Secular Mindfulness · Online (Zoom)
Applied Compassion Training (ACT) is the 11-month certificate program run by Stanford's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), the research center founded by neurosurgeon and CCARE director James Doty. The program runs January to November each year, fully online via Zoom, and is co-led by Neelama Eyres, who serves as ACT's co-founder and director. Recent cohorts have included around 92 participants drawn from 18 countries; the program has graduated more than 500 people from over 40 countries since launch. ACT sits in the secular, evidence-based wing of contemplative training. The framing isn't religious. Compassion is treated as a trainable capacity, supported by research from CCARE and from the wider science-of-compassion field. The pedagogy is borrowed from Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school): cohort-based, project-based, and oriented around shipping something into a real workplace or community by the end of the year. What students do over the eleven months looks roughly like this. Monthly live sessions with subject-matter experts on mindfulness, resiliency, unconscious bias, and compassionate leadership. Three immersion retreats held over Zoom (the program is fully remote). One-to-one mentorship throughout the year, plus smaller mentor pods and Capstone teams for project feedback. The throughline is the Applied Compassion Capstone Project, where each participant designs and ships a real intervention in a chosen setting: a hospital, a courtroom, a school district, a corporate team, an art program, a mental health hub. Cohorts skew toward working professionals who already have something to apply compassion to. Past participants have included physicians, nurses, hospital chaplains, judges, attorneys, law school faculty, organizational consultants, public school administrators, and Stanford employees themselves. The program isn't a path to becoming a meditation teacher in the classical sense. It's a path to becoming a person who can run a compassion-informed workshop, leadership program, or service intervention with the credibility of a Stanford-issued certificate behind it.
The curriculum is organized around five elements participants name as defining: action, experiential learning, mentorship, global connections, and the CCARE research base. Monthly content sessions rotate through mindfulness practice, resiliency, unconscious bias, compassionate leadership, conflict and difficult conversations, self-compassion, and the science of empathy versus compassion (a distinction CCARE researchers are careful about, since empathic distress and compassion engage different neural systems). Reading draws on CCARE-affiliated research and on adjacent compassion protocols including Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT), which CCARE also developed. The capstone runs in parallel from early in the year. Past capstones include compassion toolkits for hospital staff, judicial training programs for trauma-informed courtrooms, climate-psychology certificate tracks, workplace wellness curricula, public art installations, and community mental health hubs. The capstone is what the certificate is built around. Coursework feeds it; mentorship sharpens it; the three immersion retreats give cohort time to refine it.
Delivery is fully online over Zoom, which makes the program accessible to participants outside North America without relocating. The cadence is monthly: a live cohort session with a subject-matter expert, plus smaller-group mentor meetings and capstone team check-ins between sessions. Three immersion retreats punctuate the year. They're not silent retreats in the Buddhist sense. They're intensive synchronous gatherings, run on Zoom, that combine practice, dialogue, and project work over consecutive days. Each participant is paired with a mentor for one-to-one sessions across the eleven months, and capstone teams of four to six participants give and receive feedback on each other's projects through completion. The d.school influence shows up in how the capstone is treated: iterate, prototype, test in the real setting, refine.
Graduates receive a Certificate of Completion from CCARE Stanford and are referred to inside the network as Ambassadors of Compassion. The capstone project is the practical artifact: graduates leave with a tested intervention they've already run in a real setting, plus a CCARE-affiliated alumni network spanning 40-plus countries. Common post-graduation paths include running compassion workshops inside an existing employer, consulting on compassionate leadership, contributing to wellness or DEI programming, or scaling the capstone into ongoing work. ACT is not a license to teach a specific protocol. CCT teacher certification, for example, is a separate CCARE pathway.
No prior meditation lineage, ordination, or contemplative credential is required. Applicants should have a setting in mind for the capstone (a workplace, community, clinical program, or organization) and the time to commit roughly five to eight hours per week across the eleven months. Reading and writing fluency in English is required since all sessions and materials are in English. CCARE reviews applications; admission isn't open enrollment.
ACT sits next to two sibling CCARE pathways: Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) Teacher Training, which certifies people to teach the eight-week CCT protocol specifically, and the broader compassion-protocol field including Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) and Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) at Emory. Where CCT teacher training produces certified teachers of one curriculum, ACT produces graduates who design and run their own applied programs. The price band reflects this. At USD 18,500 over eleven months, ACT is meaningfully more expensive than most MSC or CBCT teacher certification routes, and the value sits in the Stanford affiliation, the design-school methodology, and the global cohort network rather than in lineage authority or lower cost.
| Location | Online (Zoom) |
| Country | United States |
| Tradition | Secular Mindfulness |
| Format | Online, Live Online |
| Duration | 11 months |
| Estimated cost | USD 18,500 (11-month certification) |
| Accreditation | Stanford University / CCARE |