Luminary: Robin Casarjian

Luminary: Robin Casarjian

Robin Casarjian is the Founder and Director of the Lionheart Foundation and its National Emotional Literacy Projects. She is a public speaker, writer, and consultant with extensive experience in education, stress management training, psychotherapy, and administration. She is author of Forgiveness: A Bold Choice for a Peaceful Heart (Bantam, 1992) and Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom (Lionheart Press, 1995), and co-author, with Bethany Casarjian, Ph.D., of Power Source: Taking Charge of Your Life (Lionheart Press, 2003).

Whether in inner-city classrooms, hospitals, corporations or prisons, Robin’s work has been widely acclaimed for its clarity, directness, and unwavering vision of the enormous potential within all people.

Robin’s professional career began in 1973 when she received a graduate degree in education from Columbia University and became a teacher of special needs children. She moved on to direct a small alternative school for children with severe behavioral problems who had been excluded from the Boston Public Schools. She subsequently trained in the psychotherapeutic technique of Guided Imagery and Music, using visualization as a powerful creative resource, and started a private practice. From here her career expanded as a public speaker and workshop presenter.

Robin became well known as a stress-management consultant and trainer within the corporate, medical and lay community. She conducted trainings that were telecast live to 35 major corporate sites across the country and led numerous trainings specifically for DuPont, the U.S. Army, and the Harvard Community Health Plan, where she taught for six years.

Working with people from diverse backgrounds and in different settings, Robin realized the central role that forgiveness plays in the healing process. Translating the age-old spiritual concept of forgiveness into a grounded, commonsense, day-to-day practice, she wrote her first book. Forgiveness: A Bold Choice for A Peaceful Heart, published by Bantam Books in 1992, is now available in seven languages.

Robin’s expertise in stress-management and forgiveness resulted in appearances on PBS and local and national talk shows, including ABC’s 20/20 and Oprah Winfrey. She has also been interviewed in numerous national magazines and publications.

Volunteering in a Massachusetts state prison in 1988, Robin developed a course for inmates entitled "Emotional Awareness/Emotional Healing." Witnessing the profound impact this course repeatedly had on prisoners, Robin was inspired to bring her work to prisoners across the country.

Her vision was to capture the essence of the course – respect, encouragement, new teachings and ideas, practical "hands on" exercises, questions for reflection and self-exploration, as well as personal accounts from prisoners – in a book that would be easily available to prisoners anywhere in the country.

Toward this end she wrote Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom, with the intent of distributing free copies to all prison libraries in the U.S. She founded the non-profit Lionheart Foundation in 1992 in order to support this endeavor. She called the project The National Emotional Literacy Project for Prisoners (NELPP).

To accompany this book, Robin developed the Houses of Healing Training Manual and later co-produced the Houses of Healing Educational & Training Video Series. A major focus of her recent work with Lionheart has been facilitating statewide trainings for front-line correctional rehabilitation staff throughout the United States.

In Lionheart’s latest major initiative, the National Emotional Literacy Project for Youth-At-Risk, Robin collaborated with her niece, child psychologist Bethany Casarjian, Ph.D., on the publication of a program for at-risk teens and young adults that is being distributed nationwide to juvenile detention centers and other facilities serving at-risk youth .

In response to our nation's trend toward massively expanding its prison system while diminishing rehabilitation opportunities, Robin also conducts grassroots public education about the need to make prisons places for people to heal (and about the exorbitant cost to society of choosing otherwise). In the midst of public and political frustration and debate, Robin’s voice can be heard as a rational and informed call to achievable transformation in our prisons.

For her prison work, Robin Casarjian was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by Interfaith Counseling Services of MA and was honored by The Giraffe Project, a national program recognizing individuals who "stick out their neck" for the greater good.