Enough arguing already: Create an experience & tell good stories.

Family_copyright Melanie Brown_Insight Labs

A couple weeks back, we teamed up with the folks behind Insight Labs to try to crack just what it’s going to take to make empathy a norm in today’s education system. Tucked away in an industrial warehouse in Half Moon Bay, and joined by more than a dozen leading thinkers & doers from across a variety of industris—including design, advertising, media, and academia—we wrestled with the very same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for months: what exactly do we mean by empathy? And why exactly is it more important today than ever? And what’s it going to take to spread not a curriculum or a program, but an idea? 

This was a group that wanted to believe that empathy was the next big thing, but wasn’t convinced as to why. So we spent nearly 2.5 hours trying to make sense of what empathy is and why it will matter more tomorrow than at any other time in history, at which point it wasn’t at all clear that we were going to get anywhere. It was then that someone said, “You can’t thrive without the 4th R: reading, writing, arithmetic, & relationships,” and that our job was to supply the tools for doing that. This quickly became the room’s ah-ha moment. 

The end result was a set of takeaways that will help guide the next phase of Start Empathy. But looking back, they’re also takeaways that all of us who after for systemic social change would do well to keep in mind:

  1. Empathy is meaningless without changemaking, and changemaking is dangerous without empathy. We’ve come to realize that empathy carries too many associations on its own. A big part of our job is to unpack the term, remembering at every step that what we’re after is applied empathy, and a collective commitment to equipping kids with the skills they need to be life-long changemakers. 
  2. It’s about relationships. We spent the first two hours circling around “what is empathy” and “why is it important?” It was only when a woman described it as “the 4th R” that it clicked for people.  Relationships are something that everyone can see and experience themselves—through the growing number of friends you can connect with on FB and LinkedIn, the increasing # of people you interact with each day, etc. This also bridged the gap between cultivating empathy in students, and modeling it yourself, as you can establish the same goals for teachers and students alike. Working in isolation is no longer an option, whether you’re a designer, a scientist, or an educator: it’s all about the team-of-teams. 
  3. Forget arguments: tell good stories. The turning point in the conversation was what we’ll describe as “the Molly moment.” Ashoka Fellow Molly Barker, founder of Girls on the Run, and a key champion behind the Empathy Initiative, had flown in from Charlotte to join the day’s discussion. Molly described what they’d achieved through GOTR, reaching 190K girls each year and mobilizing 47K volunteers, and started to cry as she explained that there was something transcendent about that experience that’s impossible to put to words. Her opening up suddenly gave everyone else in the room permission to do the same, and to get away from all of the political back-and-forth of “empathy is this versus that.” It was at that moment that Nina Rappaport, founder of Kimochis, said, “it’s the 4th R,” and everything shifted. While flawless arguments and showcasing the evidence-base are important, in the end, it’s all about good storytelling.  
  4. Start with the outcome. Toward the end, Hilary Hoeber, Public Sector Practice Lead at IDEO said, “You can design or relationships. You can’t design for empathy.” Empathy is fuzzy for most people, but any teacher can teach in a way that supercharges relationships. And a child or adult’s ability to forge relationships is something that you can (and often already do) measure. 
  5. This must be experienced. Our charge now is to recreate everything that happened in that room over the course of three hours, in three minutes for everyone who finds us online or as members of our schools network. Everything we do—whether through an event, or an online videos—should lead to an “empathic experience,” or this will never fly. It’s time to recreate “the Molly moment” in everything we do.  
Molly Barker’s Five Tips for Start-up Social Entrepreneurs You don’t have to sit through a year-long lecture series on Social Entrepreneurship 101 to divine its basic teachings. Ask any would-be world-changer how to launch a venture, and you’ll likely get the same answer: Identify a problem. Await your brain’s proverbial lightning strike, and craft a solution – ideally, one that’s never been done before (remember where you were at the time of said lightning strike, as this will henceforth be known as your “ah-ha moment”.) Write your business plan, outlining in precise detail where you will be in six months, one year, and five years. Build a website. Identify your Board of Directors and immediately apply for your 501(c)(3). Meticulously account for everything that could go wrong, and preempt it. Perfect your elevator pitch. Wow us with why you’re the ideal person to lead this work. Now cross your fingers, and hope that by the time you’ve completed Steps 1-17, your idea is still relevant. The story of Molly Barker suggests we may have it all wrong.  Read Molly’s 5 tips for social start-ups at Forbes.com
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Molly Barker’s Five Tips for Start-up Social Entrepreneurs

You don’t have to sit through a year-long lecture series on Social Entrepreneurship 101 to divine its basic teachings. Ask any would-be world-changer how to launch a venture, and you’ll likely get the same answer:

Identify a problem. Await your brain’s proverbial lightning strike, and craft a solution – ideally, one that’s never been done before (remember where you were at the time of said lightning strike, as this will henceforth be known as your “ah-ha moment”.) Write your business plan, outlining in precise detail where you will be in six months, one year, and five years. Build a website. Identify your Board of Directors and immediately apply for your 501(c)(3). Meticulously account for everything that could go wrong, and preempt it. Perfect your elevator pitch. Wow us with why you’re the ideal person to lead this work. Now cross your fingers, and hope that by the time you’ve completed Steps 1-17, your idea is still relevant.

The story of Molly Barker suggests we may have it all wrong. 

Read Molly’s 5 tips for social start-ups at Forbes.com

Source: forbes.com

Own it

“The deal is owning it”, says Ashoka Fellow Molly Barker, on being without makeup: “not feeling we have to (use beauty products), you know what, this is my choice.”

She and Catlin Boyle are halfway through a test period of 60 days without makeup, and have talked to ABC News’ Lisa Stark on their experiment, The Naked Face Project. 

“On a bigger scale, it’s the have-to’s that keep women feeling like victims. When we switch our perspective to choices is when we get empowered”, Molly Barker told ABC. 

“It’s not that we think any of these inherently are bad,” said Boyle, “The project is about figuring out our intention in engaging in this product.  Most people wear heels and makeup and dye their hair because women are supposed to do these things.”

Both Boyle and Barker are via their organizations working to boost girls self-esteem, and saw this project as a way of finding the answer to the girls questions about inner beauty:

Barker told ABC News the girls would ask, “If you tell me I’m beautiful just the way I am, then why do you wear makeup and why do you color your hair?” Barker found she didn’t have a ready answer and was worried she was giving the girls a mixed message.

Read the full blogpost by Lisa Stark on ABC News and more about the The Naked Face Project on their site.

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