Dalai Lama Fellows
Overview
Dalai Lama Fellows (DLF) is a unique one-year leadership program for emerging social change makers designed to help them cultivate self-awareness, resilience, and compassion; broaden their cultural perspectives; learn how to engage in efficacious ways with complex systems; and situate their work with local communities in sustainable ways. DLF’s ultimate goal is to help change makers integrate contemplative work and intentional personal transformation with their efforts to bring about positive change in their communities and the more-than-human world.
DLF offers Fellows a rigorous, interdisciplinary, and deeply contemplative program to reimagine leadership as involving self-awareness, personal sustainability, genuine compassion for others, and the capacity to skillfully navigate complex systems at multiple levels. Our Fellows learn practices for cultivating emotional intelligence, self-care, resilience, empathy, deep listening, and communication skills in order to foster systems for human and planetary flourishing for generations to come. Over the course of a year, with the support of coaches and mentors, each Fellow implements an original field project addressing a local challenge and learns how to interweave their own transformation with the transformation of the communities with which they are engaging. Upon graduation, Fellows join a community of LifeLong Fellows, with whom they connect in mutually supportive ways while continuing to advance their leadership journeys.
The primary components of the yearlong fellowship include:
- The Head, Heart, and Hands Curriculum: a 12-module semi-synchronous curriculum providing concepts, practices, and applied reflective exercises for contemplative leadership development
- 1-on-1 Contemplative Coaching: monthly support for Fellows’ contemplative and holistic development
- 1-on-1 Social Innovation Coaching: monthly support for Fellows’ social innovation projects
- Cohort Calls: monthly full-group learning experiences integrating lessons learned from each curriculum module
- Learning Pods: regional learning communities facilitated by program alumni
- Contemplative Leadership Assembly: an in-person immersive learning experience delivered at the beginning and end of the fellowship year
Global Representation
To date we have awarded 229 fellowships to change makers from 56 different countries, with the majority of our Fellows representing the Global South. Below is a map of where our Fellows hail from:
Program History
Dalai Lama Fellows was founded in 2010, with the support of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, as an independent, non-sectarian, and inclusive organization. Beginning with a fellowship program, DLF has become a pioneer in integrating contemplative practices and personal flourishing with social innovation.
With Fellows representing more than 50 different countries DLF has assembled an active global leadership network that serves as an ever-expanding resource of human flourishing for next generation change makers.
DLF is stewarded through a partnership between the University of Virginia’s Contemplative Sciences Center, the University of Colorado Boulder’s Renée Crown Wellness Institute, Stanford University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, and the Stanford Storytelling Project. Each university contributes resources to the global fellowship program while also operating interwoven local academic programs for students on each university’s campus.
In March of 2024, a group of fellows and donors made a trip to Dharamsala, India to meet with the Dalai Lama, the description of that trip and related links can be found here.