Populations across the globe are challenged by desperate situations. Advancing design education can positively impact global wellness by ensuring high-impact practices address student competencies, it can drivine cutting-edge research and creative work, and cultivate a resilient community. Bringing the concerns of humanity together with a holistic framework for engagement in the classroom promotes compassion in emerging adults. Composed of both empathy and a spirit of activism, compassion may be what sets future generations of designers apart from their predecessors with the intent to stop and repair the negative impacts of industrialization on the planet and in society. The goal of this scholarship is to identify best practices that cultivate students’ growth into grounded members of our ecosystem and ensure they can lead with expertise, inventiveness, and hope. This paradigm mixes the development of technical design skills with contemplative practices to propel our profession to design a sustainable, equitable future for all. In this context, contemplative practices are defined as those activities that a designer may do to stay focused and productive, even in complicated situations. Training student through the use of contemplative practices is demonstrated through theory and case studies in this research document. The bridge into adulthood that higher education constructs for students must include opportunities to grow skillfully and with a passion for a healthy future. Institutions across the globe need to educate the next-generation designers such that they can address complicated problems with life-centered grace and ingenuity to help us all move toward a more equitable and healthy world population.