A Sustainable KI Community (SKICOM) - Creating conditions for development including inner growth

Stefan Swartling Peterson, Professor of Global Transformation for Health, Karolinska Institutet; former Global Chief of Health, UNICEF

In this session you are invited to share Stefan’s journey during his 4.5 years as Chief of health for Unicef. During his years with Unicef Stefan learnt that success in putting mental health and wellbeing on the Unicef agenda and into its new Strategic plan does not necessarily come with inner development, or personal growth. Join Stefan on this very personal journey where he reflects and share his thoughts on what would be possible if we would put greater emphasis on and allowing us to flex and stretch our inner development muscles in our strive to create outer development and drive change.

Christine Wamsler Professor, Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), director of the Contemplative Sustainable Futures Program

Jamie Bristow, Co -Director of The Mindfulness Initiative

Climate change is a physical reality, demanding political and practical solutions. But its inner dimension, overlooked entirely by mainstream approaches, is a crisis of human relationship. In this session they will explore the cognitive and emotional foundations of conscious connection and discuss the potential for mindfulness and compassion practices to be developed into powerful enablers of reconnection, fostering both greater resilience and more appropriate responses to global sustainability crises.

Maria Watter, Ph.D, Operations director, Teaching and learning, Karolinska Institutet

In a rapidly changing complex modern society it’s clear that most of the knowledge and skills we acquire today we will not be able to use tomorrow. Emphasizing why education and learning in all formats are more important than ever. Not just for trying to catch up with the latest development, but rather to approach learning in a deeper sense to develop our inner capacity to learn, adapt and transform. Doing so we release the potential power of learning to transform the world to a better place. In this session, we bring some general assumptions forward and compare them to evidence on how we learn.

Mini Ruiz, MD, PhD, senior consultant and lecturer within the medical program at Karolinska Institutet. 

In Sweden as in many countries in the last 15 years, the medical program has had an increasing focus on professional development, including several warranted skills and capacities that we today recognize have several similarities with the IDGs. Many learning activities have hence been created and used to support medical students in their development towards empathetic, teamworking healthcare professionals of tomorrow. However promising this may sound it isn´t so easy and I will share some experiences from the professional development thread at the medical program at the Karolinska Institute.

Shervin Shahnavaz, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, and Psychotherapist at the Centre for Psychiatry Research and Centre for Education & Research at Karolinska Institutet and Region Stockholm. Vice-Chairman, The Council for Environment and Sustainable development, Karolinska Institutet.

Lundstedt/Shahnavaz duo is made up of Elvira Lundstedt and Viggo Shahnavaz, two trained and experienced jazz musicians. In close collaboration, they have created a unique jazz sound, merging Lundstedt’s mind-blowing voice and Shahnavaz´s musing guitar. The duo has toured in different parts of Sweden, now inviting you join them on their explorative musical journey.

Ingrid Landin, Adjunct lecturer, Department of Clinical Neuroscience

Compassion starts with our capacity to care. It is the softening and opening of the heart to ourselves and all that lives; a profound experience of our mysterious interconnectedness with all life; the realization that we are not separate from others. Compassion is what the world needs to heal and become whole. We can develop and deepen an intention to be of help and not to cause harm; and also the wisdom and skills needed to see what causes suffering and what will alleviate it.

Walter Osika, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Social Sustainability, Associate Professor at the Center for Psychiatry Research, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet

Christin Mellner PhD, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University

Otto Simonsson postdoctoral researcher, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet

The world is currently facing multiple challenges related to mental health and well-being issues, organizational change and disruption, and social and political polarization. Over the last five years, Walter Osika, Otto Simonsson and Christin Mellner have been researching the role of different interventions in addressing personal, inter-personal and inter-group sustainability in terms of conflict and disconnection, as well as stress and resilience within various contexts. In this session they will present qualitative and quantitative research at the private life-, workplace-, and political level related to the emerging concept of the Inner Development Goals. They will draw upon the growing body of evidence on the impact of interventions based on ACT and self-leadership as well as contemplative practices such as mindfulness- and compassion-based exercises on the association between inner transformation and outer sustainability.

Daniel Siegel, Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute

What does it mean to be intraconnected? In weaving the internal and external, the subjective and objective, this workshop will reveal how modern culture, as well as how our brain is wired, may give us a message of separation as a solo, isolated self; yet a wider perspective unveils that who we are, what a deeper reality actually is, may be something more—broader than the brain, bigger even than the body—fundamental to the social systems and the natural world in which we live.  

You have initiated an ambitious drive for Karolinska Institutet to further explore the need for inner development as a means to be better prepared and equipped to meet the complex challenges organizations, societies and the world are facing. A point of departure is our engagement in the Inner Development Goals Summit on April 29, 2022.

Learn more about the IDG framework of skills and qualities, that is envisioned to relate to what is needed in order to successfully work with complex societal issues, in particular those identified in UN's Agenda 2030 and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.