Our Mission

The mission of The Karuna School is to create a new model for learning in high school that educates the mind and awakens the heart. As a school community, we will strive for a balance between contemplation and purposeful action, nurturing peace within ourselves and building peace in the world.

It is our vision that by cultivating the seeds of wisdom in our students, they will lead loving, thoughtful lives and be a dynamic presence for peace in the world.

What We Envision:

The Karuna School will be an independent, college preparatory day school for grades 9-12 that offers traditional high school courses and a curriculum emphasizing peace-building skills and environmental studies. We envision an intimate school community of about one hundred students working with enthusiastic teachers, mentors, parents, and administrators.

The Karuna School will be located in a suburb west of Boston. We are actively looking for land on which to create our campus. We are working with a LEED certified architect to explore green building designs for our campus as well as ways to incorporate sustainable living practices into the daily functions of our school community.

Karuna is the Sanskrit word for compassion. At our school we will offer many different ways to learn about cultivating compassion in ourselves and the world through yoga, meditation, service work, and a connection with nature.

Our Inspiration

Our vision for The Karuna School arises from the inspiring examples of peacemakers from around the world.

Some of these individuals are actively working for peace today, and others have legacies that live on from times past. We believe that their efforts to create positive change in the world offer us, as well as the new generation of young people, models for what can be accomplished with vision and determination. We feel that their positive example can be a touchstone for today’s young people in the face of the enormous challenges awaiting them in the first decades of the 21st century.

In our uniquely designed global curriculum, our students will have the opportunity to learn about these peacemakers, their times, challenges, culture and history, and the inspiring stories of their accomplishments. As we engage in these studies, we will also explore the dynamics of cultivating inner peace through practices such as Mindfulness and yoga.

Our dream is to develop a program in which our students travel to meet face-to-face with current peacemakers on the world stage. In doing so each student will have the opportunity to see firsthand the capacity that each of us has to create change in the world.

Circle of Inspiration

Desmond Tutu
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Elie Wiesel
Harry Belafonte
Joanna Macy
Bob Moses
John Lewis
Hannah Ashwari
Aung San Suu Kyi
Vandana Shiva
Paul Hawken
Mahatma Gandhi
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Atish Kumar
A.T. Ariyaratne
Martin Luther King Jr.