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From:
Ashoka Empathy <lflowers@ashoka.org> Date: Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 3:17 PM
Subject: Empathy Matters: Empathy exercises to try at home, new competition winners, & Bill Drayton on the key factors for business success.
To:
billcoffin68@gmail.com
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After months of reading and reviewing entries and weeks of public voting, last week Ashoka Changemakers announced the three winners of the competition Activating Empathy. Congratulations to Sports for Sharing, Changing Worlds, and No Bully!
Sports for Sharing uses play--games and sports--to tackle civic disengagement, cross-cultural mistrust, and violence in Mexico. Their signature activity is the treasure-chest exchange, where students collect objects that represent their culture and identity, pack them up in decorated boxes, and exchange their treasure chests with another participating school. Changing Worlds' Literacy and Cultural Connection Program turns students into historians of their own families and communities, sending them out into the field for interviews and helping them transform what they learn into a sophisticated art project. No Bully creates school-based Solution Teams of students to resolve instances of bullying. The core philosophy behind their work? A non-punitive response to bullying that integrally involves students themselves. Stay tuned to StartEmpathy.org in the coming weeks for full profiles of all of the winners, and check out the list of all 14 finalists here. 
 
"I get it. It's not gender, it's not race; it's whether or not you're a changemaker that determines whether you will be a success or failure." So said a 15-year-old young woman and active Youth Venturer, quoted in a recent article from Ashoka Founder Bill Drayton, appearing in Forbes India.
"The key factors for success for any business (or other organization) going forward," writes Bill, "will be: What proportion of your people are changemakers, at what level, and how effective have you been in enabling them to work together and openly to the world? No leader will succeed against this test if he or she is not doing everything possible to ensure that every member of his/her team is brilliant in applied empathetic ethics and if the organization is not meeting the same test." Discover whether you're meeting the test, and check out tips from Bill to ensure you and your company aren't left behind. Read more. 
"If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own." Henry Ford | |
  
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  Take advantage of the lazy--or hectic--summer afternoons you'll spend with your children to try out some empathy building exercises. Not sure where to begin? Start with a family album. Gathering the family around an old photo album is an easy and fun way to share memories with your children--and a perfect opportunity to talk about emotions. Consider scanning some family photos that represent common emotions and putting them on the fridge. Create moveable labels for each family member that say "Today I feel like this." Read more about how to use the experience as an empathy builder here.
 
Earlier this month, we found ourselves sitting in an industrial warehouse in Half Moon Bay, CA, joined by Ashoka Fellow Molly Barker, Henry De Sio, and more than a dozen leading thinkers & doers from across a variety of industries, including design, advertising, media, and academia. Convened by Insight Labs, the group set out to crack what it's going to take to make empathy a norm in today's education system. Over the course of three hours, we wrestled with the very same questions we've been asking ourselves for months: what exactly do we mean by empathy? 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? Among the takeaways are that empathy must be applied--it's most powerful as an ingredient in changemaking; that relationships are crucial in today's world and empathy is the vehicle that helps us build effective ones; and that the strongest arguments for empathy may not be facts and figures but rather powerful stories. Read more about these and other lessons learned here. |
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