2024 – 2025 Annual Report

Cultivating the Conditions for Health

How Does Forging a Deeper Connectedness Lead to Flourishing for People, Places, and the Planet?

In this age of growing disconnection, polarization, and environmental degradation, it’s more important than ever to support deep relationships that promote thriving and flourishing.

Nova has a long history of innovation in this space, including our leadership in the Earthrise Community and our co-creation of the Green Road. We recognize a need to unite around values that we — as individuals and as a society — share when considering the world in which we want to live.

The Center for Planetary Consciousness and Global Flourishing

The Center for Planetary Consciousness and Global Flourishing at the Nova Institute for Health advances spiritual transformation and cultural renewal in service of planetary health and human flourishing. Centered on inner development and emotional intelligence, we foster planetary consciousness — an expanded awareness of the interdependence of people, societies, and the living world — to inspire wisdom, relational healing, and collective well-being.

Led by Nova Scholar Susan Prescott, MD, PhD, the Center is grounded in integrative research and global collaboration. Our transdisciplinary approach weaves science, spirituality, systems thinking, creativity, and community action to promote ecological stewardship and mutual flourishing across communities and sectors.

Meeting the Moment: Shifting Our Thinking

The Center for Planetary Consciousness and Global Flourishing takes an integrative, transdisciplinary approach that bridges inner development and collective action to foster planetary consciousness and advance solutions to complex problems.

Scholarly Activity and Research

We foster research communities through fellowships, partnerships, and our affiliated planetary health journal, Challenges, exploring consciousness, values, and flourishing through scientific and humanistic lenses.

Communities of Practice, Self Care, and Action Circles

We convene digital and in-person groups to seed ideas, build mutual support, and catalyze tangible action through community programs, wellness initiatives, and spiritual practices. Regular offerings include meditations and yoga practices and iterative dialogue via the Nova Integration Hub.

Art, Narrative, and Creative Endeavors

Through storytelling, visual arts, and film, we support cultural narratives that restore wonder, deepen empathy, and spark societal imagination.

Skills, Mentoring, Training and Experiential Learning

We create opportunities for early career researchers and emerging leaders through mentoring, workshops, and training programs with emphasis on personal development for collective social change and regenerative leadership practices.

Convenings

Our flagship virtual Nova Campfire webinar series and special events provide interactive platforms for dialogue and collaboration on diverse topics related to planetary health, consciousness, and culture change.

Advocacy, Outreach, and Communication

We influence global discourse through publications, position statements, collaborations, and multimedia platforms to advance the understanding of planetary consciousness as essential to societal well-being.

Thrive! Healthy People, Healthy Planet

A collaboration between Nova Scholar Sara Warber, MD, and Nova Invited Faculty Aterah Nusrat MSc, DIC, brought the Thrive! Healthy People Healthy Planet art exhibit to the Osher Center at Harvard Medical School.

Supported by Nova and the Mutual Reawakening Collaborative, this multisensory exhibition brings to life the essentials of health—from air and water to community, biodiversity, and purpose. Traveling to medical centers around the country, the evocative photography, sound, and interactive elements invite reflection on our deep connection with nature and inspire individuals and communities to act in ways that nurture both personal well-being and the flourishing of our living planet.

How Can We Support Mental Health and Flourishing for All?

The Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being

Nova understands mental health cannot be separated from the conditions in which people live, grow, and relate to one another. This includes addressing challenges in social, economic, racial, and criminal justice; food, climate, environmental, epistemic, and organizational justice; and more. In the past two years, our efforts took a wide range of shapes.

Given the significant overlap among discussions of justice, mental health, and opportunities to flourish, Nova created the Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being in 2025. The Center is a visionary, transdisciplinary initiative grounded in the recognition that justice in all forms — economic, racial, environmental, and more — is foundational to human flourishing and mental well-being.

In a time marked by a global mental health crisis, widespread loneliness, and grotesque injustices occurring in plain sight, the Center addresses the urgent need to explore and address the deeper systemic drivers of suffering and barriers to flourishing. Led by Nova Fellow Alan Logan, MSc, ND, our work brings together scientific inquiry, contemplative wisdom, and integrative health approaches to foster healing, connection, and structural change with a whole-of-society approach.

Meeting the Moment: Creating New Paradigms

Guided by the World Health Organization’s affirmation that “there is no health without mental health,” the Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being understands justice and flourishing as deeply interconnected. We emphasize innovative, equity-oriented pathways to optimize well-being — not only treating illness, but cultivating the conditions in which individuals, communities, and societies can truly flourish.

Through the development and dissemination of evidence-based success stories and applied research, we work to strengthen support for policies, programs, and funding streams — locally, nationally, and globally — that can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

Encourage New Paradigms, Holistic Ideas, and Integrated Approaches

We inspire bold, transformative thinking that challenges outdated models and embraces innovative, crossdisciplinary solutions. By fostering “blue sky thinking,” we aim to reimagine mental health through expansive, boundary-breaking ideas that integrate emotional, physical, social, and spiritual dimensions.

Support Knowledge Development

We support researchers with microgrants focusing on interdisciplinary projects, novel ideas, or creative approaches that might not attract traditional funding.

Promote Awareness, Advocacy, and Engagement

We explore new ways to share knowledge and engage stakeholders and the wider community to inspire meaningful change. This includes disseminating information through academic channels, social media, and mainstream news.

Convene and Connect

We are developing a community of diverse leaders, innovators, and advocates to explore successes, challenges, visions, and actions to promote mental well-being. This includes convening events to promote awareness of all aspects of this agenda and explore solutions, while opening up major communication pathways in the translation of justice and mental health research for policymakers and the public.

Reduce Stigmatisation

A specific focus of all our work is understanding and addressing the causes and consequences of the persistent stigma associated with justice involvement and mental health.

The Insight Collaborative for Mental Well-Being

Launched by the Nova Institute in 2024, the Insight Collaborative for Mental Well-Being is dedicated to transforming how we understand and address mental health and emotional well-being. In the face of a global mental health crisis, we aim to shift the narrative from despair to hope, raise awareness of whole-person health, and build a culture where everyone can thrive. By convening thought leaders, scientists, practitioners, and advocates across sectors, and giving a voice to their diverse perspectives, we are breaking down silos to foster innovative, interconnected solutions.

The Insight Collaborative for Mental Well-Being project is supported by a generous seed grant from the Mental Insight Foundation.

Insight Collaborative Conversations

The Insight Collaborative project highlights innovators and pioneers in the mental well-being space, exploring stories of resilience, connection, and healing with a focus on whole-person health.

Urban Farming and Community Healing: A Conversation with Tony Hillery

Dancing To Be Free: A Conversation with Lucy Wallace

Bringing Healing to the Heart of Justice: A Conversation with Bill Brown

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad.

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.)

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

“Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
“Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.”

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.”

Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding.

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors.

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.