For more than a decade, Compassionate Saint Augustine (CSA) has worked to make compassion a lived practice, moving beyond an ideal or sentiment and into advocacy, awareness, relationship-building, and action. Founded as a grassroots network of people from diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences, CSA became Florida’s first Compassionate City in 2013 and continues to build a culture in which compassion becomes a catalyst for meaningful community change.
Today, CSA’s work is growing in both depth and reach. Our initiatives bring together people across generations, faiths, cultures, political perspectives, and life experiences around a simple premise: we can disagree without dehumanizing one another, and we can turn our shared humanity into action.
Current Initiatives
Compassionate Women: Connection, Wisdom & Empowerment
Compassionate Women brings women of diverse ethnicities, faiths, backgrounds, and perspectives together in a supportive community. Through conversation, reflection, and service, the group creates space for women to build relationships across differences while nurturing their capacity to contribute to the wider community.
Lights ON for Democracy: Compassion as a Civic Practice
Launched as a community-wide project for 2026, Lights ON for Democracy invites residents to place electric candles or night lights in their windows as a visible symbol of hope, participation, and commitment to democratic values. It transforms a simple individual act into a collective expression of solidarity.
Good Trouble: Compassionate Civic Engagement
Good Trouble brings together community members, local leaders, organizations, and advocates around issues affecting our neighbors and our democracy. Its goal is to demonstrate that civic engagement can be both courageous and compassionate, speaking up for justice while preserving the dignity of those with whom we disagree.
Purple Bench: Building Compassion Into Community Spaces
The Purple Bench initiative transforms a single bench into a visible and lasting commitment to compassion. CSA works with purchasers and community partners to design and build each Purple Bench from start to finish, creating a tangible symbol of their commitment to making compassion part of the culture of their business, school, organization, park, or other community space.
Each bench carries a QR code that tells the purchaser’s story, why they chose to bring a Purple Bench into their space and, most importantly, how they intend to put compassion into practice. The story might describe how a business will foster a more compassionate workplace, how a school will cultivate empathy and inclusion among students, or how a public space will encourage connection and belonging.
In this way, the Purple Bench is more than a piece of furniture. It becomes an invitation to pause, connect, listen, and reflect. It creates a physical space where people can encounter one another and a digital space where they can learn the story and commitment behind the bench.
The initiative reflects CSA’s belief that creating a compassionate community requires both visible symbols and meaningful action. Every Purple Bench becomes a small but powerful declaration: compassion belongs here and we are committed to practicing it.
Gaza Film Series: Bearing Witness Through Story & Dialogue
Through a series of films and facilitated conversations focused on Gaza and the human consequences of conflict, CSA is creating space for education, reflection, and compassionate dialogue. The series invites participants to look beyond political divisions and encounter the human stories behind headlines, centering dignity, suffering, justice, and our shared responsibility to one another.
Community Cares: Compassion in Action
Community Cares mobilizes neighbors, businesses, and community organizations to support individuals and families facing times of crisis. An emerging focus is supporting families affected by immigration detention or deportation, particularly when children and caregivers are suddenly left facing emotional and financial uncertainty.
Through practical assistance, connection to community resources, and compassionate presence, Community Cares reminds families that they are not alone.
When one family hurts, the community shows up.
Gift Gardens: Compassion Through Food Security
Gift Gardens addresses food insecurity by transforming available spaces and community participation into sources of nourishment. The initiative reflects CSA’s belief that compassion begins with recognizing a basic human need and responding collectively.
Compassionate Youth: Developing the Next Generation of Changemakers
This interfaith, volunteer-focused initiative gives young people opportunities to build relationships across differences, develop leadership skills, and translate their values into service and action. CSA sees youth not simply as future leaders, but as partners in creating a more compassionate community today. This year’s focus has been reaching out to local incarcerated youth.
Emerging Initiatives & Next Chapter
CASA: Compassionate Aging Saint Augustine
CASA is an emerging initiative recognizing that a compassionate community must honor people at every stage of life. Compassionate Aging Saint Augustine seeks to create greater connection, dignity, belonging, and purpose for older adults while addressing the isolation and invisibility that can accompany aging. CASA envisions a community where elders are not simply recipients of care, but valued participants, mentors, storytellers, and contributors whose wisdom strengthens the entire community
CSA is also exploring new ways to connect inner transformation with outward action. Among our emerging areas of work are expanded interfaith and intercultural dialogue, opportunities for compassionate civic engagement, deeper youth leadership development, and gatherings that help communities practice courageous compassion in an increasingly divided world.
A central theme emerging across CSA’s work is “Courageous Compassion”—the understanding that compassion does not require us to remain silent in the face of injustice. Rather, compassion can give us the courage to speak, listen, advocate, build bridges, and stand with those whose dignity or humanity is threatened.
As CSA enters its next chapter, we hope to strengthen the connections among our initiatives and create a more integrated ecosystem of relationship, reflection, advocacy, service, and action.
Our aspiration is simple but ambitious: to help St. Augustine become not merely a place where compassion is valued, but a community where compassion is practiced, organized, and lived.
From empathy to action. From conversation to connection. From individual acts of kindness to a culture of compassion.
