09/29/2026
EXCITING NEWS! Our Peace Families program has officially begun for our middle schoolers at St. Francis of Assisi, and today we gathered for our first Peace Families assembly to launch it.
Peace Families is a compassion education program and a powerful form of social emotional education that gives students true opportunities to explore their own capacity for generating empathy and compassion. Students in grades 6, 7 and 8 are placed in small groups that mix all three grades, each with an adult mentor, and over the course of the year they rotate through three stations: Compassionate Listening and Dialogue, Service, and Mindful Interconnections. Along the way they meet people who have lived through real hardship or suffering and people who have devoted themselves to helping to heal it, and they take on service projects that answer real needs, so that compassion becomes something they practice with their own hands. This year we are emphasizing the Compassionate Listening and Dialogue component, and today our students had their first introduction to it.
At the heart of all of this is the skill of Compassionate Listening. Most of us were never taught how to truly listen, to sit with another person's story without rushing to fix it, judge it, or turn it back toward ourselves. Compassionate Listening is a discipline that asks for full attention, a quiet mind, and a genuinely caring curiosity about what someone has carried and what it has taught them. We learn to listen with the heart, so that our listening bears witness to the presence of Christ in those we listen to and in ourselves. We create sacred spaces that allow storytellers to feel safe enough to tell the truth of their lives.
That is the training we are in the middle of right now. Before our students ever sit across from a guest speaker or a person they are serving, they will be practicing listening to one another. They will explore the different kinds of listening, learn to ask compassionate questions, and practice listening to answers all the way through.
Peace Families and Compassionate Listening is one way we experience our Faith at St. Francis. Students who learn to listen like this will change every room they walk into.
