The introduction of the Compassionate USA course starts with some unexpected and humbling context for students.
“We live in an ocean of stars, and among these trillions of stars and planets is our island home, Earth, a home to all the plants, animals and humans who have ever lived on Earth, who live on it now, and who will ever live on it in the future.
“Here you are, just here being human,” reads the transcript and accompanying animated video depicting space, nature and community.
The free, online micro-course that launched this summer and is offered through Alamo Colleges aims to retrain people to live more compassionate lives — to treat others as one wants to be treated. The city has pledged $500,000 toward the production of the courses and website, while Alamo Colleges hired staff to implement and maintain the courses.
Compassionate USA furthers a resolution that was approved by City Council in 2017. The Charter for Compassion, which more than 450 communities across the world have adopted, states the city is committed “to the teaching, training and equipping of future generations with the core value of compassion.”
While “neuroscience research tells us that compassion is in the human DNA,” many of us have been taught through cultural norms to fend for ourselves, Ann Helmke, the City of San Antonio’s faith liaison who helps oversee the community’s Compassionate San Antonio initiative and founded the nonprofit peaceCENTER, told the San Antonio Report.
The courses and videos are an attempt to strengthen the neural pathways in an individual’s mind that lead to emotional awareness, Helmke added.
“It’s rewiring and reminding these bodies that there’s something really decent in us,” Helmke said. “But we’ve got to start repeating it more.”
The ultimate goal is for those individuals to apply that compassion to the systems they live and work in — and change them if necessary, she said.
When Mayor Ron Nirenberg took office six years ago, the Compassionate San Antonio Resolution was one of the first he and the peaceCENTER brought to city council. A framed copy of the resolution hangs in his office and his staff were the first to go through initial compassion training in 2018.
“The whole objective is systems change, community-wide and even global change,” Nirenberg said. “When the individual members of an organization [or] community exercise the skills of compassion, cultural change can occur.”
The equitable approach to budgeting, the affordable housing plan and the city’s response to the migrant crisis are just a few examples of compassion in policy, he said.
“No one argues that the immigration system in the United States is broken and in need of reform, and while local communities do not have the authority to change immigration policy, we do have a human obligation to treat all people with dignity,” he said.
The first migrant resource center was deployed in 2019 because it was the right thing to do, he added, “it didn’t take phone calls from the mayor [or] council, public outrage or the media spotlight.”
The Compassionate SA initiative has launched an opt-in texting service to notify residents about local needs and volunteer opportunities, a Compassionate Institute that welcomes professionals from all industries and established CompassionNET to connect people to compassionate institutions.
Compassionate USA is the initiative’s latest effort and its first step into a national and global spotlight. It grew out of “hallway conversations” at the United States Conference of Mayors in 2022, which convened just one week after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Helmke said.
“Everybody was talking about Uvalde,” she recalled. While there are many other worthy and ongoing policy discussions about how to prevent violence, she turned to compassion as an additional path.
“What if we took what San Antonio is already utilizing and simplified it … so it doesn’t sound like rocket science — it’s human science?” Helmke said. “And what if we made that available to everyone across the country?”
Beyond violence, compassion — or lack thereof — can be found at the root of nearly all social ills, she said. From political polarization to housing to racism to poverty to health care access, “it’s all connected.”
Since its launch on June 1, the Compassionate USA website has received more than 5,000 page views and 97 people have enrolled in the six-week, self-led course on Coursera, which donated its online learning platform for the initiative, according to Alamo Colleges. The website also offers more informal lesson videos that feature both national experts and local leaders such as Father David Garcia, former city councilman and current President and CEO of Communities in Schools Rey Saldaña and Elder Linda Ximenes of the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation.
There are many different courses on compassion taught throughout the country in schools, government and workplaces, but what makes Compassionate USA unique is that it’s entirely free, Helmke said.
“That was the hardest part, I think, for people to understand: that there is no cost,” she said. When people ask what the catch is, “my response was always: ‘I don’t know, life commitment?'”
Too ‘touchy-feely’ for you?
On Tuesday evening, Julie Moore-Felux, an English professor at Northwest Vista College who leads curriculum development for the Compassionate USA project, met with several alumni of the Compassion Institute and the micro-course. They are doctors, educators, human service providers and at least one yoga instructor.
They convened to provide feedback on the courses and talk about future curricula that could be targeted to certain audiences.
“One of the big questions I asked at the beginning of the event last night was: what groups of people or what kinds of people are going to be resistant to this curriculum? And how do we create a sincere invitation?” Moore-Felux said.
While the lessons pull from well-established teachings from biology, neuroscience, mental health practices as well as philosophy and religion, the curriculum author acknowledges that there are underlying political elements when encouraging people to have compassion — elements that Democrats and socialists are more likely to embrace.
The people who need the training most may be the most resistant, she said. “We need to …. try to find some folks in those different groups that might be open to this and [will] bring that message to their friends.”
There are also skeptics that may dismiss this work as part of a wellness or self-care fad.
“People want to assign this to a woo-woo, kind of touchy-feely thing,” Moore-Felux said. “But I strongly believe that we need more touching and feeling in this world, and if we could just get on over ourselves and lean into that, I think that’s the answer.”
The word “compassion” comes with a connotation for many as being soft, weak or turning a blind eye to wrongdoing, she said, but “true compassion requires a great deal of discernment and consequences.”
It’s a self-awareness and understanding that some people may feel uncomfortable with at first.
“We’re responding to the symptoms of this kind of illness that we’ve bought into that we can go it alone, and that’s produced a lot of trauma in the world,” Moore-Felux said. “The truth is that human beings couldn’t have survived [alone]. I think we just need to get back to our nature and be reminded that that’s who we really are.”
Teams from Compassionate San Antonio, peaceCENTER and Alamo Colleges will continue to work on expanding the initiative to reach new audiences here and across the world. A representative from San Antonio’s sister city in Japan, Kumamoto, is visiting Texas this week to find out more about the initiative, Helmke said.
“San Antonio, all of us, are gifting this to the world,” she said. “Just that is an amazing example of compassion — because we need it.”
This story has been updated with additional information from Compassionate USA.
