Certification Program for Compassionate Systems
Master Practitioners
Class of 2025-2026
A year-long blended program consisting of monthly virtual convenings and a one-week in-person retreat (location to be confirmed).
* September 11, 2025 to August 6, 2026 (Confirmed)
Facilitated by Mette Boell & Peter Senge
What’s new in 2025
For this seventh cohort, we expand our program to welcome leaders from diverse backgrounds and settings across and beyond education, aligned with our vision that “it takes a city” to grow healthy human beings.
We also shift the program timing to better accommodate participants across global time zones, making our offerings more accessible to our growing community of practitioners in Asia Pacific. Program calls will now be at 7 PM Eastern Time on Thursdays, allowing our Southeast Asian community to participate on Friday morning and our Eastern Australian community to start mid-morning on Friday, instead of in the middle of the night as in the past six cohorts. Fortunately, this timing should also work well for all of our California and British Columbia community members.
* We’re offering an early bird registration discount of $2,500, bringing the total to $12,500 if you register by June 15. Don’t miss this opportunity!
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.
For the past couple of centuries, well-educated people in positions of governance and authority have made decisions that have led to the outcomes we are struggling with in the world today. Outcomes of climate change, extinction rates, overpopulation, immense inequity, and a global pandemic of stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide. Decisions that have led to a poly-crisis of unfathomable proportions that we are unequipped to grasp, let alone deal with, in a cohesive, regenerative manner, and our children and educators are experiencing the consequences of the fear and suffering the most.
Clearly, something needs to change in education if we are to shape different outcomes for our future. Moreover, we believe that fundamental, gradual redesign of our structures of education over the coming decades can have unique leverage in shaping different ways of living that foster well-being for humans and our fellow creatures on planet Earth. What if the purpose of society is to grow healthy and flourishing humans on a healthy and thriving planet? Throughout this training we explore and develop strategies for cross-sector compassionate systems change that holds the wellbeing of our children at the heart of our societies. This vision animates the growing compassionate systems change community that is connecting educators, students and non-educators around the world.
Interestingly, from a material and physical health perspective, globally we have never been better off in recorded times. We live longer, and more people have access to education. There is less hunger and poverty globally and we have made remarkable discoveries in these past centuries improving living conditions in such a variety of ways that it is hard to imagine. However, this progress is external and physical, relating primarily to artifacts. It seems the poor state of our inner world, our personal capacity for well-being and sense of purpose and meaning in life, along with the devastating consequences in our natural world, are unintended side effects of our fast-paced, run-rampant lifestyles in global society. We seem to lack nuances of what it means to live in a good way: flourishing, joyously connected, and with an integral sense of belonging. Everything and everyone we have ever loved is right here on our beautiful planet, and our destructive relationship to the natural world seems mirrored in the self-destructive relationship to our inner world. These are the conditions children grow up with in our time.
For over a decade, we have been working with a global community of educational innovators, thought leaders and international 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 human and planetary flourishing:
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the mind-heart-body system: understanding and developing self,
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immediate relational systems of social interactions with families, teams and other groups: understanding and caring for others, and
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the larger systems of society,institutions, economy, and ecology: understanding and caring for our world.
Changing the trajectory of the future means holding our children and young people at the heart of society - they are to live in the future we are all shaping. For years, this has led us to focus on systems of education in the work towards compassionate systems change. However, it has become clear over the past years, that much more than innovation in the classroom and school system is necessary. A future of Compassionate Systems requires growth of organizational, governmental and societal cultures that:
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foster deep aspiration and intention through ongoing reflection and learning,
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develop leaders at all levels of systems adept at integrating the inner and outer dimensions of systems awareness, and
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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, as well as and for community-based organizations, healthcare and governance 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, diverse administrators and leaders, 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: August 15, 2025
(Early Bird: June 15, 2025)
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.