Current Fellow

The Center for Spirituality & Healing at the University of Minnesota has selected Aimee Prasek as the winner of a $10,000 fellowship through Dalai Lama Fellows. A graduate student in Tibetan medicine and yoga at the University of Minnesota, Prasek was chosen through a rigorous selection process after an open call for applications.

“I was speechless upon hearing of this honor,” recounts Prasek. Humbled to win, Prasek has had this project brewing in her for ten years. “My education and life experience used to feel so scattered but now I realize how much it has all shaped the knowledge base for my life’s work,” says Prasek. “The project is about bridging and connecting the mind, body, spirit in a way that reaches my generation.”

Prasek selected Dr. Miriam Cameron, Lead Faculty of the Tibetan Healing Initiative at the Center for Spirituality & Healing, as her project mentor. Her project will address the prevalence of violence in University students, including sexual violence, hazing and physical assault, a pivotal step toward fostering non-violence within this population of emerging leaders while leading to the creation of a more peaceful planet.

The Fellowship carries the personal authorization of His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the 1989 Nobel Prize winner. The outcome of the Fellowship will be the advancement of effective social change leadership and action in addressing four major and persistent global challenges:

1. Enhancing understanding and cooperation across peoples and cultures;
2. Diminishing violence and promoting peace;
3. Helping to alleviate poverty through creative initiatives;
4. Protecting the environment.

Dalai Lama Fellows include three interconnected components: a meticulous selection process to identify promising Fellows at select universities; mentorship of these Fellows to equip them with new understandings and capabilities; and lifelong participation by all Fellows in a Global Learning Community that will strengthen each individual’s capacity to lead, while fostering a sense of collective global responsibility, service and action. Fellows receive a project grant of up to $10,000 and ongoing, personalized support from program officers to undertake mentored projects and then integrate findings and insights from this work back into the lives of their campuses.

Dalai Lama Fellows advance a more skillful model of change-making in emerging leaders. Over the course of the year, Fellows are immersed in a reflective leadership curriculum, where they explore universal human values including contemplation, compassion, emotional resilience, empathy and discernment. Dalai Lama Fellows learn that cultivation of patience, tolerance for ambiguity, listening to find alignment, resilience when faced with the unexpected and allowing solutions to generate from a place of openness and humility are what make for exemplary leadership. The University of Minnesota joins an exclusive list of international campuses that partner with Dalai Lama Fellows across the globe.