Jeff Walker - meditator, tai chi practitioner, engaged philanthropist

Jeff Walker is a long term meditator with over 40 years of practice, a dedicated tai chi practitioner, and a highly-engaged philanthropist.   He is also the driver and strongest supporter of the goBlue cognitive neuroscience/meditation initiative @ Yale in which i participate and collaborate.  Jeff was here in Happy Valley to do some "work" with me and to see what meditation-focused research and programs, particularly focused on mindfulness were taking place at Penn State.


Jeff is the Chairman of Millennium Promise, which incubates ideas to reduce extreme poverty by half in Africa by 2015 in partnership with the United Nations and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.  Its major initiatives include:

·   Millennium Villages - 80 rural villages in 10 African countries are being developed as prototypes for locally-led sustainable, model communities.

·    Malaria No More - Developed and provided treated bed nets for children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Jeff is also ex-Chairman and co-founder of Npower, an organization that provides shared technology services to over 500 non-profit organizations, technology training and job placement services to inner city kids.


Jeff is also on the board of  New Profit, Inc., which provides multi-year financial and strategic support to social entrepreneurs and their organizations working in education, workforce development, public health, and other areas.   He is co-Chair of the Quincy Jones Musiq Consortium, which consists of 70 local and national organizations working to expand access to music programs for K-12 school children across the United States.


He was also an Executive in Residence at the Harvard Business School focusing on Social Enterprises and Collaboration and a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School on applying private equity concepts and skills to the social enterprise space.  He has been working with the Hauser Center at Harvard in the development and launching of an executive education course on higher level fundraising for non-profits. He is on the advisory boards of the MIT New Media Lab and Ideo.org.  


Jeff has been involved in a variety of mindfulness-based programs including the Mind Life Institute, co-created a Mindful Leadership course at UVA, has supported various programs at the Kripalu Yoga Center and is on Matthieu Ricard’s (Karuna-Shechen) Foundation Board for work in Tibet and Nepal. 

As mentioned above, Jeff is the driver behind the goBlue initiative focusing on longer-term practitioners and the control/elimination of the "wandering mind".  This work, which is currently focused at Yale under Dr. Jud Brewer, has been previously covered in this blog.   


Longer term, the focus is to develop a low cost EEG alternative to an fMRI that would make provide real time brain monitoring for neurofeedback, possibly from PCs/iPads/smartphones, for folk like athletes, artists and musicians to teachers and parents.


i met Jeff when i was being fMRI scanned at Yale.  Dr. Jeffery Martin suggested i meet Jeff, so i e-mailed Jeff and asked him if/when/where we could meet.  He suggested that we meet halfway between where he was in eastern CT and New Haven in two days @ 8:00 a.m.  Well, halfway was an exit off I-95.   He said to call him when i got off the exit ramp and we would arrange where to meet.  


When i called him, he said he was @ the Dunkin' Donuts just off the exit ramp.  i asked where we should meet and he said "how about here at the Dunkin' Donuts"?  So that's where we met for two hours.  we had a great meeting, just drinking Dunkin' Donuts coffee (tea in my case).  An interesting first meeting.


we communicate frequently by e-mail, phone call, skype, etc. w/many other folk, including researchers and other philanthropists.  Jeff is an exceptionally capable leader and organizer, with a broad perspective and vision, and a delight to work with.  i have worked with many executives, and Jeff is really exceptional, and i don't say that just because he's financing our efforts.


we found ourselves going the philanthropist route as we were unable to get funding through the  governmental agencies for the goBlue efforts.  With the current environment, the work just isn't "fundable" in its present state of development by any other route.    


For Jeff's visit to Happy Valley, i arranged several "1/1 practice" sessions as well as meetings with Dr. Mark Greenberg (a good friend w/whom i meditated many times who is the director of Penn State's Prevention Research Center for the Promotion of Human Development) and several of his associates.  Mark is a well known figure in mindfulness (meditation) in childhood education in the U.S. and world-wide, and has worked closely with the Dalai Lama, including writing a chapter in the book "Destructive Emotions". 


"Destructive Emotions" documented the challenge that the Dalai Lama laid down for a group of U.S. scientists, including Mark, to determine the neuroscientific basis for destructive emotions.  This work led to the virtual "explosion" in fMRI work on meditation on Tibetan Buddhist monks under the Dalai Lama's support and encouragement.  


As someone who meditated for decades totally in the dark "scientifically" on what meditation was and how it worked in the brain, the emergence of a definitive body of peer-reviewed scientific work has been a wonderful event.  we really are beginning to understand how this wonderful millenias old approach to managing our "minds" works.  With the guidance and assistance of folk like Jeff, Jud and Mark Greenberg, we are making great progress.