The Garrison Institute is a non-sectarian, not-for-profit institute that applies contemplative practices and new scientific insights to generate effective action for transformative social and environmental change.
Our program initiatives range across diverse and strategically important change fields — new, inclusive leadership paradigms; compassionate approaches to finance; building resilience for helping professionals; and restoring planetary health amid human disruption of the Earth’s natural systems.
Current Garrison Institute programs include:
- The Garrison Institute Fellowship
- Contemplative-Based Resilience (CBR)
- Pathways to Planetary Health
- Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE)
Each program engages leading practitioners in their fields and seeks to connect their “inner work” with their “outer work,” drawing on contemplative practice and inner experience to deepen their understanding of themselves and their work in the world — not only on a cognitive level but also in emotional, aspirational, experiential, and embodied ways of knowing.
To learn more about our work and ways to support it, please contact Karen Doyle Grossman, Executive Director.
Program participants learn that they can be effective at caring for the world only to the extent that they care for themselves. And they discover and concretely experience insights into our interconnectedness, or as Garrison Institute board member and leading psychiatrist and author Dan Siegel puts it, our “IntraConnectedness.” Siegel’s research and other new science confirm what contemplative practices have long taught: that we’re more than isolated, individual selves, that our relationships with others and the social and natural world are deep parts of who we are.
After two decades of pioneering this approach, the Garrison Institute has learned and repeatedly demonstrated that cultivating this expanded sense of identity is not just comforting; it’s empowering. It enables people to be more effective, creative leaders and change agents, and helps them frame and implement new strategies that can lead to social and environmental transformation.
This element of personal growth is a key part of the complex interplay between evolving people and evolving systems, which we work to cultivate. It has collective as well as individual impacts, creating generative social fields, and helping organizations and systems transform for the common good.