Our 2025 Cohort Training is open for registration!

If you’re looking for community and support to apply your spiritual practice to social justice engagement, we warmly invite you to join us for the 2025 Beloved Community Circles training! This is an opportunity for participants to gain skills in our three organizational pillars: community care, mindfulness practice, and strategies to advocate for climate and racial justice together. As we face unprecedented environmental, political, and economic challenges, we offer this training in the spirit of generosity, as a resource and a loving reminder that you and your community that you are not alone in this moment. We can create the world we want together.

We ask that participants:

• wants to start or deepen a Beloved Community Circle and have capacity to do so

• can commit to attend at least 7 of the 9 weekly online sessions in September and October 2025

• will attend with at least one other person from your location, and more if possible

• have proficiency in understanding and speaking English. We are working on making our training more accessible to people who speak different language, and will include translation breaks in our programming towards this end.

Schedule and Weekly Topics*

*subject to change as the situation demands

Week 1: September 6th. Course overview, community guidelines, getting to know one another.

Week 2. September 13th: “BCC DNA.” Learn to get started with a Circle, from recruitment to meeting facilitation.

Week 3. September 20th: Learn from existing BCCs about Circle-building and sustaining strategies. Connect with other participants in small support groups.

Week 4. September 27th Guest Speaker: “Nonviolent Resistance Movements and Applications” with Daniel Hunter.

Daniel Hunter coaches and trains movements across the globe. As founder of Choose Democracy he’s fought against Trump’s coup attempts and consolidating authoritarian power. He has trained extensively with ethnic minorities in Burma, pastors in Sierra Leone, and independence activists in northeast India. He has written multiple books, including "What Will You Do If Trump Wins,” "Climate Resistance Handbook" and "Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow."

Week 5. October 4th: Troubleshoot common challenges in Circle work. Share questions and connect in support groups.

Week 6. October 11th: Explore intersectionality and learn tips for building inclusive communities.

Week 7. October 18th: Develop an action plan in your local Circle and share out.

Week 8. October 25th Guest Speaker: “Mindfulness & Climate Change” with Kaira Jewel Lingo.

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong interest in spirituality and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and activists, as well as artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of  Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation. Her upcoming events and teachings can be found at www.kairajewel.com.

Week 9. November 2nd: Closing session. Review learnings, assess the program, review next steps, and share appreciations.

Interested? To register, please complete this form.