Welcome to Compassion Week 2025 - Celebrating 10 years!

This year marks a special milestone—our 10th anniversary of coming together for a full week of inspiration, knowledge-sharing, dialogue, collaborations, and hands-on activities. What began as a simple idea has grown into a vibrant tradition, connecting hearts across Greater Houston by showcasing and sharing tangible examples of Houston’s compassionate culture through various partner and network offerings.

Compassion Week 2025 NOVEMBER 10-16

Save the date for Compassion Week 2025 and it’s core message of SMALL ACTS. BIG CHANGE, highlighting the aspiration that each of us can be a force for good. Our small actions rooted in care and love ripple outward to transform the world, starting right where and how we are. Our theme invites us to explore how everyday gestures—rooted in care, courage, and connection—can spark powerful transformation, rippling outward to create lasting change. And it begins with us, right here, right now.

Whether through learning, practice, service, storytelling, or other types of shared moments, Compassion Week 2025 celebrates the tools we each carry to build a more compassionate world, one act at a time.

PURPOSE OF WORLD KINDNESS DAY

Compassion Week coincides regularly with the week in which World Kindness Day falls, a global day, introduced in 1998 by the World Kindness Movement, that promotes the importance of being kind to each other, to yourself, and to the world.

The purpose of this day, celebrated on November 13 of each year, is to help everyone understand that compassion for others is what binds us all together.

"This experience is exhilarating. It's like going on a rollercoaster that looks scary, but after you go through the drops and loops, you're like 'I want to do that again!' The Civic Gym is like that but without the long lines."

— Civic Gym Student Participant

Why This Matters

• For the Exhausted Majority: A vision that transcends left-right polarization and offers practical hope

• For Educators: A framework that recognizes both individual potential and structural barriers

• For Policy Makers: Cross-partisan appeal with 80% agreement across political parties

• For Community Leaders: A shared language for building civic culture beyond divisiveness

• For America's Future: A roadmap for reimagining democracy in the 21st century

American Enterprise Institute

Defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world.

Since 1938, AEI has been advancing ideas rooted in democracy, free enterprise, American strength and global leadership, individual liberty, and a pluralistic, entrepreneurial culture through rigorous research and open debate.

"The way we foster good public policy is through bipartisanship. Americans share a common ground that is deeper than the partisan disputes that divide us, and people on both sides of the aisle have good intentions."

— Bipartisan Policy Center Mission Statement

A dynamic digital library and network where educators discover, create, and collaborate to improve teaching and learning with open educational resources.

Making quality education accessible and affordable for everyone through freely available, openly licensed teaching and learning materials that can be used, adapted, and shared without cost.

Why this matters:

• Less than 1% of human trafficking victims are identified

• Many victims don't even realize they're being trafficked

• Traditional services require victim identification, creating barriers to help

• By serving anyone who has experienced the sex trade, we eliminate these barriers

• This approach increases victim identification and connects more people with life-saving support

Founded in 2015, The Landing started as a dream to reach survivors who were slipping through the cracks. Our founders wanted to create a safe space for survivors, regardless of whether they were ready to leave their current situation.

Why Church Safety Matters

Your church should be a safe place. Everyone should feel welcome and protected. But many churches don't know where to start with safety planning.

What churches deal with:

• More than 75% of churches don't have a safety team

• Many churches don't know what rules they need to follow

• Church leaders want to help but don't know what to do first

• Communities need safe places to gather and worship

This event will help you learn simple ways to make your church safer for everyone.

"Our mission at CountyOffice.org is to simplify access to public records and empower individuals with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions."

— CountyOffice.org Mission Statement

Why Belonging Matters

Families sign up their kids for swim lessons or sports not just to learn skills, but to make friends and feel like they belong. Seniors come for exercise classes and stay to talk over coffee. People walk through our doors for programs, but they stay because they feel seen and supported.

Recent research shows that feeling connected to others is more important for success than age, race, or income. The Y uses this information to create programs that bring different generations together and help people feel less alone.

Why This Matters for Houston

• For Community Leaders: Data-driven insights to design programs that address social isolation in vulnerable populations

• For Policy Makers: Evidence that connectedness is a stronger predictor of well-being than traditional demographic factors

• For Nonprofits: A call to collaborate across sectors rather than working in isolation

• For Faith Leaders: Recognition of your role as trusted voices at the center of belonging experiences

• For Houston's Future: A roadmap to become a city known not just for diversity, but for genuine connection

What Is The Dignity Index?

The Dignity Index is a simple tool that helps you measure whether communication shows dignity or contempt. It uses a scale from 1 to 8, where higher scores show more dignity and lower scores show more contempt.

In our current world, public conversation has become harsh and divisive. Politicians, media figures, and everyday people often use contempt when talking about others. This makes problems worse and prevents us from finding solutions.

This toolkit helps parents and families develop skills for healthy disagreement. When family members disagree constructively, everyone feels heard, relationships stay strong, and children learn valuable life skills.

Disagreement is natural and inevitable in families. The question isn't whether we'll disagree—it's how we'll disagree. This toolkit teaches practical strategies for navigating differences with respect, curiosity, and care.

This toolkit gives you tools to:

• Listen to understand, not just to respond

• Express disagreement without attacking or dismissing

• Find common ground even in tough conversations

• Model healthy conflict resolution for children

• Repair relationships after heated moments

• Build family communication skills that last a lifetime

Whether you're navigating political differences with extended family, handling sibling conflicts, or working through parenting disagreements with a partner, these tools help create more connection and less division.

What Is This Toolkit?

This toolkit helps organizations build a strong culture where people trust each other, work well together, and feel connected to their work and teammates.

Culture is how people act, talk, and treat each other at work every day. A good culture makes people want to come to work, do their best, and stay at the company. A bad culture makes people unhappy and want to leave.

Share Our America Toolkit

A free guide to help you bring people together in your community. Learn how to start conversations that build understanding and respect between people who are different from each other.

The Opportunity: Pent-Up Demand

We're living in the most age-diverse society in human history, with nearly equal numbers of people alive today at every age from birth to 70 and beyond. This unprecedented demographic reality creates extraordinary potential for intergenerational collaboration — and Americans are ready to seize it.