A word of caution: the rush to "solutions" or 'fix it quickly' is fraught with problems - it is a bit like climbing Mount Everest wearing flip flops instead of proper kit for the task at hand, or competing in a significant tennis match with a high profile tennis player without training. These are suggestions aimed at triggering a response which in turn should lead to "better" suggestions for action- it's a process and collaborative journey.

These are also very Western and Northern Hemisphere views of the world. While I have worked with people from Asia, visited Africa, India, many countries in the Pacific and spent time with all sorts of people from various walks of life from around the world, my deep experience and thinking is Western (particularly British). We are reminded daily in the news and social media forums of the ongoing impact of colonialism, war, conflicts, of poverty and of other factors which lead to very different challenges and solutions in the west and east, in the North and the South.

Our focus needs to be upon creating the most effective conditions in every context across the world to develop and sustain individuals' capacity to continuously develop their sense of sense, their compassion and their spirituality. This means more than coming up with a scoring system for meaning, purpose and identity competencies within our education system and securing good results on tests. It means rethinking the nature of work and community to foster compassion and spirituality. It means a conscious and active pursuit of a meaningful personal journey across each life span, developing and building a conscious awareness of what gives our own lives and other people a sense of meaning, purpose and identity; it means looking actively for ways to deepen our sense of spirituality, mastery and understanding, both individually and collectively. We need to understand and work with the obstacles to this. In this way we will create, engage, inspire ourselves and others.

The journey of our lives across the life span needs to enable us to connect with the deep source of our being, who we truly are, permit and ensure making and developing meaning, exploring our individual and social identity, engaging in risk-taking to understand our boundaries, learning from failure, and success, and developing a creative response to the challenge of learning and exploring this journey together as interconnected beings, as well as learning alone. These connections need to extend globally.

Here are the possible actions that could support this. To reiterate where I'm coming from: my decades of experience working on these challenges tell me that the actions we take need to:

• Raise and develop awareness of how individual, group, collective, community, cultural, and lifespan/life-stage issues relate to life's meaning, purpose, identity and spirituality.
• Build and create the adaptive, relational, collaborative capacities of each individual, community and organization, with regards to MPIS.
• Respond to the specific needs of individuals within the particular organizational frameworks and societal contexts within which they work and live.

Some specific action areas are:

1. Develop educational and awareness-raising programs to give a focus to, enable and embed MPIS within a range of organizations and contexts in society. This agenda needs to be taken up actively in education systems, from primary, through to higher education, healthcare systems, businesses, non-profit and community organizations, the arts, science, technology, media, sport, governments. This may require national and international policy developments and investment in resources to support learning, networking and research. Compassionate cities are beginning to emerge as part of the work on smart cities (Kellehear, 2012; Donovan, 2018) - we need to find more ways of enabling this work.
2. Government programs and policies. Awareness programs and enabling assessment systems need to be established in education, health businesses, commerce, the arts, media etc. in order to raise awareness and develop peoples' appreciation of the need to attend to and develop the meaning and purpose of their lives, their identity and sense of spirituality for happiness, fulfillment and well-being. Some governments are already doing this - assessing happiness as the basis for their development (Dubai, Maldives, Bhutan, Thailand - see Anielski, 2008) Governments themselves need to look at their ways of operating to develop compassion and transparency and to model meaningful ways of operating - some initial work related to this is now beginning in England.
3. Focus the education system on the four pillars of education suggested in 1996 by UNESCO in the Delors report Learning - The Treasure Within, to actively work with MPIS. This recommended that the work of schools should be focused on:
   1. Learning to know
   2. Learning to do
   3. Learning to live together, learning to live with others
   4. Learning to be
   
   The implication here is that our focus should be on the development of the person in the context of learning, skills, collaboration, compassion and social engagement - setting the stage for meaningful education, education that provides MPIS. Skills are important, but they need to be pursued in the context of these broader goals. We need to focus on building a sense of MPIS, strengthen the skills for learning for life, build a collaborative environment for consciously learning and developing these areas of ourselves and others. Some call this a commitment to holistic or lifelong learning, contrasting this with the prescribed/discrete and time-bound learning required to pass a test and then forgetting what has been "learned".
4. Strengthen early childhood learning experiences. While some have seen this as "starting school early", one of the real focuses for early childhood education needs to be strengthening MPIS via developing their sense of curiosity, creativity and collaboration through play. A range of studies - see a summary by Raburu (2015) - suggest that early childhood education and play are critical in shaping the self and the individual's sense of identity. More opportunities for early learning, for play and for social engagement of young children (all young children, not just those that can afford to pay the high costs of day-care and early childhood education) could make a significant difference to the sense of meaning, purpose and identity.
5. Drive public policy with a focus on meaning purpose identity and spirituality across the lifespan and across the world - an interconnected and holistically functioning world for all of us. This requires engaging policy makers in the process of policy development and engagement, inclusion of people of all ages with a variety of needs, and creating environments that encourage collaborative learning about MPIS. Digital technologies which permit collaborative and peer-to-peer activities can be supportive here. In health policy, for example, too few patient voices and future patient voices are involved in shaping health services. For cancer care, palliative care and other critical illness points of care, engaging patients in designing clinical pathways and supportive environments can make a difference to the way in which identity and meaning can be found through such experiences.
6. Strengthen work on essential skills -Many individuals do not have the language, numeracy and cognitive skills they need to respond to the challenges and opportunities associated with many jobs when they leave school. This limits their ability to create meaning and purpose for themselves. Strengthening literacy and numeracy and the other essential skills (including emotional intelligence) can have a significant impact on wellbeing and an individuals' capacity to develop meaning and purpose in their lives. It should be clear that these skills are all developed in a context - through the study of subjects, skills, work, social projects and individual competencies - and through social interaction. Learning these skills needs to be seen as a holistic endeavor, not like learning bits and pieces. This will become increasingly important as many work-places are disrupted by new technologies and a great many people (around 20-30% of the workforce) will need to develop new skills and new ways of working. Lifelong learning and reskilling creates opportunities to use these learning times to explore the place of work and skills and shaping meaning and identity.
7. Strengthen the specific training and professional development for teachers, health care workers, business people, politicians, in the areas of MPIS. There is a need to build communities of practice locally, regionally, nationally and internationally and share effective practice in these areas of understanding. Organizations do not necessarily know how to foster and support compassion, understanding of self or identity, even though they may desire to. They need to see why this is important, how it can be done, what impact this work can have on an organization and how this will benefit all stakeholders. Sharing practices and promoting effective practices can enable the more rapid adoption of appropriate methods of support for these kinds of initiatives.
8. Help people ASSESS where they are now on their journey to self and identity - help to developing an individual or a community's sense of MPIS. Creating effective, reflective assessment tools and instruments that enable individuals, groups, communities and governments understand the current state of compassion, wellbeing can be helpful. For example, helping young people assess their social and emotional wellbeing has been a task set to educators in Australia since 2003. Doing so helps identify new learning challenges, new opportunities to engage with students and teachers and new ways of working to build resilience, compassion and spirituality (Bernard and Stephanou, 2018). Systematically using assessments to strengthen supports can also aid governments look at the way in which identity and meaning shape responses to social, economic and community challenges. New assessments of social coherence can be helpful in community development investment decisions.
9. Make life-long learning more than a slogan. Make it meaningful. Learning is already something we each need to commit to throughout our lives - to stay healthy, to be active citizens, to be creative at work, to live meaningful and purposeful lives. This is a major system challenge. But is also a challenge to engage learners' curiosity and enable them at all levels in a love of learning new materials and skills, all the time. It is about the hard work to develop intrinsic motivations in a commercial world that is bent to feed us extrinsic motivations as shoppers and consumers. Many seniors - in some countries a very large group of people - are exploring the meaning of their lives after retirement. Many are also coping with loss, becoming carers for partners with mental or physical illnesses and battling loneliness. New learning and support opportunities are needed to support these transitions and life-changes. Too many are left to "fend for themselves" when they are not really equipped to do so.
10. Work with local communities in terms of developing MPIS across the globe. Bring local community organizations together to look at their common humanity, their similarities, particular issues and resources for enabling each person's sense of MPIS should they wish to engage in this both as individuals and collectively. Find active ways to develop and appreciate our shared and intrinsic connections together, and our 'Being' as a fundamental shared reality. Some communities are doing this, through organizations like REACH Edmonton, which is networking 180+ community-based organizations and exploring reconciliation, immigration, youth adjustment to employment, the impact of sexual violence and many other issues through collaborative, supportive networks enabled by evidence-based practice. Many other such organizations exist around the world. All are generally underfunded, supported by passionate volunteers and yet do remarkable work. How can we ensure their ongoing practice and impact - what needs to happen to enable them to continue?

These are broad headings. We need to make these challenges more concrete and meaningful, adapting them for each context and country.

That's just for starters. I'd like our discussions to identify specific actions that can be big steps toward secure three very specific outcomes:

1. More people engage and practice compassion and care for others on a daily basis in the communities in which they live.
2. More people experience a strong sense of satisfaction in who they are, what they do and how they live their lives - fewer mental health challenges, fewer suicides, less depression.
3. More people have more access to supports, learning and opportunities to explore their identity, compassion and spiritual selves more often.

We need to identify specific actions and projects that would support the achievement of these three outcomes.