Peace and Justice Institute

As part of our opening program, we will be guided through a 15 minute Buddhist practice known as Metta Meditation, understood as Loving Kindness.

Join us as we celebrate the International Day of Peace. The United Nations sanctioned International Peace Day is September 21st. The mission of “Peace Day” is to have at least one non-violent, cease-fire day throughout the world. This year's theme is “recovering better for an equitable and sustainable world.”

This interactive workshop will engage participants in exploring their core values, where values come from, and how these shape their choices and behaviors. We will also examine the impact of core values on communication, connection, and conflict transformation.

Recognizing the trying times in we are living in, PJI welcomes us to come together and connect through healing circles, which are essentially for building resilience within and among us. Resilience in the face of adversity, is built by connecting through our stories. Each one of us has a story to tell about how we are walking through these days. These safe spaces are created to remove blaming and shaming, and welcome honest, open sharing of our personal experiences, struggles and triumphs - the language of the heart.

Many of us have heard about the value of empathy in our personal and professional lives but struggle with understanding how to actually effectively offer empathy to someone else in challenging situations when it really counts. In this interactive workshop, we will examine habitual responses that often lead to disconnection, and then learn (and practice!) practical tools to offer empathy to both yourself and others.

This session explores Social Entrepreneurship as a rapidly developing and changing business field in which business and nonprofit leaders design, grow, and lead mission-driven enterprises. The need to grow sustainable businesses and organizations has never been more apparent and this session will provide the foundational knowledge needed.

This workshop will focus on strategies for selfcare and techniques for finding inner peace during this current climate. This interactive workshop will have you practicing the tools and creating your own plan for selfcare.  

'Emile' is a film tracing a year in the life of neuroscientist Emile Bruneau, Ph.D. In it, he embraces a brain cancer (glioblastoma) diagnosis with surprising positivity and works to accelerate the timeline of his scientific mission: to use the tools of neuroscience and psychology to bring peace to groups of people who are in conflict. At the same time, he reflects back on his life, including the experience of growing up with a schizophrenic mother and how that built his empathy, and considers how to prepare his young children for the loss of their father.