action.

“Educating the heart” is our tag line. The Center will provide a learning environment that cultivates mindfulness: the integration of mind, body and spirit. It will encourage heightened awareness of our inner potential through diverse practices of art. And it will provide a venue for creative interpretation of the world’s many wisdom traditions.

The Center has no religious or political affiliations. Peace will be advanced through education, personal transformation and dialogue. The Dalai Lama believes that vital, sustainable communities depend upon many small, individual acts of compassion and helpfulness. By thinking less about ourselves and more about others, we enhance our own growth and happiness. By helping others, we contribute to the greater good. Along the way, our lives and the lives of others are transformed.

The purposes of the Center are to enhance awareness of interconnectedness, to encourage the practice of compassion among youth and adults in all walks of life and to contribute to the development of peace across the world.

Programs

Educating the Heart: A Global Aspiration

The Dalai Lama’s vision of the learning process involves a full engagement of our physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions. This holistic approach seeks wisdom rather than mere information. It naturally plugs into our capacity for compassion, forgiveness and imagination. This way of knowing – the cultivation of empathy – is at the heart of moral development. The Dalai Lama believes that the most essential knowledge arises not from the head but from the heart.

The Center is committed to education that fosters cognitive development and spiritual self-reflection. Under the guidance of the Dalai Lama, the Center will develop educational initiatives that nourish both intellect and wisdom in service to the greater good. From its foundational concern for "educating the heart", the Center is working to build strong connections with others in the community in support of current and future programs.

Website: http://dalailamacenter.org

THE DALAI LAMA CENTER FOR ETHICS AND TRANSFORMATIVE VALUES (at MIT)

Mission

The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is dedicated to inquiry, to dialogue, and to the creation of programs that affect the ethical and humane dimensions of life. This nonpartisan center is a collaborative think tank focused on the development of interdisciplinary research and programs in various fields of knowledge from science and technology, to education and international relations.

The Center is founded to honor the vision of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his call for a holistic education that includes the development of human and global ethics. It will emphasize responsibility as well as examine meaningfulness and moral purpose between individuals, organizations, and societies.

Programs

It is The Center's position that we live more fulfilling lives when we are motivated to make positive contributions to society. There are many technological advances, crises in world economies, and environmental changes that are motivating many to act today. Programs at The Center are designed to help each of us redirect our creative energies into enlightened actions that not only renew our personal motivations, but sustain our communities and societies as well.

Website: http://thecenter.mit.edu

THE CENTER FOR COMPASSION AND ALTRUISM RESEARCH AND EDUCATION AT STANFORD (Stanford University)

About the Center

Project Compassion (The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education) is striving to create a community of scholars and researchers, including neuroscientists, psychologists, neuroeconomists and contemplative scholars. Drawing from such varied disciplines - from etiological approaches that look at evolutionary roots to the neuroscientific study of the brain mechanisms, and from philosophical and contemplative perspectives to cognitive and social psychology as well as neuroeconomics - Project Compassion is working to gain a deep understanding of compassion and its associated human behaviors in all its richness.

An important aspect of Project Compassion will be to critically engage with Buddhist and other contemplative traditions that contain a rich mental taxonomy and, more importantly, clearly delineated mental cultivation techniques aimed at developing and enhancing specific qualities of the human mind and heart.

This initiative envisioned at Project Compassion will:

1. Use rigorous scientific methods to define the neural basis for compassion and altruistic behavior.
2. Serve as a major hub for a scientific study of compassion and altruistic behavior both nationally and internationally.
3. Create tools to allow individuals to potentiate feelings of compassion and altruism.
4. Encourage and support collaborative research on compassion among a variety of disciplines.
5. Disseminate research findings on an international scale using a number of media forums.

Summary of Programs Areas

Research, including basic and clinical neurological, psychological, sociological and related or interrelated studies

Integration and synthesis of studies to determine applications and possible collaborations based on research outcomes of the work by Project Compassion and like-minded organizations

Education, including symposia convened with scientists and contemplative scholars who understand the power of compassion, and workshops for the public that teach techniques to help one achieve a compassionate and altruistic state

Website: http://compassion.stanford.edu/