Vision & Mission
We Love in the Toughest PlacesVision
A world where everyone practices kindness.
Mission
To encourage more kindness in the world, beginning with people in our prisons and jails.
Prison-Ashram Project
The primary work of Human Kindness Foundation is the Prison-Ashram Project, which encourages people who are incarcerated to use their time for focused spiritual growth. We send free books about interfaith spirituality to people in prisons and jails. HKF has books in English and Spanish that teach classic spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation and yoga.
People who are incarcerated have the opportunity to dedicate themselves to an inward journey without the distractions and luxuries that occupy many people in the “free world.” Once someone gets too tired of seeing themselves as a convict just biding their time until their release, they can decide to use the time they’ve been given and transform their prison into an ashram.
‘Ashram’ is a Sanskrit word meaning “House of God.” In the East, an ashram is a place where people live for some period of time in order to strengthen their spiritual practice and self-discipline. Many ashrams are very strict. Residents, or ashramites, abide by an exhaustive schedule and live very simply, without many comforts or luxuries.
We never imagined that hundreds of thousands of people doing hard-core prison time would be interested in such an idea. But within the first couple of years, the letters began pouring in and have not stopped to this day
The Three Principles
The Human Kindness Foundation was founded upon three principles. After reading the scriptures of most of the great traditions of the world, Bo saw three principles just singing off the pages of the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, Greek mythology and the writing of the Greek philosophers.
If you distill any of those great philosophical or religious traditions down to some practical advice, three things they all agree on are: live simply, devote your life to service and spend time every day in spiritual practice.