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Hearth Summit Higher Ed 2025

ABOUT THE SUMMIT ABOUT THE SUMMIT

Fostering Wellbeing in Higher Education

After an incredible first edition, Hearth Summit Higher Ed returns to continue sparking wellbeing and positive change in the higher education sector! Get ready for another transformative experience where an exploration of wellbeing at every level — individual, organizational, societal, and ecological — will intersect, all in pursuit of creating a culture of wellbeing within higher education.

Stay tuned for more information.

In the meantime, express your interest in attending this year’s summit and catch a glimpse of Hearth Summit Higher Ed 2024.

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HOSTED BY HOSTED BY

The Wellbeing Project’s Wellbeing in Higher Education Network

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Wellbeing Wisdom From India: An Interview with Dr. Mala Kapadia on Intergenerational Trauma and Ecological Belonging Wellbeing Wisdom From India: An Interview with Dr. Mala Kapadia on Intergenerational Trauma and Ecological Belonging

A CONVERSATION WITH:

Dr. Mala Kapadia

Director, Anaadi Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Anaadi Foundation
🌍 Tamil Nadu, India

What can traditional Indian Knowledge Systems teach the world about wellbeing?

Dr. Mala Kapadia, director of the Anaadi Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems at the Anaadi Foundation, shares knowledge and practices from the Indian sciences of Ayurveda, Yoga, Aesthetics, and Poetry, around Ecological Belonging and intergenerational trauma.

Watch the full video for her teachings, or read the highlights below.

“In India, I realized that the ideal could be that India becomes the voice for humanity — where you see the vibrancy of people practicing Ayurveda, practicing Yoga, living their civilizational, cultural values, which is slowly happening post-pandemic. It is slowly happening.”

WHAT ARE THE SCIENCES OF AYURVEDA AND YOGA AND HOW DO THEY RELATE TO WELLBEING?

Ayurveda, as they describe it, is a manual of life skills. It’s not just a medicinal system. It’s Veda- knowledge of ayu. Ayu is life. Ayurveda actually describes Life, and the beauty of Ayurveda is that it is for everyone. It’s not only for Indian people. It’s not for the people from a certain region, but the Sages talked about humanity at large. They say that our life has purpose and meaningfulness and to achieve that, there are paths, right?

The path begins with dharma, a Sanskrit word coming from the etymology  Dharayati Iti Dharma. Meaning, anything that sustains you, holds you together, is dharma. I feel it’s a beautiful way to look at our life. It’s only psychology that has taken more than 200 years to reach positive psychology where Martin Seligman and others are talking about meaningfulness. And here there are sages many, many millennia ago who wrote about how life has to be meaningful for us to be healthy and happy. They describe life as Hita, beneficial to self and others, because they always saw life as a continuum: we and the Cosmos, we and everyone else, are interconnected. And only when we are leading a life which is interconnected and integral, can we be happy. And happiness is, not the pursuit of happiness that we understand today in a modern language, but it’s all about the State of Being. With the wellbeing crises that we see today, I realize that Ayurveda beautifully connects the wellbeing of the planet and wellbeing of an individual.

With the wellbeing crises that we see today, I realize that Ayurveda beautifully connects the wellbeing of the planet and wellbeing of an individual.

WHAT DO AYURVEDA, YOGA AND OTHER INDIAN SCIENCES TELL US ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE, EMOTIONS, AND HEALING?

What Yoga, Ayurveda, and the science of Aesthetics are talking about is being rediscovered and not just rediscovered, it’s being validated scientifically by some modern theorists. Today a lot of scientists talk of neurotransmitters, et cetera, but they look at only the brain. If you revisit our biology or anatomy from a Yogic perspective, our physical body that can be seen and studied or x-rayed is one reality, but we are also energy sheets.

So we are still stuck learning biology and anatomy from a Newtonian or Cartesian perspective dividing body and mind. But what is mind? People are still struggling to understand it. While in Ayurveda and Yoga, the body-mind continuum is very beautifully described. We have seven chakras, the major chakras, and many minor chakras. And I’m glad today chakra, like mantra and dharma, is a word in Western vocabulary as well. These are what Georgetown University neuroscientist Candace Pert talks about nodal points of neurotransmitters. The neurotransmitters on those nodal points of the chakras are either blocked or they are open. So when they are blocked, naturally the energy flow is restricted and therefore the energy or Prana does not reach those organs which are connected with those nodal points. She was one of the, I think, first Western scientists to say that body and mind is a continuum.

HOW CAN THIS KNOWLEDGE HELP US WITH HEALING FROM TRAUMA?

So when I go back to Yoga and Ayurveda as ancient sciences as I said, “If we all are integrated, we all are connected, then my energy and the world’s energy is somewhere merging together, right?” Energy, we all know, cannot be created or destroyed. It needs to be transformed. So when we look at trauma, trauma is an energy block as I see it personally. If it’s a blocked energy, then which chakra is it impacting? Is it impacting your security? Is it impacting your relationships? Is it about your power or victimhood? Is it about your heart experiencing gratitude or is it about your heart experiencing a closed xenophobic existence where you switch on to a survivalistic mode? This is what scientifically people talk about trauma and the response to trauma as fight, flight, or freeze. But that fight, flight, freeze is not just limited to the brain. It travels all over the body. So, if my mind is in every cell of my body, then my trauma response is also coming from every cell in my body. It’s not only a cognitive skill.

This is where Yoga and Ayurveda come into play because they have a lot of practices which can help you dissolve these traumatic emotional imprints without wanting to bring them up to the brain, which is not able to cope.

And they can be dissolved with a lot of Ayurvedic treatments, Ayurvedic lifestyle guidance meditations and Yogic lifestyle. And when I say Yoga, it’s not just exercise or breathing exercises or physical postures. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, one of the oldest texts of Yoga talks of Yama and Niyama, which are the behavioural codes at the individual level and collective level. So unless we practice them, doing breathing exercises and doing postures will not give us results.

DO INDIAN SCIENCES TELL US HOW INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA AND ECOLOGICAL BELONGING ARE CONNECTED?

In all ancient indigenous cultures, I found one thing common is, apart from being connected with nature, they’re also connected with their ancestors. Our history, our ancestors, are living within us, not just genetically, but psychologically and spiritually. Ancestor healing is a major ritual in most of the indigenous cultures, including India. In India, we have birth charts. The moment you are born, depending on the time of the birth, a birth chart for every child is created. Most of the birth charts have a problem with ancestors. It’s called Pitru Dosha. Pitru are ancestors and Dosha is some problem. Now, obviously, we really don’t know what our ancestors were going through, right? Beyond a certain generation, we don’t even know our ancestors.  And we don’t even know what their life was. We don’t even know what trauma they went through. But whatever their trauma, we have inherited it and the trauma of Mother Earth. That’s also an ancestral trauma. There are a lot of rituals connected with the five elements – the element of sky or ether or Akaash; the element of air or Vayu; Fire; Water; and Earth – because many ancient indigenous cultures believe that the entire universe and our body all are made up of these five elements. 

WHAT IS AN EXAMPLE OF AN INDIAN PRACTICE ONE CAN DO TO WORK ON INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE HEALING?

One ritual we have is ending all the prayers with saying, “Shanti hi, Shanti hi, Shanti hi.” Shanti means peace. Why do all prayers end with saying peace three times? Just one time could have been enough. The three “peace” is invoking peace at three levels: one, individual, me and myself; two, collective, which is the community around me, society, Nature around me, my nation; and three, the global level and Universal level. 

Today, when there are wars happening, when there is so much destruction happening, when there is so much human suffering, working on peace and giving it priority is very important. I realized that, unfortunately, most of the Western researchers define peace as an absence of war or conflict. Peace is not seen as a positive construct in itself, which is there in India. In Indian literature, in Indian philosophy, peace is a positive construct. Health is a positive construct. Health is not as opposed to disease and peace is not opposed to war or conflict. So, if peace is a construct in itself, how do you arrive at it? How do you actually start experiencing peace from within? And chanting mantras, chanting simple Om, is one way.

Why do all prayers end with saying peace three times? The three “peace” is invoking peace at three levels: one, individual; two, collective ; and three, the global level and universal level. 

YOU’RE DESCRIBING HOW MODERN SCIENCES ARE “VALIDATING” TRADITIONAL SCIENCES. DOES THIS MEAN THEY ARE THE SAME?

We talk of ancient or indigenous wisdom at one level and modern at another. And a lot of people have this misconception that ancient is outdated and modern is more scientific, or modern is the complete know-how. Unfortunately – or fortunately – we realize that what is ancient is being rediscovered by many modern theorists. So we as humanity, we just have to take a U-turn and go back to our own cultural roots, civilizational roots. I realize that most of the indigenous cultures, they were connected and rooted in nNature. I’ve been to Hawai’i. I’ve met some of the Kahunas, the wisdom holders. And one of the Kahuna, I still remember, she held my hands and she said, “You are one of us.” I realized that she felt that and I felt that because of the Mother Earth. We could have lived in different lifetimes. We could have lived in different geographical locations, but ultimately, it’s all One.

I’ve been to Hawai’i. I’ve met some of the kahunas, the wisdom holders. And one of the Kahuna, I still remember, she held my hands and she said, “You are one of us.” I realized that she felt that and I felt that because of the Mother Earth.

IN FACING OUR 21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES, WHAT ROLE DO YOU THINK SPIRITUALITY AND THIS ANCIENT WISDOM CAN PLAY IN THE SOLUTIONS?

The industrial revolution has uprooted people from nature. Nature has become a resource to be used and exploited. People became a resource that needs to be used and exploited and we didn’t realize that we ourselves became this resource. This trauma needs to be addressed because today, corporates have to wake up to the spiritual aspect, which is not a philosophical aspect, it is a practical aspect. Most of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are far away from being met. 

When we are spending so much money on sustainability goals, climate change, et cetera, what we don’t realize is, we just need to bring back that foundation of spirituality, Dharma, in everything we do. And the moment that foundation comes back, everything will fall into place. Right now, we have lost the bigger picture. We are all struggling with pieces of puzzles, trying to fit them here and there. But spirituality is like a bigger picture, and without looking at that bigger picture, we are not able to fit in those pieces of the puzzles.

mala-kapadia-headshot

About Mala

Dr. Mala Kapadia is a highly accomplished scholar and practitioner with a distinguished career spanning research, education, journalism, human resources, and consulting. She is a passionate advocate for integrating ancient Indian wisdom with modern approaches to wellbeing, leadership, and organizational development. Dr. Kapadia is currently the Director of Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems, at the Anaadi Foundation and the Principal Investigator for a Ministry of Education (India) Indian Knowledge Systems Research Project on Wellbeing and Happiness based on Ayurveda. Mala is also a Guru participating in Grateful to Gurus, an initiative by Indica Academy, in which she inspire young minds in ancient wisdom. She is also a member of the Advisory Council of Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems at Chanakya University, Bengaluru, India.

About the Anaadi Foundation

Anaadi Foundation is a spiritual organisation founded in 2015 and located near Palani in Tamil Nadu, India. With key focal areas on Education, Culture, Wellbeing and Sustainability, the Anaadi Foundation focuses on imparting Indian Knowledge Systems through various initiatives including Dharma Gurukulam, IKS-funded projects, publication of books, and training programs. The Anaadi Foundation provides various programs aimed at physical, emotional, and cognitive stability. These include the Mouna Sadhana program, which integrates asana, pranayama, dharana, dhyana, and Bhagavad Gita sessions. The foundation actively engages in sharing and preserving the depth of Indian culture, sciences, and values.

Want to know more about trauma and its impacts?

Watch the first virtual convening in our webinar series hosted by The Wellbeing Project and the Collective Change Lab. You can also visit our new hub for research and stories on intergenerational trauma. Together, we explore how we can move from trauma-informed to healing-centered ways of working for systemic change.

Discover the Wellbeing Movement in IndiaDiscover the Wellbeing Movement in India

Meet and hear stories from the changemakers championing the wellbeing movement in India.

Strengthening Community Resilience in Kuwait with Storytelling Strengthening Community Resilience in Kuwait with Storytelling

Insights from en.v’s Eleanor Burton and Mohammed Marafi

With a vision of a united, compassionate and resilient society, a small organisation is making a big impact on collective wellbeing across the Gulf states.

en.v facilitates positive social transformation within Kuwaiti society with an integral focus on empowering Kuwait’s migrant population – as well as youth and other traditionally silenced communities – through storytelling. Recognised by the International Labour Organization (ILO) for its impactful work supporting the human rights of migrant workers, en.v practices community-building through socially responsible ways. We talked with Eleanor Burton, en.v’s training and relationship manager, and Mohammed Marafi, en.v’s programs manager, about their use of storytelling as a tool for social transformation. Here’s how they do it.

Storytelling to Build Trust, New Narratives, and Healing Bridges

As an organisation committed to the collective wellbeing of communities in Kuwait, an integral focus for en.v is on the country’s migrant population, whose wellbeing is significantly impacted by the grave consequences they often face working under the Gulf labour market’s kafala system. Broken trust, mistreatment, and abuse are common, as are trauma and mental health struggles. Beyond legal frameworks, cultural attitudes in Kuwait have helped normalise the effects of the kafala system: with certain long-held beliefs about migrant workers and commonplace employment practices, de-facto segregation and a deeply ingrained power balance are the norm. 

While important efforts are in motion to update migrant worker schemes in the Gulf and protect migrants’ wellbeing, en.v recognises migrants themselves are missing from these conversations. In response en.v passes the mic to the migrant community in Kuwait to support systemic change from the ground up. Working with employers of migrant workers and the migrant community, it offers spaces for both groups to meet and begin to build healing bridges. The process is complex, but it is working, and its Global Migrant Workers Network (GMWN), Compassionate Communities programme, and BUILD Ideathon community projects have been recognised as important actors in this process.

“The insight and connection with and from the vast network and community that en.v has nurtured over the years is unrivaled. Their ability to get straight to the beneficiary and those most in need has been inspiring to witness, and a great honour to support.” – International Labour Organization

en.v’s Theory of Change (Credit: en.v/@blancheillustrates)

en.v’s community-led approach to social change is founded on bringing different groups together to work across differences. Building bridges that lead to social change is a complex process – and for en.v, it all starts with a story. 

“In every single piece of our work, whether it’s with labour inspectors, activists in the migrant community, domestic workers, students, academics, or officials from the ministry, we always start with storytelling and connection,” says Eleanor. “We start with some sort of space where we try and get people into an intimate, authentic conversation with each other. It’s in every single thing that we do – having that first moment of building trust and connection, but in safety.”

As different people come together – many for the first time – to express themselves and listen to each other, these moments of connection are rich with opportunity. They help pave the path to reconciliation by the way of self-exploration, bonding, and movement-building. With long-held beliefs contributing to divisions within the community, this is an important step towards sustainable behavioural change.

“It changed my viewpoints on others around me. I lived in a bubble and thought that there wasn’t a community of people who genuinely wanted change too.” – en.v BUILD Ideathon Participant

The AWAKEN journey.

In supporting the migrant community, this storytelling can involve facilitating conversations between workers and employers and creating space for both groups to reflect on their experiences with their peers. For example, generations-long employment practices in the Gulf shape how employers view domestic workers and how domestic workers view themselves. Through dialogue, en.v encourages everyone to practice self-inquiry and reflection. Sharing one’s story and listening to others serves as a foundational, and often emotional, step towards reconciliation. 

“With storytelling, we can think about roots and forces shaping our value systems,” says Eleanor. “We can ask questions: what’s your power in the society? What privilege do you have? How do you move through the society? It’s ultimately a practice in building empathy, deconstructing a lot of the cultural norms, and thinking about how we relate to one another.”

One example of a project defined by storytelling is en.v’s Women’s Circle Project. Held in partnership with the International Labour Organization’s FAIRWAY Project, it brings together female employers of domestic workers in safe spaces to talk about employment practices. These Women’s Circles help to shift employer mindsets, leading to improved relationships and increased fair treatment of workers.  

Storytelling with the migrant community also focuses on understanding values and shifting mindsets, while also caring for the deep traumas felt by the community. Their experiences in Kuwait are often defined by deep feelings of loss: a loss of self while facing exploitation at work and having to support family back home, and a loss of community due to the transient, impermanent type of residency available under the kafala system.

In response, en.v uses storytelling to help the members of the migrant community create a new sense of self and belonging, which can help strengthen their resiliency, increase feelings of agency, and promote healing – an empowering process that helps unlock doors to a new future. 

Mohammed explains this process is essential for empowering community-led action: “If you want for people to really feel like they want to change this place, they first have to feel like they belong here. A lot of what we try to do in our work is try to create a space within Kuwait where they can at least feel like they belong to each other.”en.v helps create these spaces physically – with community gatherings such as its AWAKEN festival or its Aswatna program promoting inclusion in the country’s schools– and figuratively, through various activities such as Mapping Belonging and art therapies. Through different methodologies practiced in safe spaces, migrant and other traditionally silenced or marginalized communities are offered the opportunity to own, share, and rewrite their stories.

While the process of behavioural and systemic change is complex and challenging, these meaningful moments of storytelling are also important marks of progress. At the heart of this storytelling is a true sense of compassion and unity, says Eleanor: “It’s very intimate. It’s really loving work we do, that creates a space where people can really connect.” 

With a vision of solidarity among communities in Kuwait, these emotional connections are the first step towards community wellbeing and healing. 

en.v is a proud member of The Wellbeing Project’s Wellbeing in Higher Education Network. Learn more about en.v’s work to foster transformational leadership and community-building in the Gulf at www.envearth.com.

Welldoing ToolWelldoing Tool

Mapping Belonging

Contributed by en.v (Kuwait)

“Mapping Belonging” is a social cartography exercise that consists of identifying the different emotions that we associate with the different places where our lives (and the lives of other members of our society) take place. It encourages us to explore, from a place of curiosity, our conceptions of identity, belonging, difference and otherness, and gain deeper insights about our individual and collective lived experiences. 

It is a tool that serves as a participatory and experimental research method, while also creating a positive impact on the participants in the process of being implemented: it increases our ability to understand social diversity and empathize with other perspectives and values. 

Collective emotional mapping takes us out of the bubble of our individual worldview and shows us that we are part of a larger system where many different people find many different sources of meaning. A higher sense of self-awareness and social awareness are both key ingredients to the process of strengthening community bonds from a place of compassion and resilience, and they establish the grounds for positive interpersonal interaction and transformative change. 

en.v has been working with its AWAKEN Community of Practice to further refine and test out this tool, and facilitate it across diverse communities in Kuwait, collecting valuable data and promoting self-reflection and connection.

How to Practice

What you will need: a map of your location, coloured stickers corresponding to the emotions chart, cards, and writing materials

Step 1

Welcome participants into the space and tell them a little bit about the exercise. Facilitators can add whatever they consider suitable to this explanation and refer to examples from their personal experiences.

Step 2

Introduce a warm-up / ice-breaker. Before the mapping activity, invite the group to do a short exercise to warm-up and break the ice for about 10 minutes. The activity is called “story-slam”: participants will be asked to get into two lines facing each other and give a 1-minute answer to the person in front of them (at each turn) to the questions that the facilitators will ask out loud. After one minute, one of the lines will move one spot and each participant will be facing someone new and giving an answer to a new question. Facilitators can choose any of the following questions during five rounds:

What is your favourite place in [location]?

Where do you live and have you ever lived in that area?

What place in [location] brings up happy memories and why?

Where do you go when you want to relax?

Where in [location] do you eat the best food?

What are your favourite family spaces?

What is a space that doesn’t feel like [location]?

Are there places in [location]that you avoid? Which ones and why?

What are the places you frequented as a child?

If you have a friend coming to visit [location] for the first time, where would you take them and why?

Step 3

Begin the Mapping Belonging exercise. Start by explaining the activity: it’s an exercise that consists of identifying the different emotions that we associate with the different places where our lives take place. Facilitators will ask the participants to look at the map of their location, with its different zones and areas, and identify the places where they feel these emotions:

While looking at the map and identifying the areas where they feel the different emotions (they can choose 3-4 places for each emotion), participants can take coloured stickers that correspond to the emotions and place them on the chosen areas of the map. This part of the activity can last 10-15 minutes.

Step 4

Go deeper with story cards. After they have finished placing the stickers in the corresponding areas, facilitators will give them a set of cards that contain some questions about the mapped emotions and ask them to write their answers on the cards. Encourage participants to keep their answers short and sweet and use only the space on the cards. This part of the activity can last 20-25 minutes. 

Step 5

Conclude with a group discussion. After participants are done filling in the cards, host a short collective debrief (5 minutes) around the two following questions:

What did it feel like to place the emotions on the map? Are there any reflections or emotions that this exercise brought up for you?

How can we make spaces in [location] more inclusive?

About en.v

We are a culturally diverse and interdisciplinary team of current and former Kuwait residents and nationals working together to foster a more united, compassionate and resilient society – locally and globally. Over the past decade, we have been working with and building bridges between a wide array of stakeholders, including corporates, governmental, intergovernmental and international institutions, foundations, educators, youth, civil society organizations and migrant community groups. Leveraging our own and our partners’ learnings, experience and networks, we design and facilitate inclusive and participatory processes that support the development of more equitable solutions and narratives. Specifically, we:

Develop training and programming which promotes informed empathy, critical thinking, and intersectional frameworks

Support the development and institutionalization of more inclusive and equitable processes and policies

Bring together multiple stakeholders to collectively address complex problems, envision possible futures and promote social transformation.

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A commitment to wellness and innovation: Design Factory Javeriana Bogotá A commitment to wellness and innovation: Design Factory Javeriana Bogotá

Guest post by:

Lucas Ivorra Peñafort, Coordinator of the Design Factory Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

The Design Factory Javeriana Bogotá (DFJBOG) was born on August 4, 2016, to strengthen the efforts of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ) to better articulate with different internal and external stakeholders of the University, to address different challenges of society that the university could tackle through the development of products, services, or strategies. It also aims to strengthen the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem of the University. The commitment of the DFJBOG, managed by the Faculty of Architecture and Design in Bogotá (At the PUJ campus in Cali the Design Factory is in the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship), fits the mission of the PUJ under the Jesuit principles in the pursuit of the integral education of people, while being respectful of human dignity.

Educating people must 1) Transcend the merely technical aspects of education which, although important, are insufficient for a comprehensive education; and it must 2) Contribute to the satisfaction of the diverse human needs in the educational processes, not only those related to the curricular content of each course, but those linked to the whole set of material and non-material human needs. Thus, including well-being in the pedagogical dynamics is key to 1) Having more enriching and integral educational processes and 2) Contributing to the physical, mental, and spiritual health of the educational community. At the DFJBOG and the Faculty of Architecture and Design we consider it important to join the efforts of TWP Higher Education Network. Basically, with our involvement in “The Wellbeing Project’s Higher Education Network” we want to 1) Strengthen the activities that PUJ has been conducting to be a better place to study and work; 2) Share our good practices and lessons learned in terms of wellbeing and innovation, to enrich the processes in other institutions; and 3) Learn from the good practices and lessons learned from other institutions.

Currently, at the DFJBOG and the Faculty of Architecture and Design, we have been advancing and supporting different initiatives that contribute to the well-being of our university community. From the different Vice Rectors’ Offices, we develop community building and integral health activities with our Center for Cultural Management, the Center for the Promotion of Identity and Community Building, the Javeriana Center for Sports Training, the Center for Psychological Counseling and Health, the Center for Learning, Teaching and Evaluation, the San Francisco Javier Pastoral Center, the cultural events of the Faculty of Arts, the personalized support of the Academic Counseling, among others.

In the DFJBOG, one of the main bets for wellness is our Open Mind Fridays, where we conduct community and trust-building activities, which are not related to classes or projects. For example, we have developed kite and cookie-making workshops, relaxation sessions, movie and pizza afternoons, and singing and dancing sessions, among others. In this line, following the initiative of Professor David Osorio from the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, we joined the sessions that he and Professor Jairo Hurtado from the Faculty of Engineering had been conducting with game afternoons with students, lecturers, and friends. To paraphrase Professor Jairo, this initiative, which we agreed to call “Game Fridays,” strengthens the physical and mental health care of our students and contributes to building richer and closer relationships in the educational community. More recently, the Cultural Management Center offered us their support to increase the reach of Games Fridays with the Cultural Management Center’s initiative called “Fridays at Sunset”.

After more than five Games Fridays sessions held jointly, we are planning to move on to the next stage, with the participation of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, the Faculty of Engineering, and the DFJBOG with the support of the Faculty of Architecture and Design. This new stage seeks to combine and strengthen the participation of more people from the three faculties involved, extend the impact to other faculties and units of the University, and merge and document the lessons learned and impacts achieved by this initiative.

Thank you to our TWP Higher Education Network colleagues for having us, and we trust that we can make a significant contribution to the network’s efforts to improve educational processes in an innovative way and the pursuit of the well-being of all involved.

Wellbeing in Higher Education Network Gathering 2023 Wellbeing in Higher Education Network Gathering 2023

Montreaux, Switzerland

The Wellbeing in Higher Education Network held its annual gathering this year in Switzerland. Participants from 34 of our member institutions immersed themselves in experiential spaces fostering wellbeing of the mind, body, and soul and its relation to our practices in Higher Education.

During our days together, we built a space of connection, learning, and growth for our community as we focused on envisioning and co-creating models that weave wellbeing into higher education programs and curricula focused on social innovation and change. The broad goals of our gathering included:

Enhancing collaboration and strengthening relationships

Facilitating knowledge creation and sharing

Fostering a sense of identity as a community

Building the foundations for our next year together

The gathering was co-hosted by The Wellbeing Project, Facens University, Georgetown University, Highpoint University, and Mondragon University. Daily workshops and practices, led by our incredible network members, allowed for contemplation and creativity in imagining a future for Higher Education centering wellbeing. Some highlights were:

  • Wrapping spaces to hold our community together, fostering storytelling, mapping and creativity
  • Presentation of the Inner Work Think Tank for Social Change in partnership with Georgetown University
  • Unconferencing methodology to address our shared topics of interest and expertise around wellbeing in higher education

Together we imagined a future for Global Higher Education that integrates wellbeing into every aspect of our education systems and promotes flourishing for all.  We thank all of our network members for being part of making this event and shared work so special!

Testimonials From Our Members Testimonials From Our Members

Haikus & Poems From Our Gathering Haikus & Poems From Our Gathering

Haikus & Poems Haikus & Poems

By The Higher Education Network

Get ready to embark on a journey through the poetic expressions of The Higher Education Network‘s annual gathering in Switzerland.

In this collection, you will discover haikus and poems that echo the spirit of intellectual exploration, camaraderie, and the shared commitment to the future of wellbeing in education. Each syllable is a brushstroke, painting a picture of contemplation, connection, and elevation of the mind. Through verses inspired by the serene landscapes, the vibrant discussions, and the harmonious bonds formed, we invite you to experience the essence of this gathering.

As you immerse yourself in these poetic reflections, may you find inspiration, insight, and a renewed sense of purpose in the pursuit of wellbeing and enlightenment within the realm of education.