Compassionate Conversations
The UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute will begin the second year of its “Compassionate Conversations” series, featuring speakers who share a deep and humane commitment to engaging others with passion, compassion, empathy, and respect. A recurrent theme in the 2025-26 series will be “kindness to the stranger.”
The 2025-26 Compassionate Conversations series is as follows:
Upcoming Events
This event will feature the work of Clean Shelter, an NGO that provides relief to displaced communities in Gaza by offering essential sanitation and shelter. Clean Shelter is run by Seba Abu-Daqa, a Palestinian living in Munich, and Tom Kellner, an Israeli living in Berlin. Since its founding in January 2024, Clean Shelter has constructed and financed more than a thousand toilets, showers, tents, and community spaces and structures, benefiting approximately 10,000 displaced persons. With the aid of volunteers on the ground, Clean Shelter works to alleviate anguish of displacement while safeguarding communities against the threat of sanitary crisis. Seba and Tom will speak about what brought them together and what motivates them in the midst of the overwhelming challenges of Gaza.
Racial Exhaustion: How to Move Through Racism in the Wake of DEI Book Launch with Vice Provost Ralina Joseph
December 2, 2025
Ralina L. Joseph, a university professor, educator, administrator, and advocate whose work focuses on issues of equity, access, and belonging in higher education and beyond, is UCLA’s new vice provost for inclusive excellence. In her new book, Racial Exhaustion: How to Move Through Racism in the Wake of DEI, Joseph draws on personal narrative, real-world dialogue, and critical race scholarship to explore how radical listening can help us navigate conversations about race. Racial Exhaustion challenges us to recognize and address the fatigue that racial discourse brings while offering strategies to foster more equitable communication and productive change.
Presentation: Claire Adida (Stanford, UCSD)
Respondents: Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA), Abel Valenzuela (UCLA)
Prof. Claire Adida is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and faculty co-director at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. Her research on the topic of immigration and kindness investigates how countries manage new and existing forms of diversity, what exacerbates or alleviates outgroup prejudice and discrimination, and how vulnerable groups navigate discriminatory environments. Prof. Adida will be joined conversation by Prof. Hiroshi Motomura, faculty co-director of the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, and Prof. Abel Valenzuela, the dean of UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences.
Panelists: Father Greg Boyle, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Valarie Kaur, and Imam Dr. Jihad Turk
In our deeply fractured world, religion serves both to connect and offer wisdom and to foster conflict and division. Over the course of centuries, it has been frequently invoked to justify brutal violence, but can it be an effective tool to advance justice? To explore different perspectives on the topic of faith, forgiveness, and justice, we will be joined by a distinguished panel of religious leaders: Father Greg Boyle, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Valarie Kaur, and Imam Dr. Jihad Turk.
Father Greg Boyle is a Jesuit priest and director of Homeboy Industries, the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program. Rabbi Sharon Brous is the senior and founding Rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish spiritual community in Los Angeles. Valarie Kaur is a civil rights leader and activist, filmmaker, educator, best-selling author, and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, a movement to reclaim love as a force for justice. Imam Dr. Jihad Turk is the founding President of Bayan Islamic Graduate School, a preeminent Muslim institution of higher education.
Professor john powell is a renowned scholar and advocate in the areas of civil rights, structural racism, housing, constitutional law, equality, democracy, and belonging. He is the director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion and is a Professor of Law, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies. Prof. powell has served as the National Legal Director of the ACLU and is well-known for the development of an “opportunity-based” model for thinking about affordable housing, racialized space, and the many ways that housing influences other opportunity domains including education, health, health care, and employment.
Watch and Read About Past Events
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