Twenty years, twenty days, ten brochures, five podcasts, and plenty of reasons to show up
This year the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health (BPMH) program turns twenty. This fall, a community group supporting the program is launching 20 Days for 20 Years: twenty days of events, publications, podcasts, contemplative practices, and opportunities to come together to celebrate what BPMH has built since 2006 and to ask what should happen next.
Organized by the BPMH Task Force, a coalition of faculty, students, alumni, and community supporters, the campaign brings the conversation about BPMH out into a wider community. Some events are especially for students; others are open to everyone. They explore questions that have animated BPMH for two decades: Buddhism and mental health, contemplative science, attention and distraction, student flourishing, transdisciplinary education, equity, and the responsibilities of universities to the communities they serve.
20 Days for 20 Years is also about the future. Three years after enrolment in BPMH was suspended, we believe the twentieth anniversary is a good moment to ask hard questions. Who gets to decide which forms of knowledge belong in a university? What happens when interdisciplinary programs do not fit comfortably within conventional academic structures? How should universities reconcile their public commitments to student well-being, equity, inclusion, and innovation with the decisions they make behind closed doors?
Over the twenty days, we will release ten illustrated brochures, each taking on a different piece of the BPMH story. Why brochures? Because long before the social-media post, email blast, or QR code, people with something important to say had pamphlets and brochures. These small booklets circulated arguments, challenged institutions, spread inconvenient information, and helped turn individual concerns into public conversations for centuries. They were inexpensive, portable, shareable, and hard to scroll past.
Our ten brochures take up questions ranging from transdisciplinary education, contemplative science, student mental health, and “attention sanctuaries” to anti-Asian racism, adjunctification, university governance, and the gap that can emerge between an institution’s public commitments and its actual decisions. Each brochure stands on its own but together, they tell a bigger story. We’re also launching a five-part podcast series featuring the people, ideas, experiences, and histories that have made BPMH what it is. Twenty years of a program can’t be captured in enrolment figures, committee reports, or administrative decisions, and so the podcast makes space for the voices of students who took the courses and the scholars and practitioners who helped build the field.
Because a twenty-day campaign requires persistence, we are introducing the Task Force Solidarity Card, a chance for us to celebrate your commitment to showing up now, when we need you most. Pick up a card at a campaign event and get it marked each time you attend. Attend five events and you’ll be eligible for a prize when you show up for your sixth. Collect all ten campaign brochures and your complete set counts as one event attendance on your Solidarity Card.
Communities are not built by clicking “like.” They are built by showing up in person. Twenty years is worth showing up for.
BPMH began in 2006 as an unusual experiment: a Canadian undergraduate program willing to put Buddhist traditions into sustained conversation with psychology, mental health, cognitive science, contemplative practice, and questions about how human and more-than-human communities live and flourish. Twenty years later, those questions have only become more urgent.
Join us this fall to celebrate 20 Days for 20 Years.