About Shawn

Right now all of the contributors to Compassionate U are personal and very close friends of mine. I am well aware of the work they do to be compassionate individuals, as well as their writing styles and the care they will bring to writing their articles. We’re open to having lots of people contribute, so we’ve just started with people who are interested, and we’ll go from there! If you’re interested in contributing an article you can check out our guidelines.

My ultimate vision for the blog is that the articles and posts are all sparks for dialogue on a new definition of compassion. Often associated with characteristics like weakness and compromise (in the weakest sense) we want to illustrate the kind of strength and courage it can take to be a compassionate individual.

All of our journey’s are ongoing, so it’s very difficult for me to give a full depth and breadth of my own, but I can definitely say that it has certainly been deeply affected by my meeting amazing people from all over the world who are incredibly compassionate individuals, who work every day, whether in a formal way as a non-profit or other change-making leader, or in their own small ways to make the world a better place for all of us. So I would definitely say that my compassionate journey is characterized by our experiences with the people we meet, and I am very fortunate to know an abundance of very compassionate people.

All of them. Just joking. But I do really have a broad set of interests when it comes to issues in our communities and the world. Perhaps my greatest interest is in animal welfare, including both wildlife and farm animal welfare. I’m also very passionate about food production and eating behavior, LGBTQ and women’s rights, and mental health advocacy.

One profound act of compassion that always sticks in my head is in the early parts of knowing Dr. Jane Goodall, we were together on a very rainy spring day at one of her lectures and there were earthworms crawling all over the sidewalks. As we were heading in to the building where she was going to speak, about every five feet or so we saw Jane crouching down, picking up worms and sticking them in the grass. All of a sudden the group of five or six of us all started doing the same thing. As guests were entering the lecture people started looking at us funny, but eventually they joined in. The worms cannot survive outside of the dirt, and simply moving them back to the grass can get them back safely so that they can survive. Jane mentioned this in her lecture that night to a huge crowd of a 1,000 people. A very simple act of compassion, but a contagious one that has remained profound to me today.