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United Nations Invites AIMF to Establish a North American Hub for the Mountain Partnership—Fundraising Campaign Launched

AIMF is pleased to announce that it has received a formal invitation from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations to establish in Aspen a North American Hub for the Mountain Partnership. (Click here to view the letter from the UN.) Read more>

View the letter> 

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"Sustainable Mountain Development: The North American Report"

We're pleased to announce that the Aspen International Mountain Foundation (AIMF) and the Telluride Institute—have just completed a major report on sustainable development in North American mountains for inclusion in the materials being developed for the upcoming United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, a.k.a. Rio+20. View the report>

 

 

 

Project Compassion

On the evening of July 25, 2008, an unprecedented meeting of the minds  in Aspen, Colorado, marked the introduction of the Stanford University-based non-profit, Project Compassion (otherwise known as The Stanford Center for the Study of Altruism and Compassion), to a group of founding supporters. Honored guests of this AIMF-sponsored event included Dr. James Doty; Geshe Thupten Jinpa, His Holiness The Dalai Lama's principal translator; Tenzin Tethong, President of the Dalai Lama Foundation; Pico Iyer, author of Dalai Lama biography, The Open Road; and Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and author of the recent best-seller, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill.

In honor of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's visit to Aspen July 24-26, Project Compassion unveiled the organization's mission of creating a multi-disciplinary environment whereby compassion and altruism research is supported and legitimized within the broader scientific community.

Project Compassion, founded by Stanford Professor of Neurosurgery, Dr. James Doty,  is one of the most important scientific centers taking shape today. The effort is a joint project of the Neuroscience Institute and a host of contemplative scholars (including His Holiness the Dalai Lama) to explore the neural underpinnings of compassion states and develop protocols for potentiating these states in a secular structure.

Project Compassion goals include:

  • Exploring the neural correlates of compassion and human connection and devise secular protocols by which they can be trained
  • Researching civil and social structures in order to determine how to best create incentive for cooperative and pro-social behaviors
  • Helping to forge an international consortium to explore these topics and bring urgently needed, academic legitimacy to the field of compassion research


For more information about Project Compassion, visit www.compassionstanford.org