Commonweal works in three core fields—health and healing, art and education, and environment and justice. Within those fields, Commonweal incubates and supports more than 40 different programs including programs in cancer, health professional education, environmental health, adult learning, yoga, healing nutrition, permaculture gardening, and juvenile justice.
With the help of the generous donations and support from our community, our programs offered healing, support, and resources to hundreds of thousands of people world wide in 2022.
Healing ourselves and healing the earth is Commonweal’s mission—and has been so for four decades. We care about at-risk children, people with cancer, health professionals, and the healing that comes from caring for the earth. We care equally about healing for the rest of us, and about what each of us needs to heal.
Our programs in the field of health and healing are deep and diverse. The Commonweal Cancer Help Program, featured by Bill Moyers in his award-winning series Healing and the Mind, is among the foremost residential support programs for people with cancer. And the Collaborative on Health and the Environment is the premier global network for environmental health science dialogue. We encourage you to browse through the full list of our powerful health and healing programs, below.
Learning is an essential dimension of true healing, and it emerges through dialogue. We believe that we are designed to learn better through conversation, story, and art. Our love of learning and our need for healing forge our destinies—individual and collective.
Our arts and education programs create spaces for learning and healing as a community. The New School at Commonweal has more than 3,000 partners exploring nature, culture, and the inner life in live conversations, talks, art exhibits and musical events, many of which are available in our audio podcast and video library. The Center for Creative Community explores dialogue, cognition, creativity, and community through programs like the Power of Hope youth camp, the Ecology of Awakening, the our Gathering programs. We invite you to browse through all of our arts and education programs, below.
We cannot be truly healthy people or live in peace on a sick planet. And we cannot heal the earth—or ourselves—without justice. Just as healing and learning are central to our lives, so is the quest for justice.
Commonweal started four decades ago with a core commitment to the health and well-being of children with learning and behavior disorders. We worked with young people incarcerated in California juvenile halls, youth prisons, and other institutions. The Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program is among the foremost advocacy programs for these young people in California—overwhelmingly children of color from low-income communities. The Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center works extensively with low-income communities exposed to high levels of toxic chemicals. The Collaborative on Health and the Environment explores the impact of disparities on human health, and the Regenerative Design Institute at Commonweal Garden draws people of all ages to learn in our permaculture garden.
We invite you to browse the list of our programs that work to address environmental issues and justice.