![Paula Ortiz and Lia Pikus sitting on a bench in the CSWR courtyard. Photo: Alex Bayer](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-10/Paula-Lia-Banner.jpg?h=895afe68&itok=ui8GfqcE) # HDS Students Win Harvard Culture Lab Grant for Deep Listening Project Paula Ortiz, MDiv ’26, and Lia Pikus, MTS ’27, are using their grant to launch workshops that foster connection and belonging across campus. October 30, 2025 Office of Communications Harvard Divinity School (HDS) students Paula Ortiz, MDiv ’26, and Lia Pikus, MTS ’27, recently received a [Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund](https://harvard.communityforce.com/Funds/FundDetails.aspx?496F49596D593768464E3537506B6F754D5442315A7A7465307A72322B34382F587464316B3230367658774559626F57666C356D4E2F59714442433259316242312B645A727154393232593D) grant totaling $10,100 to support their Deep Listening Workshop Series—a cross-school initiative designed to explore listening as a generative, creative, and relational practice. The yearlong pilot, hosted under [Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program](https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/), includes six immersive workshops that cultivate embodied experiences of connection and redefine what belonging can feel like on campus. In the following conversation, Ortiz and Pikus discuss the inspiration behind their project, what participants can expect, and how they hope deep listening will foster connection across Harvard. **What inspired you to create the Deep Listening Workshop Series?** We noticed in our own lives how the deepest connections we were building were through shared experiences. We recognized how this was missing in larger community structures on campus and that people were eager to explore new and creative pathways for connection. The gap we are trying to fill is to offer community space where bonds can be developed through perceptual attunement, which then leads to more resilient bonds than those formed through just dialogue. In higher education spaces it often feels that the way to create meaningful relationships is through the engagement of the intellect. There is nothing wrong with this, but sometimes the potential for deeper connection lies in other forms of relation. Something that we were noticing is that in that process, the subtler, quieter, and more creative parts of the human experience are not necessarily uplifted. With this initiative, we are trying to open space for fostering new pathways of relating to one another that reveal the more expansive parts of the self that are not always captured through dialogue—training perception to see more expansiveness in oneself and in another. When you are deeply listening you are in an orientation of curiosity and engagement rather than judgment and control. We think that these are important skills to develop for resilient communities that can sustain critical dialogue, conflict, repair, and diversity. We want to emphasize that this isn’t about assimilation or agreement. It’s about attunement. **How has your time at HDS influenced this work?** Divinity school training gives access to a sensitivity to why people gather in particular ways and what they are seeking to feel or create together. Divinity school has uniquely positioned us to facilitate community cultivation because it has developed an awareness, appreciation, and respect for people’s different values and meaning-making systems and equipped us to design spaces that can hold the complexity of the human experience while engaging creativity, contemplation, and connection. Deep listening is a spiritual practice as we conceive it. It is the practice of being present with life as it is—for us, this is spiritual. It is a way in which you can stay honestly engaged with the present and find opportunities for loving attention and reverence. That affirmation of the world, of aliveness itself, is a spiritual practice. **How did you two meet and begin collaborating on this project?** We met at HDS during a sonic meditation. During that meditation there was a degree of experiential closeness and resonance that being in the space allowed us to recognize the sensitivity and possibility in the other. That initial experience set the connective tissue for us to come together and build a subsequent (personal and professional) relationship from this place of connectedness. We also quickly found out that we had both been Thomas J. Watson fellows a few years apart, and that our projects were both focused on community cultivation, attention, and contemplation practices widely conceived. ![two HDS students pose for photo next to tree with orange leaves](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__960x960_scale/public/2025-10/Paula-Lia-Tree%20crop.jpg?itok=oMEQOXt3) Lia Pikus, MTS ’27, and Paula Ortiz, MDiv '26, on the HDS Campus Green. Photo: Alex Bayer **Why is deep listening important at this moment?** We, as a country and a campus, are in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. According to Harvard’s own [“Making Caring Common” report](https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/on-edge), 44 percent of young adults feel like they don’t matter to others. One in three people in the United States reports chronic loneliness. Nationally, time in community has declined by over 20 percent in the last two decades, making social disconnection a public health crisis. On our own campus, according to the most recent Pulse survey, only 66 percent of students and 59 percent of staff and faculty reported having formed relationships with people holding different views from their own. We’re not just losing conversation. We’re losing the ability to attune and collaborate, to have the sense of shared presence that makes dialogue possible in the first place. This is where the Deep Listening Workshop Series comes in. **You describe deep listening as a “way of being in relation.” How do you hope this practice will strengthen connection and belonging across Harvard’s diverse campus?** Rather than relying solely on discussion-based or analytical approaches, it introduces sound, movement, and creative attention as foundational tools for connection. By cultivating our perceptual bandwidth, which is the ability to stay present with complexity, tension, and multiplicity, these workshops foster a relational infrastructure that supports diversity and inclusion. We believe that developing these relational skills on campus will strengthen our ability to tolerate disorientation, discomfort, and conflict, which is essential in building more inclusive and resilient communities. In doing so, deep listening becomes a practice of fostering inclusivity, breaking through loneliness, facilitating meaning-making, and expanding how we connect with ourselves, each other, and our environment. **For someone unfamiliar with deep listening, what might a participant experience during one of your sessions?** During one of our sessions, there is a mix of theory and practice in group formation where we offer some of the theory, thinkers who have informed our frameworks, and the idea is to offer participants very tangible skills that they can use after they leave our session—and to immediately put them into practice in the workshop. People report a sense of release and ease, groundedness, presence, and sensing into body. Participants will receive a sense of connectedness to the people around them and their environment and themselves; an increased ability to notice things that you would not have been attentive to before; and sensitivity and attunement to the environment that is around us. **What have been some of the most meaningful surprises, challenges, or lessons learned as you’ve developed this project?** So many people are interested and open to deep listening as a modality of fostering relationships! We have seen many new connections and friendships happen after we host these sessions, which has been incredibly special for us as facilitators. Our sessions have also had incredible reception, oftentimes beyond capacity, which to us signals the profound need for this offering in this moment. **How can people get involved?** Reach out [to Paula](mailto:paulaortiz@hds.harvard.edu) or [to Lia](mailto:liapikus@hds.harvard.edu) and we will add you to the Outlook group where we will be sending out the information. We will host a pilot program in the fall semester and will formally launch the series in the spring. We are also forming a deep listening cohort that will be participating in all six sessions. We also welcome people to join for individual sessions. **What are your hopes for the future of the Deep Listening Workshop Series after this pilot year?** We are working toward the possibility of establishing a more permanent version of this workshop series at Harvard and beyond once the grant term has expired. We believe this is a framework that can benefit communities of all kinds. *Banner photo: Paula Ortiz and Lia Pikus sitting on a bench in the CSWR courtyard. Photo by Alex Bayer.* ## More Student Awards [ HDS Students Win 2025 Buechner Prize arrow\_circle\_right ](https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/05/22/saints-serpents-hds-students-win-2025-buechner-prize) [ HDS Students Awarded Building Bridges Grant for Black-Jewish Pluralism Project arrow\_circle\_right ](https://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/12/18/students-awarded-building-bridges-grant-black-jewish-pluralism-project) See also:- [ Student Activities and Interviews ](/discover-stories-about/student-activities-and-interviews)