​A new podcast on council, compassion and healing, entitled “What if Compassion Could Heal Society?” focused on how the practice of council could be tapped to increase compassion in the world featuring Beyond Us & Them’s Jared Seide and Dr. Ann Seide.

Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Network and host of the podcast From What If to What Next, which was an outgrowth of his book: From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want.

Rob sought out Beyond Us & Them’s Executive Director, Jared Seide, to explore how creating council-based programs can actually provide the resources and the spaces where compassion can flourish. Rob asked our Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. Ann Seide to join the conversation to bring a scientific lens to this inquiry around the factors that prime compassion and how council increases the experience of social connection, wellbeing and the emergence of compassion itself.

Rob’s podcast episodes explore a series of important questions that begin with a clarion call for radical imagination and big ideas (along with a journey of the imagination to a brighter future). For the episode on compassion, Rob reached out to Beyond Us & Them (formerly Center for Council) as a result of the organization’s groundbreaking work creating structures of belonging and reframing the power of compassion in environments where emphasis and practical training in this quality have often been often overlooked — like prisons, education and law enforcement.

In Rob’s view, “We live in a world that can appear pretty bereft of compassion, with leaders trying to outpace each other to be as heartless, unkind and ruthless as possible. People increasingly retreat into silos of fear and resent those outside their silos. Compassion is often portrayed as some kind of a weakness, as a frailty, as something that means we can be taken advantage of. But for many cultures, compassion is seen as something deeply powerful and active and dynamic.”

This perspective led Rob to ask some pointed questions that call for innovative ideas and a shift in paradigm: “In a future that is healing itself, that is breaking down those silos and healing traumas past and present, what is the role of compassion? And how best to create spaces where it can flourish, spaces where compassion is most needed, and where its awesome power is unlocked?”

​Have a listen to Rob’s penetrating, dynamic – and sometime whimsical – conversation with Jared and Ann here.

Notable decline in recidivism attributed to in-prison programs, according to CDCR

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