UC San Diego Initiative
Sustainable Wellbeing
For more than two decades, Karen Dobkins has taught the Principles of Clarity — a framework drawing on mindfulness, positive psychology, and cognitive therapy — to private clients, workshop groups, and a small Freshman seminar at UC San Diego.
The seminar was capped at twenty students. In 2019, Karen asked the question that would become her next chapter: what if every student at UC San Diego had access to this kind of work — not as an add-on, not as a clinic referral, but as a course taught by a professor in their own home department?
That question is now an institution. Learning Sustainable Well-being (LSW) is a first-of-its-kind cross-campus initiative at UC San Diego that embeds well-being education directly inside the academic departments where students already live.
Sponsored by the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion and the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor, LSW trains and pays ladder-rank faculty to teach 1-credit courses on compassion, resilience, and the skills of flourishing — bringing the same practice Karen has taught for years into the curriculum at scale.