Brooke D. Lavelle, PhD, is the Co-Founder and President of the Courage of Care Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to facilitating the co-creation of a more just, compassionate world. Together with her diverse, interdisciplinary, and multi-generational team at Courage, Brooke provides training and consultation in relational compassion practices, anti-oppressive pedagogies, restorative healing methods, and systems tools to social service and caring professionals, as well as to educational, spiritual, and human rights organizations.
Holding a PhD in Buddhist Studies from Emory University and an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University, Brooke’s academic work focuses on the diversity of contemplative models for cultivating compassion as well as the ways in which spiritual practice and social activism inform one another.
Brooke is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany, where she co-developed a climate justice program for ecological sustainability researchers. She has served as a lecturer at San Francisco State University and as an education consultant to the Mind & Life Institute, the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia, Teachers College at Columbia University, The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, and the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley.
In 2016, Brooke received a Mind & Life Think Tank grant to study various conceptualizations of compassion, which she is now applying in her work to include a more consistent justice and equity framework in research and training in the field. She recently completed a book manuscript on courage and spiritual activism and is co-writing a book on compassion and equity in education with an education collaborative she founded in Oakland.
Brooke splits her time between Berlin, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area, and travels regularly to lead Courage workshops and retreats in the US and abroad. Brooke will be leading the contemplative faculty at the 2020 Summer Research Institute, where she will bring her expertise and skills to bear on the theme of “Cultivating Prosociality Across the Lifespan”.
