Case Study
Beloved Community Circles
Beloved Community Circles (BCC) is a coalition that calls on mindfulness practitioners “to respond to suffering in our world.”
Beloved Community Circles
Context
Beloved Community Circles (BCC) is a coalition that calls on mindfulness practitioners “to respond to suffering in our world.” This decentralized group of community leaders is building an international movement toward climate and racial justice.
Their organizing efforts center approaches of “nonviolence, emotional healing, spiritual practice, and mindful action.” The BCC movement grew out of the Plum Village tradition of Vietnamese Buddhism. Plum Village was established by the Zen monk and scholar, Thich Nhat Hanh, following his exile from Vietnam for anti-war activism in 1966. The original Plum Village monastery, based in France, aspires to be “a healthy, nourishing environment where people can learn the art of living in harmony with one another and with the Earth” through practicing mindfulness.
This mindfulness community has grown to establish global initiatives for youth leadership, anti-racism, environmental care, and trauma-informed teaching. However, many of these initiatives developed independently in response to specific needs, relying on the availability of local resources.
The result meant that initiative leaders were often unable to connect over issues intersecting their efforts, like problems of environmental racism or burnout among activist organizers. BCC formed as a way to bring these initiatives together with a grassroots focus on both local and global social change, creating “a movement of movements.”
Beloved Community Circles
Problem / Power Analysis
Commitment to “tight-knit” community building amid transnational decentralization
Some of the challenges anticipated by the BCC creators came from their commitments to “tight-knit” community building amid transnational decentralization. The tension between proximity and distance required them to think creatively about resourcing local communities with toolkits for establishing their own Circles, balanced with regular Zoom meetings and workshops to connect with broader international Circles. The model is a series of concentric Circles that function to scale up and scale down programming to both global and grassroots levels.
Working on issues of environmentalism, anti-racism, and trauma-informed communication meant also embodying these commitments in their relationships with one another. The committee of visionaries behind BCC is inter-racial, inter-ethnic, and multi-religious. Their steering committee or “Caretakers Council” is deliberately composed of majority BIPOC and younger leaders, with a commitment to growing with further inclusivity, diversity, and representation. They mirror the societal changes they seek through the communication styles and spiritual practices of their own leadership meetings.
To promote mindful communication as a starting point for social change, they wrote a handbook for people interested in starting new (or equipping existing) mindfulness practice Circles. They also planned trainings and workshops to facilitate conversations around principles of consent, centering mindfulness as a practice for both self-transformation and societal transformation following the model of Thich Nhat Hanh’s life and teachings.
Some of the key challenges faced by the organization as of 2026 were loss of funding possibilities through federal cuts, which directly correlated to an increase in demand for the type of grassroots, direct-service work the Circles seek to provide.
Beloved Community Circles
Vision & Experience of the Project
BCC sought to equip local communities of 3-8 practitioners with skills for engaging with “mindful social action” – ranging from volunteering and fundraising to public demonstrations and protests. They organized through commitments to “deep collaboration with the communities most directly impacted by racism and climate change,” connecting with other local organizations already serving these populations to “support existing efforts toward justice.”
By the Numbers
BBC started with six Circles in 2023. In 2024, they hosted cohort trainings for 50 participants, which doubled to 100 registrants in 2025. They adapted and re-focused the trainings into a 9-work program to meet this rapidly growing demand, while also investing in staffing support to ensure the quality of their outreach remained both deep and sustainable. By 2025, 20 local Circles were operating in 16 U.S. cities, expanding into international contexts across North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Australia.
Reported Themes
Following these trainings, the BCC Caretakers Council reports that local Circles “engaged in diverse actions: climate legislation advocacy, immigrant support, Indigenous water protection, food distribution, Palestinian solidarity, and direct action campaigns.”
Participants in these groups shared feedback on their activities. Several expressed joy and commitment to their ongoing work, emphasized the need for “mindfulness-based approaches to climate justice and systemic justice.” One Circle especially emphasized “the importance of solidarity without ‘white savior’ dynamics,” following their participation in a Juneteenth celebration, which showed “growth in racial awareness and humility.” These findings affirmed BCC’s understanding that “Circles thrive when they integrate mindfulness and strong interpersonal relationships with their social justice work.”
Beloved Community Circles
Lessons Learned
BCC highlights four main areas for “lessons learned” from their rapid growth between 2023 and 2026.
Leadership Structures
“Balancing decentralized networks with professional staff support is essential. Consent-based decision-making requires alignment of values and clarity of roles.”
Intersectionality
Emphasizing again that “Circles thrive when they integrate mindfulness and strong interpersonal relationships with their social justice work.”
Communications
“Online platforms like Mighty Networks need intentional cultivation to become robust hubs of engagement.”
Scaling
“Growth requires infrastructure—staffing, funding, and systems—to sustain quality while expanding reach.”
Beloved Community Circles
Takeaways
Beloved Community Circle provides a creative model for coalitional movements that span geographic locations and timezones. They are guided by clear values of anti-racism and environmental justice, yet are also attuned to the ways these complex issues manifest differently across global contexts. Mindfulness is the practice they center as a way to remain attuned to the specific needs of any given community, in their own context and on their own terms. They emphasize the importance of mindfulness as a way to remain aware of organizers’ own positionalities, backgrounds, and power dynamics to minimize harm while working toward sustainable forms of compassionate justice.
Their hybrid emphasis on (1) small-scale, local Circles with high levels of internal accountability to one another and their surrounding communities, as well as (2) large-scale, online workshops to foster solidarity across global Circles, offers a compelling model for other organizations navigating layered levels of action and outreach.
BBC also offers a model for coalitional work rooted in intentional ”intersectionality.” Their diverse leadership team – as well as their treatment of issues like environmental racism as irreducibly complex and multi-layered – all show a commitment to lived ethics of solidarity, deeply grounded in mindfulness.