Launch of the CUSA Campaign
At the U.S. Conference of Mayors 91st Winter Meeting in Washington on January 18, 2023, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Chair of the Conference’s Mayors and Business Leaders Center for Compassionate and Equitable Cities, announced that the development of a six-part campaign designed to promote compassion and community healing was underway in his city and would be released for no-cost distribution to all cities in June in the U.S. Conference of Mayors 91st Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio.
On June 4 in the Columbus meeting, Mayor Nirenberg launched the campaign, CompassionateUSA (CUSA), as “an earnest and honest remedy to political polarization, civil discord, racialized violence, and the far-reaching impacts of a global pandemic.” He described it as “a learning journey designed to teach self-compassion and community well-being that honors our common humanity and affirms the beauty of our differences,” and as an effort “to help people develop foundational skill sets, a shared vocabulary, and a common practice to ultimately decrease violence and trauma and increase individual and collective healing.”
Developed by the City of San Antonio, the Alamo Colleges District, and the San Antonio Peace Center, the campaign includes a video series to introduce learners to key concepts about compassion, a free micro-course to deepen understanding, and a toolkit that provides resources to help create a compassionate community. Detailed information on these components and on formally partnering with the campaign is available at www.compassionateusa.org.
The Response
A January 2024 report to the Center indicated that in the seven months following the launch of the CUSA initiative, 89 organizations had become partners, disseminating and implementing the initiative’s videos, micro-courses and other resources within their organizations and throughout their networks.
On the CUSA website, home pages and partner pages had been accessed more than 10,000 times, micro-course and resource pages more than 2,000 times, and videos treating self-awareness, self-compassion, interdependence and other dimensions of compassion nearly 2,000 times. Global viewership embraced 69 countries; more than 16,000 of the viewers were
U.S. residents and 500 had viewed the pages in Canada, the U.K., Mexico and Australia.
The International Charter for Compassion, an outgrowth of the Charter for Compassion originally inspired by an award-winning TED Talk in 2009, provides a wide range of resources and serves as the leader in national outreach for CompassionateUSA partnerships. The Compassionate Cities movement is also an outgrowth of this Charter and globally over 600 cities and communities, more than half of them in the U.S., have affirmed the Charter through their official designation as Compassionate Cities by their local governments. In January 2024 the International Charter for Compassion had almost 200 community initiatives in the United States, nearly 125 of which are working directly with local mayors and city councils.
Mayors’ Starter Guide – Compassionate and Equitable Cities
On June 22, in the U.S. Conference of Mayors 2024 Annual Meeting held in Kansas City (MO), Mayor Nirenberg launched the Mayors’ Starter Guide to Compassionate and Equitable Cities, a unique document outlining a chronology of USCM’s compacts combatting hate, extremism and bigotry and promoting racial equity, and the development and wide acceptance of CompassionateUSA across the nation’s cities. The Guide presents elements of a Compassion Curriculum; tools, models and recommendations for building a civic infrastructure of compassion; a youth curriculum aimed at building a more compassionate future; and examples of policies supporting the building of compassionate cities.
CUSA was developed through a partnership of Mayor Nirenberg, former Louisville Mayor and former USCM President Greg Fischer, Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), Compassionate San Antonio, and the International Charter for Compassion. As the year ended, the online micro course, powered through Coursera, was nearing 700 active learners across the United States, and a redesign process to move into smaller modules for easier and more accessible learning experiences was underway. Now fully available in Spanish and English, there were more than 1,000 video viewings in 2024. To be released in 2025 is a new version, Circulo, an in-person or virtual facilitated course designed to deepen understanding and practice of compassion skills
Muhammad Ali Index
Mayor Nirenberg’s presentation in Kansas City also included the formal launch of the Muhammad Ali Index, which he described as “a pioneering national research study to track the cultural trends shaping compassion in cities across America and develop data-backed recommendations for city partners to have a powerful social impact.” The Index represents the first rigorous, data-driven research to both measure and predict the state of compassion in America today, the Mayor explained, using a unique combination of human and artificial intelligence. An initiative of the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville in conjunction with sparks & honey, a leading cultural intelligence consultancy, the study is starting with a 12-region pilot that includes San Antonio, Louisville, Denver, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Las Vegas, Dallas /Fort Worth, Atlanta, Seattle, Phoenix, and Jacksonville. The first phase of the research culminated in the Fall with the publication of a report synthesizing the findings and presenting data-backed recommendations for use by cities in rebuilding relationships and social cohesion; the report can be found at aliindex.org. Future efforts will include rural communities and additional urban populations. The 2025 Compassion Report was released in New York City on January 16, 2025, the eve of what would have been Muhammad Ali’s 82nd birthday.