Brooklyn Zen Center | A New York City Soto Zen Buddhist Temple
Getting Involved

 
If you would like to take part in Brooklyn Zen Center's outreach efforts, we invite you to meet with the outreach committee to explore your interests further. The outreach committee oversees all programming that corresponds with Brooklyn Zen Center's vision to address broader social concerns and offer the practice to those who might never enter a zendo. Though we can never take on all of the following areas, the committee is broadly concerned with cultivating the following in accordance with our overall vision:

  • A space for other religious, professional, and community groups to host independent meditation retreats, co-create programs with BZC, and facilitate dialogue.
  • Programs that bring meditation and mindfulness training to those living and working in prisons, homeless shelters, hospices, hospitals, schools and other difficult institutional environments.
  • Education and support groups for those working in helping and education professions whose work is informed by the dharma, meditation and mindfulness techniques. 
  • Diversity efforts so that the dharma is available to all who wish to take up the practice.

Brooklyn Zen Center's vision reads,

Our hearts and minds can only fully awaken together with others. Centered in this truth, we hope to allow the dharma and our meditative practice to support us and the world as we address socially, politically, economically, and religiously-conditioned suffering and injustice. In doing so, we believe that we not only honor the Buddha’s request to attend to the suffering of the world, but also that this meeting of hearts deepens our understanding of the dharma and our path. 

With this in mind, we are currently offering mindfulness and meditation workshops around anger and stress for students from underserved communities as a part of our outreach efforts. These programs are now in five high schools, two middle schools, and two colleges. If you would like to support this program or other outreach initiatives, please click here to use our contact form to get in touch with the Outreach Committee Chair. Thank you.