UCLA’s Bedari Kindness Institute (BKI) will launch the second year of its Compassionate Conversations speaker series today, inviting the campus and the broader community to reflect on the theme “kindness to the stranger.”
David Myers, UCLA’s Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History and director of BKI, and Maia Ferdman, deputy director of BKI, said this year’s theme is ever more urgent amid growing social disconnection, polarization and fragmentation.
“Thinking about what it means to be kind to those who are ‘strange’ to us is the call of our times,” Ferdman said. “We can think of the ‘stranger’ as immigrants who are increasingly vilified and attacked, as people with whom we disagree, as stereotypical ‘rivals’ or enemies.”
To explore this year’s theme, the series will feature speakers from a variety of fields and traditions who share a deep and humane commitment to engaging others with passion, compassion, empathy and respect.
“There are many lenses through which we can understand ‘kindness to the stranger’ — it is a core tenet among many faith and cultural traditions rooted in teachings of hospitality and neighborliness, and in our series, we also treat it as a subject of scholarly inquiry,” Myers said.
Launched in the fall of 2024, the Compassionate Conversations series aims to bridge kindness research and practice to make kindness relevant and actionable.
“Ultimately, our series showcases exemplars of kindness and compassion to deepen our understanding of the most complex societal issues we are facing today and to inspire participants into action,” Ferdman said. Myers added that the series aims to model and promote kindness as a bottom-up daily praxis that can have a transformative effect on society.
Compassionate Conversations is open to the UCLA community and the public. Details of each event in the series and registration details for the first conversation are available below. Join BKI’s email list for future invitations and updates.
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“Compassion in Practice: Providing Water and Shelter in Gaza”: A Conversation with Tom Kellner and Seba AbuDaqa, co-founders of Clean Shelter
November 17, 2025
This event will feature the work of Clean Shelter, a grassroots organization registered in Germany that delivers immediate relief to displaced communities in Gaza through essential sanitation and shelter solutions. Founded by Seba Abudaqa, a Palestinian from Gaza living between Munich and Cairo, and Tom Kellner, an Israeli based in Berlin, the organization focuses on concrete action on the ground, providing shelter, sanitation and water. Since January 2024, Clean Shelter has established multiple camps for internally displaced people, installed water desalination units and constructed water infrastructure and provided aid to more than 150,000 displaced people across Gaza. Abudaqa and Kellner will speak about what brought them together and what motivates them in the midst of the overwhelming challenges in Gaza.
December 2, 2025
This event will feature Ralina L. Joseph, UCLA’s new vice provost for inclusive excellence and a university professor, educator, administrator and advocate whose work focuses on issues of equity, access and belonging in higher education and beyond in conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley, distinguished professor and UCLA’s Gary B. Nash endowed chair in U.S. History; Salma Mousa, assistant professor of political science at UCLA; and D’artagnan Scorza, executive director of the Anti-Racism, Diversity and Inclusion Initiative at Los Angeles County. Joseph will discuss her new book, “Racial Exhaustion: How to Move Through Racism in the Wake of DEI,” to be published by NYU Press in 2025, which draws on personal narrative, real-world dialogue and critical race scholarship to explore how radical listening can help us navigate conversations about race. Joseph will address the fatigue that racial discourse brings while offering strategies to foster more equitable communication and productive change.
Kindness to the Stranger: A Discussion on Immigration
January 29, 2026
Presentation: Claire Adida (Stanford)
Respondents: Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA), Abel Valenzuela (UCLA)
This discussion will feature Claire Adida, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and faculty co-director at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, whose research on 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. Adida will be joined in conversation by Hiroshi Motomura, faculty co-director of the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, and Abel Valenzuela Jr., dean of the UCLA Division of Social Sciences.
An Interfaith Dialogue on Justice, Forgiveness and Compassion
February 24, 2026
Panelists: Father Greg Boyle, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Valarie Kaur and Imam Jihad Turk
A distinguished panel of religious leaders: Father Greg Boyle, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Valarie Kaur and Imam Jihad Turk will explore different perspectives on the topic of faith, forgiveness and justice. Together, the panel will discuss how religion has served to connect and foster conflict and division over centuries. Panelists will explore if religion can be an effective tool to advance justice today.
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, bestselling author and founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, a movement to reclaim love as a force for justice. Imam Jihad Turk is the founding president of Bayan Islamic Graduate School, a preeminent Muslim institution of higher education.
Bridging and Belonging with Professor john powell
April 15, 2026
This event will feature a conversation with john powell, 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. 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.
