The Dalai Lama Center For Peace+Education

http://www.dalailamacenter.org

History
The Vancouver-based Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education is an embodiment of His
Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama’s life-long commitment to compassion and inner well-being.
Founded in 2005 by the Dalai Lama and Victor Chan, the Center is envisioned as a world-class
institution, firmly grounded in Vancouver yet present and influential on the global stage.
The Center has no religious or political affiliations. It promotes peace 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 the well-being of others, we enhance our growth
and happiness. By helping others, we contribute to the greater good. Along the way, our lives
and the lives of others are transformed.
Committed to Educating the Heart
“My religion is kindness,” the Dalai Lama famously says. The Center embraces this ethos and
His Holiness’ belief that each of us has a responsibility to “develop a warm heart, cultivate
compassion and work for peace within oneself and in the world.”
“Educating the heart” is the Center’s tag line. The Center will provide a learning environment
that cultivates mindfulness: the integration of mind, body, and spirit. It will encourage
heightened awareness within 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.
By bringing peace into our own lives, the Center will help to bring peace into the world.
Mission Statement
The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education educates the heart and fosters compassion
through: creative learning, facilitating and applying research, and connecting people and ideas.
Values
The Center encourages values such as compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and selfdiscipline
through engagement with the community. These are the values that contribute to peace
and harmony locally, nationally and globally. We believe that most people embrace and
recognize the importance of these values, but often don’t know how to access the information
and guidance they seek to bring them into their lives. We will help them do that.
The Center seeks, in all of its activities, to reflect values of compassion, mutual understanding,
inner well-being, mindfulness, creativity, peacefulness, warm heartedness, aspiration and
interconnectedness.
About Our Programs
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 selfreflection.
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.
Connecting for Change
Connecting for Change is comprised of a series of dialogues, hosted both locally and
internationally, that connect people across boundaries of business, philanthropy and community,
building understanding and creating inter-connectedness. The program facilitates meaningful
conversations and provides tools to inspire personal reflection, transformation and connection
with others across sectors and professions. It strives to strengthen and sustain an increasingly
connected, collaborative and actively compassionate society.

Speakers Program
The Dalai Lama Center will host regular seminars, workshops, dialogues and lectures, including
a Nobel Lecture Series. It will invite distinguished thinkers, educators, researchers, social
innovators, artists and other leaders from diverse cultural, religious and educational backgrounds.
Speakers and events will reinforce the values and advance the mission of the Dalai Lama Center
for Peace and Education. The Speakers Series offers public events that focus on key areas of
interest to the Center and to His Holiness The Dalai Lama, including science and its relationship
to spirituality, education of the heart and related research, and the development of compassion
and its contribution to the public good. The Speakers Series seeks to create, nourish and sustain
the Center’s internal and external communities, and to reach and engage the widest possible
audience through various media and by partnering with other organizations
Programs in Development
Center for the Advancement of Heart-Mind Education
Inspired by the Dalai Lama’s strong interest in education, the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and
Education is working to advance education that addresses the full capacities of children. As an
important part of this initiative, the Center is planning to establish a continuing program to
support expert knowledge, public awareness and specific initiatives promoting the emotional,
social and intellectual development of youth. This educational resource will aim to ensure that in
British Columbia, and beyond, the teaching of mindful awareness and compassion is embedded
as a basic component of the primary and secondary school curriculum.
CAHME will work collaboratively with school boards, universities and other educational
institutions. It will engage with researchers, school authorities, teachers and parents with the goal
of developing educational programming and enabling the exchange and dissemination of
relevant ideas, techniques and best practices.
The Center will consult with local and international advisory groups, complementing the work of
other agencies. It will be distinctive in its local attention, by seeking to stimulate the emergence
of the Vancouver area and British Columbia as a world centre in employing educational
approaches that emphasize the heart-mind connection. It will be international in its reach and
connections through association with prominent researchers and with agencies such as the
Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in the U.S.
The center, and the resulting diffusion of research demonstrating the linkages between emotional
and cognitive development, may lead forward to the creation of a collaborative school that will
model heart-mind education throughout its curriculum.
XIV Dalai Lama Global Scholars and Fellows Program
The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education has committed itself to exploring the possibility
of establishing in collaboration with other parties a XIV Dalai Lama Global Scholars and
Fellows Program to recognize and advance the learning of talented young people who have
demonstrated a commitment to compassion in action. Each year, the Program would select and
engage young people from North America and throughout the world, based on their
demonstrated capacity to advance the connections between the Dalai Lama’s values and interests
and the creation of a peaceful and sustainable world. Those selected at the undergraduate or
young professional levels would be supported in pursuing paths of study or other approved
activities for one or more years. They would come together periodically at the Dalai Lama
Center in Vancouver to learn from each other and from distinguished guests and mentors.
The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education is currently sponsoring a feasibility study
regarding this major global initiative to clarify its vision, activities and anticipated outcomes, and
to assess the breadth of potential support. The initiation of awards identified with His Holiness
the XIV Dalai Lama would advance a model of recognition and support for young people that is
diverse, inclusive, interdependent and comprehensive – clearly attuned to the new realities,
challenges and opportunities of today’s complex and turbulent era in human development.
Future Programs and Initiatives
The Dalai Lama Center believes that the peace is advanced through the engagement of a broad
and diverse community, locally and globally. Hence, the Center will develop community and
global programs that engage people through education, dialogue and research.
The Center also has a long-term goal to establish a physical Center which will provide a home
for its programs and function as a special gathering place and focal point for people of all walks
of life from near and far. When built, this will be the only Center in the world that bears the
Dalai Lama’s name. Like the Carter Center and the proposed Tutu Peace Center, the DLC will
radiate positive social change not just in Vancouver, but throughout the world. This unique
institution will be an important global legacy providing a permanent home for the secular
commitments of the Dalai Lama: to advance his twin goals of personal growth and acting for the
greater good. Currently we are considering locations in the downtown core of Vancouver.
Trustees
Victor Chan
Brenda Eaton
Evan Alderson
Gwyn Morgan
James Hoggan
Martha Piper
Thomas Rafael
Advisory Board
His Holiness The Dalai Lama
Betty Williams
Desmond Tutu
Jimmy Carter
Jody Williams
Kim Campbell
Mairead Maguire
Rigoberta Menchu Tum
Shirin Ebadi
Tendzin Choegyal
Vaclav Havel
Sakyong Mipham