CCARE is delighted to present the 2026 Compassion Showcase:
Compassion Talk Presenters
Claudia Bernard
Seeing Humanity in the Other: Compassionate Dialogue in Fractured Communities
Although trained and educated as a lawyer, Claudia has spent her career as a mediator, educator, facilitator and trainer. She spent 30 years as a mediator at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and has taught mediation and negotiation at Stanford Law School, U.C. Law S.F., and Berkeley Law. She has taught mediation, negotiation, mindfulness, and communication skills to lawyers and judges throughout the U.S. and around the world. Currently she designs and facilitates dialogue projects for fractured communities, which will be the subject of her Showcase talk.
Pinuccia Contino
The Day I Didn’t Get Promoted
Pinuccia Contino is Deputy-Director for Equality and Non-Discrimination and Head of the Gender Equality Unit at the European Commission, where she leads work advancing gender equality across the EU and beyond. She is an Ambassador of Compassion certified by Stanford University and has cultivated compassion in her workplace since taking part in ACT 2021, including through the Compassion Network and monthly Compassion Breaks. She is also the author of “What It Takes to Be Yourself: From Seeking Success to Embodying Purpose through Compassion.” In her Featured Talk, Pinuccia explores how an unexpected sense of freedom after not getting a long-sought promotion led her to question dominant standards of success. She shares how self-compassion helped redirect her ambition from becoming someone to becoming herself, and invites us to consider how freeing ourselves from performance-based measures of worth can transform not only how we live, but also how we relate to others and lead.
Jeff Jacobs
Keep Coming of Age: The Lifelong Practice of Pursuing Purpose Over Approval
This session explores how we continue to grow by choosing what matters most over the approval and expectations of others. Drawing from experiences spanning corporate leadership, nonprofit service, prison ministry, and his own life, Jeff Jacobs explores how compassion can help us navigate the inevitable adversity that comes with these choices. His practice breaks compassion into four distinct capabilities, Awareness, Empathy, Motivation, and Readiness, making each easier to understand, practice, and develop. In doing so, we are better equipped to more intentionally pursue lives of purpose and flourishing.
Nancy Lee
Caring with Compassion and Cultural Humility
Nancy Lee, PhD, LPC, ACS, DipCFT, is a private practice psychotherapist and adjunct instructor at Naropa University and Adams State University. Her clinical approach blends contemplative, multicultural, and third-wave cognitive behavioral therapies. Nancy works across disciplines to advance compassion and cultural humility in healthcare and health professions education. Her showcase will highlight the synergistic relationship between compassion and cultural humility in clinical training and practice. Participants will leave with a definition of cultural humility and three empirically supported qualities central to compassionate care.
Belinda May
Shining Light on Accessibility in Compassion
Belinda is an advocate for accessibility, compassion and humanity, and she speaks on these topics in a variety of forums, including industry, higher education, nonprofit and other international organizations. She is a Stanford ACT graduate (2023), a PurpleSpaceUK Ambassador, and a former global law partner, where she received highest honors as a Chambers Band One attorney and was named among the Best Lawyers in America. Following a life-threatening medical diagnosis for which there is no cure, Belinda enrolled in ACT, where she received colorful yet life-changing words of wisdom from Dr. Jim Doty. She then retired from the practice of law to tend to her illness and wellbeing, and to pursue her passion of giving voice to accessibility and compassion for all persons.
Alice McNelis
The Strength Within: Unleashing the Regenerative Power of Compassion
Alice McNelis is a retired pediatric physical therapist with over 30 years of clinical experience supporting children and parents. Her primary focus now is on behavioral health advocacy and teaching applied compassion through workshops, lectures, and support groups, including with the Global Compassion Coalition. Alice serves on a Santa Clara County Supervisor’s Behavioral Health Kitchen Cabinet Advisory Board, leads caregiver groups as a Psychosis REACH Certified Family Ambassador, and supports national mental health advocacy organizations such as TAC, NSSC and NAMI.
Mollie Reinhart
What If Everyone Felt Like They Belonged?
Division, loneliness, and isolation are defining challenges of our time, and Befriend is an answer. With compassion at its core, Befriend creates spaces where people feel seen, valued, connected, and welcomed as their authentic selves. Through curiosity, deep listening, storytelling, and simple acts of kindness, Befriend builds bridges across differences and turns strangers into friends. Mollie Reinhart holds a B.A. in Psychology and Management from Hood College and an Ed.M. in Human Development Psychology from Harvard University, and hopes to inspire each of us to make compassion a lifestyle, because every conversation, friendship, and small act of kindness moves us closer to a world where everyone belongs.
Compassion Poster Presenters
Elif Aldemir
Beden Bedene Eşlik: Cultivating an Ecology of Care. Who Holds the Body That Holds Another?
Elif Kaya is a compassion practitioner, writer and embodied movement facilitator exploring the intersections of body, care, relationship and everyday life. Her work grows from both her own lived experience of motherhood and her practice with mothers of children ages 0 to 6, bringing personal inquiry into conversation with collective experience. At the CCARE Immersion, she will share Beden Bedene Eşlik (“Body-to-Body Accompaniment”), an emerging project that weaves compassion practice, somatic inquiry, expressive movement, nervous system literacy, play and community. The project asks what becomes possible when the body of the caregiver is not treated simply as a resource for care, but as a living body that also needs movement, witnessing, relationship and care.
Jade Araujo
Beyond Symptom Relief: Group MBCT Shifts Self-Compassion and Psychological Inflexibility in a Brazilian Community Trial
Jade Araujo is a Clinical Psychologist licensed in Australia and Brazil, with a private practice in Australia where she integrates compassion-based therapies into her clinical work. She holds a Master’s in Behavioural Neuroscience and is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, focusing on process-based, transdiagnostic, and mindfulness-based interventions. She is passionate about bringing compassion into both therapy and everyday life. At the Immersion, she will share a community trial conducted in Brazil that explored a mindfulness group program as a pathway to cultivating self-compassion and psychological flexibility, beyond symptom relief.
Leah I Brucal
Compassion Cultivation Before the White Coat: An Impact Study on Premedical Compassion Curriculum on Later Medical School/Residency Training and Clinical Practice
Leah Brucal is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (ND ’25), a compassion science researcher affiliated with the Hillebrand Center at Notre Dame, and an MPhil graduate in Health, Medicine, and Society from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the philosophy of measurement and medicine, compassion science training, and medical education. This research focuses on her work at the Hillebrand Center, examining the graduate medical and professional outcomes of Notre Dame alumni and students who participated in the Center’s courses over the past 14 years, assessing whether compassion science training prior to medical school influences later training experiences, clinical practice, and clinician well-being. The findings identify a gap in current medical education and underscore the importance of a compassion-centric approach to training future healthcare providers.
Amelia Cheung, Nathan He, Angela Li, Emily Ma, Mira Poeta, Lily Youssef
Alark: The App That Lights Your Spark
How might we design a supportive audio intervention that breaks the cycle of mindless distractions without adding to the anxiety or guilt of students? Existing solutions include pop-up screens on Instagram and YouTube, or even alarms on your phone. However, there is a flaw in all of these platforms: the option to skip. This team developed over 10 musical tracks showing how different tempo, musical keys, binaural beats, and behavioral friction can nudge a person in the right direction.
Maureen Dionysian
Compassion Upstream: A Pre-Med Mentoring Curriculum
Maureen Dionysian, MPH, is a doctoral candidate in General Psychology (Cognition & Instruction) at Grand Canyon University, where her research focuses on physician well-being. She brings a background in medical education, including work at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and NEOMED, and is a graduate of CCARE’s Applied Compassion Training. At the Immersion she is sharing Compassion Upstream, a proposed pre-med mentoring curriculum built on the Compassion Flourishing Framework, which grew out of her ACT capstone. Its three pillars, the science of compassion, the theory of caring, and clinical communication and compassionate presence, aim to cultivate empathy, ethics, and resilience before burnout begins. She welcomes your thoughts, especially on how to measure compassion-related growth without reducing it to a checklist.
James Ehrlich
Compassionate Sustainability with the VillageOS™ Opensource Software
James Ehrlich is the Director of Compassionate Sustainability at Stanford CCARE, presenting the VillageOS™ opensource platform, applying generative design and edge intelligent operation for resilient, self-sustainable housing developments in diverse climate zones around the world, addressing urgent housing needs while supporting local and regional supply chain security.
Jackie Justice
Studies in Compassion as a 200-Level General Education Requirement
Jackie Justice has been an English/Humanities professor for over 20 years. During 2020, a particularly politically divisive time, she decided to develop a Studies in Compassion humanities course for her students at Mid Michigan College, where she teaches. She worked with UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center’s Bridging Differences program to develop a meaningful experience for students to develop their compassionate bandwidth with themselves and their communities. She comes to the Showcase in her sixth year teaching this course, as she builds a 200-level Studies in Compassion textbook that will eventually be packaged for other community colleges to utilize on their campuses. Would you like to share research, articles, or be interviewed for this project?
Aleksandra Kalinich
Implementing a Workplace Compassion Training: A Qualitative Evaluation of Participant Learning and Intended Application
Aleksandra O. Kalinich, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, compassion educator, and Board-Certified Coach with more than 15 years of experience helping individuals and organizations cultivate greater self-compassion, resilience, and emotional well-being. She completed Stanford CCARE’s Applied Compassion Training and integrates compassion science with evidence-based psychological practice in her clinical work, teaching, and workplace presentations. At the Immersion, she will share an evaluation of a workplace compassion training developed as part of her CCARE capstone, exploring what participants learned and how they intended to apply compassion in their professional lives. Her findings highlight the distinction between empathy and compassion, the challenge of extending compassion toward oneself, and participants’ desire for practical tools to bring compassionate action into everyday work.
Nicole Longstaff
Exploring the Relationship Between Compassionate Leadership, Symmetrical Internal Communication, Psychological Safety, and Employee Engagement
Nicole Longstaff, MCM, PMP, is a strategic leader, researcher, writer, teacher, and advocate for compassion as a foundational principle in the systems that shape our lives, drawing on experience in digital research support, organisational strategy, and communications management. Her award-winning capstone research, which received the Top Student Paper Award at the 28th International Public Relations Research Conference (IPRRC), examined how compassionate leadership relates to symmetrical internal communication, psychological safety, and employee engagement. Survey results from 265 Canadian and U.S. employees showed that compassionate leadership was strongly associated with both symmetrical internal communication and psychological safety, and moderately associated with employee engagement. Through her initiative, Everything Compassion, Nicole explores compassion as a foundational principle for shaping leadership, organisations, policy, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies in ways that support the flourishing of people, communities, and the broader web of life.
Daniel E. Martin, Ph.D.
(Applied) Compassion in Leadership/Organizational Research/Applications: The Secrets of Organizational Authoritarians, and Cheerful Bosses Who Keep You in Your Place, or Benevolent Dominance
Daniel E. Martin, Ph.D., is Director of Corporate Compassion Education at CCARE, Stanford University, Associate Professor of Management at California State University, East Bay, and a member of several boards, where he integrates social and organizational psychology, compassion science, leadership, and human development to measurably impact wellbeing and organizational competence from the micro, meso to macro level. He will share recent research publications on kiss-up/kick-down behavior as organizational authoritarianism and benevolent dominance, along with outcomes establishing the impact of compassion, personality, power, hierarchy, and social systems on behavior, well-being, relationships, and work. Through teaching, research, social facilitation, and public engagement, he applies psychological science to help people build courage, connection, compassion, and meaningful action.
Olga Restrepo Botero
Mindful Awareness Practices (A-MAPs) in Soldiers in Recovery: A Pilot Study of Cultural and Communication Adaptations
Olga has facilitated meditation and contemplative practices since 2015, with training from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and the Compassion Institute (Stanford). She adapts the programs she facilitates for diverse vulnerable populations to participants’ individual needs and cultural and social contexts, with the aim of enhancing well-being and quality of life. At the Immersion, she will present a pilot study of adapted Mindful Awareness Practices (A-MAPs) for Colombian soldiers in recovery. Her poster explores cultural and communication adaptations designed to make these practices accessible and relevant to participants.
Clifford Saron
Differential Effects of Compassion and Mindfulness-Based Training Programs on Emotional Responses to Suffering, Threat, and Harm: A Distributed Multi-Course Study
Clifford Saron, PhD, is Research Scientist Emeritus at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. In the early 1990s, he conducted field research investigating Tibetan Buddhist mind training under the auspices of the Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama. For the past 23 years, Dr. Saron has directed the Shamatha Project, a multidisciplinary longitudinal investigation of intensive meditation on physiological and psychological processes central to well-being. Currently, his team is analyzing how meditation experience may have mitigated the effects of the pandemic on chronic stress and cellular aging, as well as improved adaptive coping styles. The work presented at the Compassion Showcase reveals the differential consequences of 8-week compassion and mindfulness training programs on engagement with suffering, harm, and threat.
Compassion Table Presenters
Vittoria Daiello
Centering Compassionate Sensemaking in Arts-Based Research and Reflective Practice
Vittoria Daiello, PhD, is an interdisciplinary scholar, arts educator, and researcher in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) and Co-Director of the Action Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Her scholarship focuses on the development and implementation of compassion-based pedagogies that support well-being and flourishing in higher education, medical education, and K-12 schools. Her arts-based research courses are laboratories of hope where graduate students from diverse disciplines engage in collaborative, compassion-informed sensemaking processes, emphasizing “being with, thinking with, and knowing with” one another as pathways toward innovative and transformative research. At the Immersion, she will share pedagogical artifacts and practices designed to foster generative connection, meaningful collaboration, and compassionate reflection through artful, materials-based inquiry and exploration.
Edna Rocio Freeman
Altruism Now
As the Founder and Executive Director of Altruism Now, Edna leads the mission to integrate applied compassion science and somatic self-regulation into vulnerable ecosystems across Latin America. At the Immersion, she will share insights from Escucha, Aprende, Evoluciona (EAE), a non-clinical Conscious Education framework designed for youth navigating chronic adversity, trauma, and systemic violence. By combining somatic practices, such as conscious breathwork, movement, and rhythm, with explicit compassion cultivation, EAE de-escalates automatic survival responses to restore physiological inner safety. The initiative operates through a cost-effective Train-the-Trainer model, equipping local school staff and community mentors to serve as frontline facilitators of mutual care. Having validated this methodology across a historical sample of approximately 11,000 children and adolescents to date, EAE demonstrates that altruism is a cultivable, active capacity capable of disrupting transgenerational suffering in low-resource environments.
Diana Hull
The Heart of Caring in the Age of Forgetting
Diana Hull, PA, MPH, authored The Heart of Caring in the Age of Forgetting: A Transformative Journey Through Alzheimer’s, published by Purdue University Press in July 2026. She developed this book as her capstone project during Stanford’s Applied Compassion Training in 2021. A Stanford-trained primary care physician assistant, Diana has practiced extensively in women’s, family, and community health. Despite her clinical background, she felt unprepared when her mother developed Alzheimer’s and required a family caregiver, an experience that reshaped her perspective on healthcare and highlighted the importance of compassion in caregiving. She created the CARE Compass, representing Compassion, Awareness, Resilience, and Engagement, as a practical tool for navigating the uncertainties and changes of caregiving, and now integrates it into caregiver groups and educational settings.
Sandy SY Lee
Compassion in Bloom
Sandy is the founder of TunedInHeart, a community initiative based in London, UK, offering mindfulness, sound, creative making and compassion-centred gatherings. Her work centres on cultivating heart-led spaces where people can slow down, reconnect with themselves and connect with community. At the Immersion, she is bringing a sculptural installation of handmade flowers, a growing expression of the flower metaphor and compassionate breath meditation she created for her CCARE Compassion Lab blueprint presentation. Alongside the flowers, everyone is warmly invited to add written reflections to a shared collage of hearts, creating space for conversation about how we understand and practise compassion, what we wish we understood or explored more deeply about compassion, and what listening to our hearts means to us.
Mansi
The RIPPLE Practice
Mansi is a Los Altos-based writer, mixed-media artist, community facilitator and creator of The RIPPLE Practice. What began as a personal ritual eight years ago has grown into public RIPPLE Stations and community gatherings that invite people to pause, connect and acknowledge one another beyond their everyday roles. At its center are handmade tokens: 2-by-4-inch mixed-media paintings inscribed on the back and given as small, tangible acts of recognition to grocery workers, custodians, receptionists, baristas, people who routinely go unnoticed. Mansi has personally given approximately 3,000 tokens; since the first public RIPPLE Station launched last August, community members have taken another 1,000 to give to someone else. At the Immersion, she will share this evolution and what she is learning about the conditions that help compassion travel between strangers.
José Ocaño
Más Compassion
José Ocaño is a proud Chicano leader and co-founder and CEO of Hatching, a social impact organization helping people move from Survival Mode to Compassion Mode. At the Immersion, José will share about the Más Compassion Experience, an experiential workshop that uses mindfulness, music, reflection, and meaningful conversation to help people slow down, connect with themselves and one another, and cultivate compassion in practice.
Lakiba Pittman
Cultivating Compassion Across Contexts and Communities
Lakiba Pittman is an educator, compassion teacher, facilitator, and scholar whose work explores how compassion can cultivate belonging, connection, and transformation across educational, organizational, and community settings. She is a Full-Time Lecturer at Menlo College and a certified Senior Instructor of Compassion Cultivation Training, with more than a decade of experience bringing compassion and mindfulness practices into higher education, leadership development, and community-based work. Lakiba is currently pursuing a PhD in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where her research explores Black musical traditions as sources of spirituality, cultural memory, healing, and liberation. Across her work, she approaches compassion not simply as an individual practice, but as something we can cultivate collectively through how we listen, learn, lead, and gather together.
Ashin Varabuddhi
Cultivating Compassion for the Benefit of Individuals and Society
Dr. Ashin Varabuddhi (Ph.D.) is a Theravada Buddhist monk, an author, a Buddhism scholar, and the Abbot of the Mahamuni Theravada Buddhist Monastery (MTBS) of Minnesota, USA. In 2019, he earned a Doctorate in Buddhist Studies from the Postgraduate Institute of Pali and Buddhist Studies of the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. In 2023, Venerable Varabuddhi graduated from Stanford University’s School of Medicine’s Applied Compassion Training (ACT) program through CCARE. In addition to his academic achievements, Venerable practices meditation in accordance with the traditions of Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, and now in the United States. He is currently studying in a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program with a full scholarship, and serves as principal monk and president of MTBS of Minnesota while teaching weekly Dhamma Talk and meditation classes based on a compassionate perspective throughout the United States.
Jody Washburn
A Dance of Discernment: Cultivating Compassion and Embracing Wholeness
Jody Washburn (PhD, MSW) is an interdisciplinary scholar and facilitator whose work explores intersections between sacred texts and social science. Her most recent project is a group processing curriculum for people healing from religious trauma entitled Reclaiming Our Spirituality. At her table, she will be sharing resources exploring the lifelong process of balancing authenticity (connection with oneself) and attachment (connection with others), and what practices support flexibility in this ongoing balancing act while grounding us in a sense of wholeness rather than constant striving.
Heather Willems
Visual Strategies for Compassion
Heather Willems creates clarity in moments of complexity. She helps leaders and teams see their challenges through a new perspective, where listening slows the pace, visuals reveal what matters, and difficult conversations become pathways to breakthrough. With two decades of graphic facilitation for Fortune 100 teams and thought leaders, Heather uses visual strategy as a medium for innovation. Her practice draws from the MG Taylor methodology, Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, and a deep study of mediation and facilitation. Bestselling co-author of Draw Your Big Idea, Heather has led collaborative strategy sessions for global gatherings, executive retreats, and innovation labs. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Inc.