Certification Program for Compassionate Systems
Master Practitioners
Class of 2024-2025
A year-long blended program consisting of monthly virtual convenings and a one-week in-person retreat.
Starts June 24, 2024 and ends July 18, 2025
Facilitated by Mette Boell, Peter Senge, & Hanneli Ågotsdatter
We are grateful to partner with a growing, impressive, and diverse group of people around the world who feel deeply that living in the ways of compassionate systems change carries promises of better futures for ourselves, our children, and those who are to come.
The Compassionate Systems Masters Practitioners program is a certification for those who are willing and able to take the lead on these changes in their local settings. The certification program is designed to help Master Practitioners support and enable compassionate systems change through an eclectic collection of tools, practices, and approaches that can help people reorient and choose a different way of showing up and being in relationship with themselves, other people, and the world. The framework can increase people’s well-being, their sense of purpose and belonging, their critical and analytical reflective capacities, and their overall self-awareness and commitment to caring about themselves and others. This stance, along with the diverse tools and practices synthesized from fields like the science of learning and development, organizational learning, neuroscience and contemplative neuroscience, contemplative cultivation, social-emotional learning, evolutionary biology, systems dynamics, and the science of living systems, empowers people to take steps towards systems change in the spaces they inhabit.
For the past several years, we have been working with a global network of educational innovators and scientists to develop and test a new synthesis of head, heart, and hand, called the “Compassionate Systems Framework,” in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Systems Awareness Lab.
The focus is on “cultivating three interconnected facets of “systems awareness” for adults and students alike:
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- the mind-heart-body system: understanding and developing self,
- immediate social systems of relationships, families, teams and groups and social networks: understanding and caring for others, and
- the larger systems of society, economy, and ecology: understanding and caring for our world.
Changing the system of education requires much more than innovation in the “classroom.” It requires developing organizational climates and cultures that:
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- foster deep aspiration and ongoing reflection and learning,
- develop leaders at all levels (classroom, school, school system, community) adept at integrating the inner and outer dimensions of systems awareness, and
- engage diverse stakeholders in building shared visions and shared responsibility for change.
This is true for schools as well as larger administrative structures like school districts, education departments, or ministries, and for community-based organizations working with students and young people outside of school.
This larger Compassionate Systems movement is at a point where its continued growth and expansion depends on developing Master Practitioners – teachers, administrators, students, local stakeholders – who can shepherd the ongoing growth locally and globally, as well as better understand how this capacity building can become coherent, regenerative, and self-sustaining in diverse cultural and organizational contexts, over time. This is the purpose of our certification program.
Application deadline: May 30, 2024
If you have any questions, please email Miho Kito at
mkito@systemsawareness.org
Please note that only those who have previously taken our Compassionate Systems Introductory workshop are eligible to apply. Please know that submitting an application does NOT secure anyone a seat as we will prioritize those who come in teams and where there is already work/efforts going on in those local communities.