PROJECTS - Our Commitments

The Art of Peace Foundation and its partners have many projects either underway or ready to begin. Feel free to read about them below.

Songs for Tibet

Songs For Tibet Record Project Details Can Be Found Here

MERIDIAN TRUST ­ Preserving Tibetan Culture

UK based Meridian Trust nonprofit preserves and disseminates Buddhist culture and traditions on film and video. The Dalai Lama is the patron of Meridian Trust and believes the efforts of preserving Tibetan culture and teachings are vital for the Tibetan people and culture.

The Meridian Trust has an archive of over 2,500 hours of footage that focuses primarily on the endangered traditions of Tibet. For over 30 years they have filmed teachings and talks given by leading Buddhist teachers, including the Dalai Lama and his teachers. They are in the process of making these teaching available to all people of the world by translating and digitizing this extensive library and making it available on the web for future generations.

For more information, visit: Meridian Trust

PATHs: Spreading the power of Mindfulness

The Dalai Lama has taken a keen interest in the roll of education in teaching empathy and compassion to children. This skill set is absent from most educational curricula. He believes that long-term global peace can be promoted dramatically by teaching our children better empathic and emotional skills.

To this end, he has been actively engaging Penn State's Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development. Research scientists and practitioners led by Dr. Mark Greenberg have been developing and evaluating the effectiveness of social and emotional learning programs to build caring, compassion and competence. The goal of these programs is to build mindfulness and caring as central aspects of education and family life.

This work began in 1981 with the development of the PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) Curriculum which focuses on building children's self-control, emotional awareness and regulation, and empathy for others. PATHS has been selected is used in schools in over 20 countries. In 2000, Dr. Greenberg and His Holiness the Dalai Lama discussed this work (See Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, 2004).  As a result of this dialogue, His Holiness invited Dr. Greenberg to provide training to Tibetan elementary school teachers in India. Since then, Dr. Greenberg has discussed the effects of social and emotional learning on caring, competence, and cognition (brain development) with His Holiness in a number of public forums in the U.S. and Canada.  The Art of Peace Foundation is to make this curricula available more extensively - especially in areas of conflict.

Penn State continues to develop educational programs for children, parents, and teachers to support mindfulness and compassion. A new model of mindful parenting has been developed and showed initial success in promoting more positive and caring relationships in parent-teen relationships. A second project is an ongoing evaluation with John's Hopkins University of the use of yoga with 4th and 5th grade students to evaluate the effects of daily yoga on the caring, competence, and attentional skills of students. Finally, work has begun on developing more effective models to increase the mindfulness and compassion of teachers and to promote more caring classroom environments.

Program Results
In rigorous clinical studies, the PATHS program has been shown to substantially:

• reduce teachers' reports of students exhibiting aggressive behavior.
• increase teachers' reports of students exhibiting self-control
• increase students' scores on cognitive skills tests
• improve students' ability to tolerate frustration plus their ability -- and willingness -- to use effective conflict-resolution strategies
• decrease conduct problems and the percentage of aggressive/violent solutions to social problems.
• increase students' vocabulary for emotions

FUTURE PROJECTS

The Art of Peace Foundation is currently developing a plan of support of other programs that the Dalai Lama believes is important for promoting peace.