Compassion Café: Morning UK A Place for Connection, Discussion and Restoration
A Place for Connection, Discussion and Restoration with Kathryn Lovewell. Compassion Cafe is a fortnightly, informal meet-up for the whole, global GCC family to come together. In a warm and welcoming atmosphere, you’ll find connection with others, support in your compassion practice and ideas for developing it, wherever you are in your personal journey.
This is a free space to learn, share and simply connect. So if you’ve ever wondered ‘am I knowledgeable enough to take part?’ or ‘do I have enough experience?’, please know that the only requirement to attend these get-togethers is for you to show up! You don’t have to be a GCC member. And if you just want to listen, that’s totally fine too!
Each meet-up will include some of the following:
Prompts to encourage some personal reflections
Practical suggestions and advice for developing your compassion practice
Free space for those that want to share their thoughts and experiences
Optional small group spaces for sharing
Inspiration for putting compassion into action in your personal life, your community and the wider world
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
LGBTQ+ Compassion in Action: Pride, Inclusion and Mental Wellbeing at Work
Join Rainbow Mind Greater Manchester for a free Pride Month webinar exploring LGBTQIA+ mental health in the workplace.
This 45 minute session introduces practical, compassion focused approaches that help organisations better understand and support LGBTQIA+ wellbeing at work.
Joined by special guests, Adam Imber and Zelah Glasson, and drawing on principles from Compassion Focused Therapy and humanistic practice, the session will explore how minority stress, stigma and workplace culture can impact mental health, and what meaningful inclusion can look like in practice.
This session is ideal for organisations looking to mark Pride Month with thoughtful learning that goes beyond awareness and supports real cultural change.
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Empathy & Compassion Research Speaker Series: The Neuroscience of Prosocial Behavior: From Helping and Cooperation to Social AI
Prosocial behavior—actions that benefit others—represents one of the most evolutionarily puzzling yet critically important aspects of social life. Unlike other behaviors that primarily serve direct self-interest, prosocial behaviors appear to contradict basic evolutionary principles by directing effort and resources toward helping others, often at one’s own cost. This paradox makes prosocial behavior both fascinating from a scientific perspective and profoundly understudied compared to self-serving behaviors. We investigate the fundamental neural mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior, with a focus on empathy, helping, and cooperation. Using a multidisciplinary approach that integrates behavioral paradigms with genetic, circuit-level, and computational tools, we demonstrate that mice exhibit multiple forms of prosocial behaviors, including comforting, targeted helping behavior, rescue-like behavior, and cooperation. Using these behavioral models, we identify key neural pathways in the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that specifically encode and control these behaviors. In addition to mechanisms within a single brain, we demonstrate that animals exhibit inter-brain neural correlations between interacting individuals. Beyond biological systems, our research further extends to understanding emergent social behaviors among artificial intelligence systems, identifying fundamental and generalizable features of interacting neural systems present in both biological and artificial agents.
Speaker: Weizhe Hong, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Neurobiology, Biochemistry, and Bioengineering
UC San Diego’s Center for Research on Empathy and Compassion proudly presents the Empathy & Compassion Research Speaker Series for Summer 2026.
This free virtual series highlights the impactful and groundbreaking research that Sanford Institute-affiliated faculty and researchers have played an integral role in. This series is designed for anyone with an interest in empathy and compassion in neurobiology and healthcare.
The hosting organization, T. Denny Sanford Institute of Empathy and Compassion, represents an unprecedented blending of two parallel themes: employing the unyielding rigor and tools of science to establish the neurological basis for empathy in the brain to identify the mechanisms that transform compassion from biology to behavior, and experimenting with and developing new ways to teach and instill empathy and compassion in clinicians currently practicing and in the teaching of future generations of health professionals.
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Lead with Humanity: Emotional intelligence and Relational Skills at Work
Improve communication, collaboration & psychological safety with hands-on emotional intelligence tools for real workplace impact.
This interactive 1‑hour taster introduces leaders and professionals to emotionally‑intelligent communication and relational skills that strengthen everyday conversations, collaboration and psychological safety at work. It blends core emotional intelligence ideas with practical coaching‑style tools that participants can immediately apply to one‑to‑ones, team discussions and cross‑organisational meetings.
We will explore how emotional self‑awareness, empathy and presence directly influence confidence, decision‑making and relationships in fast‑paced, high‑pressure environments. This is a practical session, with discussion and practice.
You’ll leave the session with:
· A clearer understanding of how emotional intelligence and relational skills can improve day‑to‑day conversations, collaboration and outcomes.
· Some practical tools and questions you can immediately try out in one‑to‑ones, team meetings and brave conversations.
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Leading with Purpose: Establishing Trust and Impact in a New Leadership Role
New to a role? Build trust, lead with confidence, strengthen your team, and navigate your first months with clarity and purpose.
Have you recently been appointed to a new role? Feeling excited – or maybe a little anxious about making the right impression? This session is for you!
The first few months in any new role are crucial. It’s your opportunity to build strong relationships while also showing others who you are, what you stand for, and how you lead. This session will provide practical guidance and steady foundations to help you navigate those early months with clarity, confidence, and purpose.
After the session, participants will be able to:
Articulate what matters as a leader
Identify what builds or undermines trust
How to build a good team around you
Communicate with confidence and compassion
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Compassionate Leadership
Come along to this session to find support for compassionate leadership. Christine Mullen, Senior HR Consultant with The City of Edinburgh Council will host this session which will support participants to:
• Explore some current thinking about compassionate leadership.
• Identify some key skills and behaviours that support compassionate leadership.
• Understand why compassionate leadership is important in the workplace today.
• Reflect on why self-compassion is an important component of compassionate leadership
• Have an awareness of some tools and resources to support both compassionate leadership and self-compassion
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
The Power of Beliefs with Shawn Achor
Are the stories you tell yourself helping you thrive - or holding you back?
Each of us sees the world through a lens shaped by our experiences, assumptions and beliefs. This lens quietly influences our everyday life - including our wellbeing, relationships and choices - but most of us rarely stop to question it or realise how much power we have to change it.
At this special event, positive psychology expert Shawn Achor will share insights from his new book The Power of Beliefs and explore how the stories we tell ourselves can either hold us back or help us thrive. Drawing on cutting-edge research, powerful real-life examples and his trademark warmth and humour, Shawn will reveal how our conscious and unconscious beliefs shape the way we experience the world – and what becomes possible within it.
Shawn will introduce the Seven Core Power Beliefs that underpin resilience, connection and purpose - and explain how small shifts in mindset can create meaningful changes in our everyday lives. At a time when many of us feel overwhelmed and disconnected, this event offers a hopeful and practical guide to reclaiming your agency and optimism.
Whether you're seeking greater fulfilment, stronger relationships or simply a more empowering way to navigate life, this conversation will leave you inspired to see yourself and your future differently.
About the speaker
Shawn Achor is a world-renowned expert on positive psychology and human potential. He is the bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage, Big Potential and his latest book The Power of Beliefs. His TED Talk on happiness and success is one of the most viewed of all time, with more than 25 million views. For over two decades, Shawn has worked with organisations and audiences around the world, including Google, NASA, the NBA and the White House, helping people cultivate greater wellbeing, resilience and performance. His work combines rigorous scientific research with humour, storytelling and practical tools that people can apply immediately in their daily lives. Shawn is widely recognised for making complex psychological ideas accessible, engaging and deeply relevant to modern life.
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
From Surviving To Thriving with Paris Bartholomew
Do you ever feel exhausted from just holding everything together?
For many of us, life can feel more like survival than living. Even when things seem okay on the outside, old wounds, stress and emotional patterns can leave us feeling disconnected, overwhelmed or stuck.
At this special event, speaker and educator Paris Bartholomew will explore happiness through a trauma-informed lens – sharing ideas to help you move from surviving to thriving. With warmth, honesty and compassion, Paris will challenge some of the myths around happiness and healing, while offering hope that meaningful change is possible.
Drawing on her own lived experience and years of work supporting others, Paris will explore the impact trauma can have on our minds, bodies and relationships – and why healing often begins when we stop hiding what we’re carrying.
Whether you’re navigating your own healing journey or simply wanting to understand yourself better, this event will offer encouragement, insights and practical ways forward.
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Compassion Café: A Place for Connection, Discussion and Restoration
A Place for Connection, Discussion and Restoration with Kathryn Lovewell. Compassion Cafe is a fortnightly, informal meet-up for the whole, global GCC family to come together. In a warm and welcoming atmosphere, you’ll find connection with others, support in your compassion practice and ideas for developing it, wherever you are in your personal journey.
This is a free space to learn, share and simply connect. So if you’ve ever wondered ‘am I knowledgeable enough to take part?’ or ‘do I have enough experience?’, please know that the only requirement to attend these get-togethers is for you to show up!
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Psychological Safety as a Tool for Collaboration
How internal team culture shapes trust, engagement and collaboration with your community.
Psychological safety is often framed as a mental health or workplace well-being concept, and it is, but its real impact shows in how teams collaborate and how organizations build trust with their communities.
Local news organizations are working to better engage younger and more diverse audiences, but new products or reporting alone aren’t enough. Creating psychologically safe spaces is essential for encouraging honest dialogue.
In this interactive and self-reflective session, API’s senior vice president, Sam Ragland, will guide participants through exploring how psychological safety shows up within their teams — and how it directly impacts their ability to build meaningful relationships with the communities they serve.
Through practical frameworks and real-time reflection, you’ll examine your own leadership behaviors, meeting dynamics and decision-making practices to identify what fosters (or hinders) trust, belonging and collaboration.
You’ll leave with:
A clearer understanding of how internal team culture shapes community engagement
Tools to recognize and reduce social threats in your work
Practical ways to create more inclusive and collaborative environments
About Sam Ragland:
Sam is an award-winning local newsroom leader who thought she was immune to burnout. She wasn't. And since the start of the pandemic, she's been studying the hazards of being a journalist, collaborating with trauma therapists and getting certified in digital wellness to coach and support journalists in their stress response. Using her tenure as an editor at The Palm Beach Post and USA TODAY, Sam has developed trauma-informed leadership practices and trained thousands of journalists worldwide.
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Leading Through AI Transformation, What It’s Teaching Us About Being Human: A Webinar Series - How Organizations & Leaders Can Build the Human Connections AI Can’t Replace
Every AI conversation includes a version of the same promise: that as automation accelerates, uniquely human qualities will matter even more. Most senior leaders believe it. And yet, the employee experience keeps pointing in the opposite direction — more efficiency, but less connection; faster coordination, but weaker alignment.
The gap isn’t a morale problem or a hybrid work problem. It’s structural.
The interactions that build and maintain relationships once replenished themselves naturally. That’s no longer the environment most organizations are operating in. In this webinar on how AI transformation affects leaders and organizations, researchers and practitioners explore what it takes to close that gap — and what development looks like when it’s designed for strengthening the space between people.
What You’ll Learn
What it takes to build the relational infrastructure that makes leadership possible when the conditions that once sustained it naturally no longer exist
Why the erosion of connection is a structural design problem — not a culture problem — and why that distinction changes what organizations need to do in response
The 3 interconnected pathways through which leadership development rebuilds what AI and distributed work erode
Why most leadership development misses the mark — and what changes when the unit of development shifts from the individual to the space between people
What it looks like in practice when organizations design for collective relational capacity rather than individual skill-building — and how that plays out in the real world
What L&D leaders can do now to start building relational infrastructure deliberately, without waiting for a fully formed organizational strategy to take shape
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Leading With Humanity: AI for Purpose-Driven Organizations
AI is rapidly reshaping how organizations operate, make decisions, and deliver on their missions.
For leaders in the social sector, this moment presents both opportunity and responsibility: how to leverage AI for purpose-driven organizations effectively while keeping people, purpose, and values at the center.
This discussion will explore how AI is influencing leadership in education, human services, and public health — shaping decision-making, redefining critical skills, and raising important organizational considerations.
We’ll also reveal practical insights to help you assess and apply AI within your own organization, with a focus on balancing innovation with a focus on leading with humanity.
What You'll Learn:
In this webinar, you’ll hear from social sector leaders about the challenges and opportunities they’re seeing with AI — and walk away with practical guidance for thoughtfully integrating AI into your organization, including:
Perspective on how purpose-driven organizations are leveraging AI
An understanding of the impact of AI on leadership in the social sector
Practical tips for considering AI innovation in your own context
Insights into leading with humanity and AI
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.
Compassionate Leadership: From Human Connection to Commercial Impact
How do leaders sustain performance when trust is fragile, energy is depleted, and the human cost of work is rising - without sacrificing commercial accountability?
Join Laura Berland and Evan Harrel (Co-founders and Executive Directors, the Center for Compassionate Leadership), alongside Nicola Shearer and Daniel Stane (Senior Pluribus Consultants and leadership experts) for an evidence‑based conversation on Compassionate Leadership.
Drawing on a compelling evidence base, and organisational case studies, this session makes explicit how compassionate leadership operates as a strategic capability - shaping effective decision‑making, trust, execution, and results. It brings the human experience of work into focus, showing how leaders can respond to real pressure, fear, and fatigue in ways that restore energy, strengthen performance, and deliver commercial impact.
Who Should Join
- Senior leaders, HR and People leaders, inclusion and transformation professionals, and others accountable for delivering performance through people.
- Leaders navigating sustained pressure who need approaches that are both human and commercially credible
- Those responsible for culture, engagement, and results, looking to move from good intentions to systemic, practical impact
What You’ll Gain
- A sharper lens to identify where human suffering is enabling or blocking performance
- Practical ways to operationalise compassion in leadership, work, and organisational dynamics
- Greater confidence to make the commercial case for compassionate leadership
- Clear insight into how addressing visible and hidden suffering strengthens trust, engagement, and collaboration
- A simple, repeatable approach to embedding Compassionate Leadership in practice
This webinar is connected to a tailored Compassionate Leadership solution offered by Pluribus in partnership with the Center for Compassionate Leadership.
Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.