The 2021 Conference of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education
Resourcing, Reconnection, and Reemergence:
Centering Contemplative Practices in our Work and in our Healing
Online
Main Conference: Friday, November 5th - Saturday, November 6th
Contemplative Workshop: Sunday, November 7th
Two full days of concurrent presentations, two keynote talks, a live musical performance, and an online poster session, plus a Sunday workshop and more to be announced!
Keynote Speakers

Dr. Ron Bell
Pastor & Author, The Four Promises: Journeying through Past and Present Trauma
Ron Bell is the senior pastor of Camphor Memorial UMC and writes about race, trauma, empathy, and grief. He has created an ongoing webinar series on Trauma and Empathy that he has led with several universities including St. Paul College, Bethel University, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Fuller Theological Seminary and several others, as well as with numerous nonprofits and county agencies.

Dr. Angel Acosta
Chief Learning Officer, Acosta Institute & Fellowship Program Director, Garrison Institute
For the last decade, Dr. Angel Acosta has worked to bridge the fields of leadership, social justice, and mindfulness. Acosta has supported educational leaders and their students by facilitating leadership trainings, creating pathways to higher education, and designing dynamic learning experiences. His dissertation explored healing-centered education as a promising framework for educational leadership development.
For 2021, the ACMHE conference will focus on how contemplative practices can support and sustain learning communities that resource and enhance resilience, connection, and healthy reemergence back into a more equitable and inclusive society. Acknowledging the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the inequities and disparities created by systemic oppression, we are now faced with an even greater urgency to collectively move the societal needle of engaging with one another and the environment from health-compromising to health-enhancing, from unsustainable to sustainable, from unjust to just. This movement will be facilitated by a more compassionate understanding of the loss and grief we have experienced as individuals and communities, illumination of the resilience and wisdom that we have drawn upon, and the application of the diverse learning, healing, and transformative strategies that have emerged.
Therefore, the goals of the 2021 ACMHE conference are to explore the importance of the following areas of focus:
- radical self and community care,
- acknowledging and sitting with our experiences of loss and grief,
- emphasizing the criticality of fostering a foundation of compassion between historically disparate communities, and
- learning how to be more intentional about demonstrating these goals across all aspects of education.
Past ACMHE Conference Keynote Videos
2019 Keynote Speaker

Dr. Jasmine K. Syedullah
Past Conferences
Questions?
If you have any questions, please contact Maya Elinevsky at Maya@contemplativemind.org or at 413-582-0071.