You will rarely find our Director of Culture and Compassion, Jennifer Kilimnik, without a smile. Jennifer helps us build and maintain a supportive, engaging, and most importantly, a compassionate workplace culture. If she’s not leading our short meditations at the start of staff meetings, she’s encouraging one of us to lead them. She develops new courses for Réseau Compassion Network and facilitates the Short Course – Mindful Self-Compassion online. She also creates opportunities like the bursary program to breakdown financial barriers that prevent people from taking courses that help them learn and grow. “It’s hard to put into words, but one of the things that I find so precious is seeing people begin to embrace a sense of purpose in their work and in their being,” says Jennifer.
When she’s out of the office, Jennifer watches a lot of baking shows, meditates, practices yoga and reads. “I’ll read just about anything I can get my hands on: fiction to escape, philosophy to challenge the way I think, cereal boxes at breakfast,” says Jennifer. Before the pandemic, travelling was among the things Jennifer did during her free time. She did quite a bit of it, she even lived in Northern Ireland for a number of years. “It was charming,” says Jennifer. “There were tiny two lane highways as opposed to freeways, there were mom and pop shops, there were bakeries and butcher shops, everything was unique because there weren’t any big chain companies. It was like being in a movie from the 1960s.”
