Charter for Compassion Gala

Compassion brings us together. Collaboration turns it into action.

Thank you for stopping by our table. We’re glad you found us.

ProSocial World helps people achieve meaningful things together by strengthening their capacity to cooperate.

Members of San Antonio’s community collaboratives in conversation at a ProSocial session

Who we are

Helping people achieve more, together

Every day, people are working to improve the places, organizations, and systems they care about. They bring knowledge, commitment, and relationships. They know what matters. What can be harder is working together to make it happen.

That’s where we come in. Our approach draws on evolutionary science, Elinor Ostrom’s research into governing shared resources, and contextual behavioral science. In practice, that means helping people clarify a shared purpose, hear perspectives that have been missed, make fair decisions, address conflict, and turn good intentions into workable agreements.

We don’t decide what communities or organizations should pursue. We help them work together more effectively to achieve what matters to them.

Our gift to you

Something to take home with you

Two ways to keep exploring after the gala: one for the groups you’re part of, and one for yourself. Start with whichever speaks to you.

What helps your group cooperate, and where could it grow?

For the groups you care about

ProSocial Insights Collaboration Assessment

Think of a group you belong to, whether that’s a team at work, a congregation, a volunteer group, or a neighborhood. This assessment asks how that group works together and gives you a personalized report on the conditions that support cooperation within it.

It’s built on ProSocial Insights, the research-based platform we use with groups around the world.

How it works

  1. 1Choose a group you’re part of.
  2. 2Answer questions about how it works together.
  3. 3Get a personalized report on the conditions for cooperation in your group.
Take the assessment
Inner Transformation: An Introduction to Interspirituality course

For your own inner life

Inner Transformation: An Introduction to Interspirituality

A short, self-paced online course that invites you to explore your inner life and how it connects to the world around you. It moves through three themes, Interconnectedness, Inner Transformation, and Social Engagement, with short videos, poems, reflections, and simple practices for carrying the ideas into daily life.

Co-created by Rev. Diane Berke and Susan Soleil, drawing on Dr. Wayne Teasdale’s Nine Elements of Universal Spirituality. No background in spirituality or religion is required.

Free for gala guests (regularly $75). Enter this code at checkout:

COMPASSIONGALA
Start the course

What this looks like in practice

Compassion, put to work

Caring about a shared goal is where collaboration starts. What helps it last is how people work together day to day.

San Antonio, Texas · with our partner Charter for Compassion

Strengthening community collaboratives in a Compassionate City

In 2017, San Antonio declared itself a Compassionate City. What followed was a network of community collaboratives, many of them volunteer-led, working on mental health, housing, environmental sustainability, immigration, and community resources. The work mattered, but it wasn’t always easy to sustain. Meetings could feel unfocused, roles were unclear, and differences in perspective were hard to address directly.

ProSocial World worked with local leaders to understand what was helping these collaboratives work. Community members were trained as co-researchers and gathered the evidence themselves. They found that progress came from gradual shifts in how people worked together: shared purpose was revisited rather than assumed, decisions became more transparent, roles became clearer, and tensions were more often raised openly.

Compassion is like water; it gets through the cracks down to the level of need.

Each person in the Collaborative matters. This weaves a level of trust that endures for a long time.

Read the San Antonio case study

Nuevo León, Mexico

INSPIRE: Compassion in Action

Students from Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Leaders of Tomorrow scholarship program spent a semester learning the ProSocial Process, then put it to work with the nonprofit Pal Sur del Norte in El Refugio de Cerros Blancos, a rural community. Working in four groups, they ran parenting workshops on empathic communication, a community mural and storytelling theater, social-emotional learning activities for children, and a project gathering residents’ stories about their cultural identity.

In interviews afterward, mothers described feeling heard, and community members noticed changes in how they listened and communicated.

We learned to pause and listen to each other, not just react.

Charter for Compassion and five partner organizations

Bridging science and spirit

With support from the Templeton Religion Trust and the Issachar Fund, ProSocial piloted an eight-week course that paired Elinor Ostrom’s principles for cooperation with Brother Wayne Teasdale’s nine elements of universal spirituality. The first cohort included Charter for Compassion, Osage Forest of Peace, Stillpoint Center for Spiritual Development, All Souls Interfaith Gathering, and the San Antonio PeaceCENTER with Alamo Colleges District.

The research looked at both sides of group life: participants’ inner experience and insight, and how they connected and acted together. The same nine elements sit at the heart of the Inner Transformation course above.

Read the case study

Let’s stay in touch

We imagine a world where people are better able to navigate differences, care for what they share, and accomplish together what none could do alone.

If something from the evening sparked an idea for your organization or community, we’d love to hear about it. And if you’d like to help more people learn to work together this way, you can support our work.

Start a conversation Support our work

Questions about the course? Email courses@prosocial.world