Posted by Sanjiv Prabhakaran on May 04, 2018
 
Sara Schairer is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit "Compassion It" whose mission is to inspire compassionate actions and attitudes. She can be seen above providing a guided meditation class to make the audience more mindful of their compassionate actions in life.
 
Sara is a Stanford-certified compassion facilitator and leads trainings globally for people of all ages and backgrounds, including inmates, business leaders, students, educators, and healthcare providers. She was a contributing author to the book "The Neuroscience of Learning and Development" and also writes for The Chopra Center. An interesting fact is that she was the female vocalist in a local indie band that broke up in 2015.
 
 
She explains that there are many varieties of social issues in the world - hunger, divisive country on racial issues, bullying, hatred, etc. She points out there are several solution proposed and she looks at her doc Scout and says that is the definition of "Compassion" since dog's love every person whether that person is rich, poor, homeless or a criminal.
 
Her passion for this movement started when she was divorced early with her little daughter. She went through various challenges for several years until one days she saw a show of Ellen DeGeneres with a person talking about compassion. That changed her life completely and the idea of the phrase and company name "Compassion It" came to her, which makes compassion a verb and a movement!
 
She was dealt with another tragedy when her father got hit by a truck and was killed instantly in 2004. So she stared making T-shirts with the "Compassion It" logo and giving it out at Yoga clubs and other events.
 
 
Then she came up with the idea of a wrist band that had a purpose. It was designed with flippable colors so that one side was a different color and the other side was white. She suggested that wearers should flip the band each time they do an act of compassion. A girl in UK demonstrated and explained this well on a video that went viral. Later 2 high-school girls set up a fundraising event and people were lined up outside the school and they sold all the bands in 42 minutes. These bands can be purchased from her site at Compassion It Store.
 
She says there are about 140,000 bands in use all over the world! She was with the President of Botswana distributing the bands to the office staff and other folks there. She found out that Stanford in CA offers a course on compassion training at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) and she got certified 5 years ago as a teacher and now offers various courses to inmates in prisons, business leaders and healthcare providers.
 
 
Bill Sutton awarded the Joshua Malawi school certificate to Sara that represents donation of school supplies by DMSB to schools in Malawi in the name of the speaker.
 
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