THE BRONX

The Bronx Compassionate Communities - 2018

HEART has just completed our year-long Compassionate Communities Award Competition in collaboration with the NYC Mayor’s Office and the NYC Department of Education.

We are very pleased to report it was a great success! The competition engaged all of the elementary schools in Bronx District 8 in an innovative program designed to share humane education practices and resources that inspire respect, empathy, and social action.

We structured our competition around the concept of community because we believe that life-long compassionate engagement can be most powerfully awakened in individual students when it is expressed in all aspects of the community that guides and sustains them. To that end, each of the participating schools was asked to develop and implement lessons, activities, and service projects within their school community that reflect upon the meaningful connections between the needs of the people in their neighborhoods, and those of the animals with whom we also share the world: our companions, farm animals, and our wild animal neighbors.

HEART shared extensive resources with each school that explore these connections from many different perspectives, and had frequent contact throughout the school year with teachers, parent coordinators, and administrators through email up-dates and face-to-face visits.

These educational and service experiences were then paired by the schools with a proposal for how they would use our grand prize money of $10,000 to further enhance their compassionate connections both within the school and in their wider community.