Cultivating Empathy as a Societal Norm_Insights from Ashoka Fellows_Sept. 2011

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative DRAFT

ASHOKA’S EMPATHY INITIATIVE FELLOWSHIP MAPPING September 2011

1.0 – Introduction 2.0 – Barriers to Every Child Mastering Empathy 3.0 – Fellowship Map 3.1 – Design Principles 3.2 – Location of Change 4.0 – Strategies 5.0 – Results: Metrics & Evaluation 6.0 – Fellows by Region Appendix: Fellow Profiles

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative 1.0 Introduction Why Empathy?

As the rate of change in the world accelerates, our traditional power structures are being transformed, opening the way for millions to participate in society in a way that they could not before. From the end of slavery and colonization, to the rise of democracy, the women's and civil rights movements, and the current technological revolution, which has unleashed ideas and initiatives from humans from every corner of the globe, we are witnessing the flattening of hierarchies and diffusion of power from the hands of a small elite to those of every individual across the globe. The door has opened to a future where every person can and must help tackle the increasing number of social challenges that are emerging every day.

A world of rapid change can be a complex landscape to navigate. In the past, we had hierarchies in our societies and institutions that—for better or worse—kept the world organized. Today we live in a more decentralized world. Everyone must have initiative, confidence and good decisionmaking skills, as there is often no one above them to tell them what to do. Everyone must be able to prioritize important information and actions in a world of information overflow and ambiguity. Everyone must be comfortable working in a team of teams environment through facilitative management styles. We already see the world’s leading companies clamoring for employees who have these leadership skills. To thrive in a world of rapidchange, to not be marginalized, to contribute constructively to solving problems, people need to learn to be changemakers. !"#$#%&'()*$+%!(,-(%.*'/$%% In particular, as rules are in flux, as people move fluidly in and between formerly homogenous groups, cultures, and societies, and as power is shared by all, every person needs an ever higher level of empathetic skill in order to thrive. We need applied empathy—the ability to understand what other people are feeling and to act in response in a way that avoids harm and contributes to positive change. Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed both a growing recognition of empathy’s increasingly critical place in society, and a wave of innovation designed to unlock it.

Ashoka is committed to a world in which every individual has the opportunity to learn the skill of empathy and every institution, from school to corporation to country, integrates empathy as a core principle and practice. The most critical step in getting there is to ensure that every child masters empathy. Without this skill, he or she will hurt people and groups, will be marginalized, and will not be able to join with others to create beneficial change in the world. !

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative Distilling Insights, Strategies, and Stories Over the last few months, we have begun to deepen our understanding of how Ashoka Fellows view empathy, the key strategies they're using to cultivate it, and the insights from their pattern-changing work that directs us to how to build a world where every child masters empathy. We aim to: 1. Identify the barriers to a culture where empathy learning is a norm and the solutions for overcoming them; 2. Understand the best strategies for cultivating and sustaining empathy in individuals and systems; and 3. Capture the best stories of empathy in action.

We intend for this knowledge, when linked to the science in this area and other insights in education and related fields, to be the basis of a dynamic framework to be used to inspire and enable schools and communities to develop environments where every child masters empathy.

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative 2.0 Barriers to Every Child Mastering Empathy In exploring the strategies of Ashoka Fellows around the world and talking to many Fellows, educators and experts, the following key issues emerged as the primary obstacles to empathy as an educational norm: 1. Empathy is perceived merely as a value or character trait, and instilling value is considered outside the bounds of our education system.

2. Today’s high-pressure environment leads parents and educators to feel overwhelmed, and without the right skills ourselves, we default to what we know, applying command and control techniques with children.

3. Our incentive systems and measures of success discourage empathy. Education policy reflects those systems, emphasizing test scores over other measures of personal development and success.

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

3.0 Fellowship Map (Figure 1)

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The following matrix demonstrates how Ashoka Fellows are overcoming these barriers to cultivate empathy as a societal norm. Three design principles emerge as a pattern across Fellows’ work globally: 1) treat empathy as a skill, 2) create conditions for open exchange, and 3) foster an empathy economy. Fellows are applying these principles at three “locations” of transformation: 1) individuals, 2) educational infrastructure, and 3) communities broadly. This map plots a handful of Fellows, whose work illustrates each design principle at each location. The categories are not mutually exclusive; Fellows are mapped according to their principal innovation, but most are working across many or all of these levels to effect systems-change. All of the Fellows listed here are introduced in the appendix. The asterisked (*) Fellows are also spotlighted in Section 3.0 as illustrations of each section of the matrix.

0&%($'*+,($-.'(#'('12344'" " *Roots of Empathy – Mary Gordon " Positive Coaching Alliance – Jim Thompson

Transforming Individuals

(I)

Transforming Educational Infrastructure

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*Peace First – Eric Dawson *Playworks – Jill Vialet Riverside School – Kiran Bir Sethi Papilio – Heidrun Mayer (IV)

Transforming Communities

- *Dream a Dream - Vishal Talreja - Health Leads - Rebecca Onie - People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond - Ron Chisom

(VII)

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5&%($%'5")63$3")#'7"&'8,%)'*9/-():%'" " *Dialogue in the Dark – Andreas Heinecke " Fresh Lifelines for Youth – Christa Gannon

" Genocide Intervention Network – Mark Hanis " *First Nations Child and Family Caring Society – Cindy Blackstock " YouthBuild USA – Dorothy Stoneman " Engineers Without Borders – Bernard Amadei (III)

(II)

" *Girls on the Run – Molly Barker " Center for Inspired Teaching – Aleta Margolis

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*Escuela Nueva – Vicky Colbert New Teacher Center – Ellen Moir

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TimeBanks USA – Edgar Cahn *MEDIACON – Princess OlufemiKayode *KaBOOM! – Darell Hammond Making History Institute – Claudia Vidigal

(V)

- *Search for Common Ground – John Marks - Interfaith Youth Core – Eboo Patel - Interfaith Mediation Centre – Iman Mohammed Ashafa - Genetic Alliance – Sharon Terry (VIII)

(VI)

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(IX)

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3.1 Design Principles

After mining the work of Ashoka Fellows around the world and interviewing a subset of them, we have identified three core design principles for advancing applied empathy as a societal and educational norm.

Treat Empathy as a Skill Science increasingly shows that we as humans are wired for empathy. It is an innate capacity we all have. But as with any capacity, it only flourishes if we nurture it. Empathy can be learned, but mastery takes practice. Applied empathy encompasses the abilities to feel and understand as another and then act with a concern for the welfare of others. Understood in this way, empathy requires a number of different skills and aptitudes: emotional literacy, perspective-taking, self-regulation, communication, problem-solving, and more. For individuals, such skills are correlated with greater success in reasoning, collaboration, academic performance, and professional performance. For communities, empathetic ability facilitates conflict resolution and cooperation.

Social entrepreneurs are demonstrating that empathy is not merely a value or character trait. They are showing how empathy skills can be learned, practiced, and measured.

Create Conditions for Open Exchange Individual effort is necessary but not sufficient to learn and master empathy. Empathy is a relational skill, and culture thus plays a critical role in the learning process. Social entrepreneurs recognize that empathy cannot be learned just from textbooks or in discrete instructional windows. It must be embedded in the environment. Empathy learning thrives under conditions of trust and transparency. It requires interaction with a diversity of perspectives and viewpoints.

Social entrepreneurs are breaking down barriers to collaborative interaction. They are demonstrating how to cultivate a culture of open exchange that facilitates the learning and practice of empathy by embedding it in roles, rituals and behavioral norms.

Foster an Empathy Economy Skill-building practices and an enabling culture facilitate empathy learning, but social entrepreneurs also recognize that to create lasting change, systems must incentivize and sustain empathy learning and practice. Applied empathy needs to be nurtured by a supporting system that encourages empathic action, thus building demand for empathy learning.

Social entrepreneurs are redefining success for individuals, professions, and communities. They are showing how to foster an empathy economy by transforming traditional incentives, interests, and exchange relationships.

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3.2 Location of Change Social entrepreneurs change destructive patterns in society and reorient systems for the benefit of all.

Doing so generally requires catalyzing both personal and system transformation. Making empathy learning and practice a societal norm requires innovative strategies for transforming individual behavior, educational infrastructure, and community systems.

Individuals Empathy has significant social implications, but at its core, it is a personal skill. The most empathic systems will be futile if individuals are unequipped to activate their innate capacity for empathy.

Creating transformation at this level requires careful, high-touch interventions attuned to psychological, social and emotional development. The creative interventions of social entrepreneurs help cultivate the individual capacity for empathy and its associated skills, ensure empathic accuracy, and link empathy to personal development.

Educational Infrastructure To become a norm, empathy must move beyond the realm of a value that some parents, schools, programs, institutions choose to advance. Empathy learning cannot be merely an accident of the family or community one was born into or the school or summer camp one attends. It must permeate the educational infrastructure. Social entrepreneurs are innovating new education models where empathy is valued as a necessary skill for development and success, and demonstrating measurable impact to refute the idea that empathy does not belong in learning agendas. With or without explicit reference to empathy, they are revolutionizing learning environments and redefining educators’ roles in ways that enable it. And their innovations are not limited to traditional schools. Social entrepreneurs are transforming the entire education ecosystem, from families to the juvenile justice system to higher education to professional development.

Communities While mastering empathy requires training and practice at the individual level, sustaining it can prove an inordinate challenge if individuals find themselves subject to dismissive or discriminatory practices the minute they leave a nurturing environment, whether a family, classroom, school, or other group or institution. Recognizing that empathy mastery does not result from learning only in controlled environments, social entrepreneurs are targeting and transforming entire communities, creating collective empathic consciousness and capacity by changing the way we conceive of everything from certain groups or populations, to professions, to the values and traditions we use to define ourselves and the systems we use to organize ourselves. !

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4.0 Strategies

The following is a selection of strategies—distilled from the work of Fellows—at the intersection of each design principle and location on the fellowship map (Figure 1).

I.

Transforming Individuals ! Treat Empathy as a Skill

Spotlight: Mary Gordon, Roots of Empathy Canadian Fellow Mary Gordon’s Roots of Empathy program is founded on the idea that children cannot simply be told about behaviors like kindness and sharing; they must meaningfully experience them. Aimed at reaching students on both a cognitive and an affective level, she works to foster perspective-taking and pro-social behavior in children and young people ages 5 to 13. For an entire year, an infant and parent, joined by a Roots of Empathy Instructor, visit a classroom every three weeks, participating in a series of activities tailored to each particular age group.

Treating the baby as “teacher,” students observe the baby’s development and learn to label the baby’s feelings. In turn, they learn to identify and reflect on their own feelings and the feelings of others. The result is a lasting reduction in childhood aggression and increase in helpful behavior and attitudes. !.

Experience empathy, don't intellectualize it. Empathy cannot be transmitted through a book or a lecture: “it has to be about construction, not simply instruction,” says Roots of Empathy’s Mary Gordon. It comes of feeling, intuition, and interpersonal connection. Lasting memories—the product of emotional connections rather than mere cognitive understanding—then become a vehicle for applying those lessons outside of the classroom setting.

Practice it. “It’s not what you teach, it’s what you emphasize,” says Positive Coaching Alliance founder Jim Thompson. Lessons and experiences must be reinforced through continual practice and repetition. Athletes who constantly improve both themselves and their team practice what Jim calls “Double Vision”: the ability to take a hard look internally and take responsibility for your actions, and to look around externally, focusing on what’s happening with your teammates and what you can do to help them be successful. PCA coaches use visual gestures as a constant reminder for kids to put what they’ve learned into practice. If a kid is sitting on the bench, the coach holds his hand up as though looking through a window, reminding him or her to focus on the rest of the team and ways to help them out.

Measure it. Empathy is the combination of a number of different skills & aptitudes—the ability to read emotion, to appropriately express emotion, to listen effectively and accept differences, to resolve conflict, and many more—which can be measured independently through a combination of self-assessment, observation, and performance. As with any learning outcome, “we value what we measure,” says Peace First founder Eric Dawson. Successful programs both measure students’ empathy along a growth spectrum, and connect empathy to schools’ “pain points,” through clear metrics that draw a direct line between students’ involvement and reduced disciplinary referrals, reduced bullying and conflict, increased retention, and improved academic outcomes.

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II.

Transforming Individuals ! Create Conditions for Open Exchange

Spotlight: Andreas Heinecke, Dialogue in the Dark Andreas created Dialogue in the Dark as a means of removing the prejudices, clichés, and preconceptions that define our understanding of “the other.” For two to three hours, participants enter a pitch-black space, where they discover what it is to be blind. The blind become their guides: those who were once the objects of pity are suddenly the people with power, assurance, and capability, and those who can see find themselves disabled. Through this role reversal, participants learn to rely on their other senses to interact and communicate, and in the process, develop a different understanding both of their own limits and capacities, and those of others. Furthermore, Andreas has found that darkness itself is an ideal learning environment--among its benefits, it stimulates the creation of memory-inducing melatonin in the brain. He is now designing similar dialogue workshops in present and post-conflict zones, using the exchange of perspectives to establish improved social cohesion, respect, and trust. .

Reverse role dynamics. Where there are imbalances of power, whether between individuals or at a societal level, the side with power has little incentive to practice empathy. Genuine expressions of empathy thus require reversing traditional roles and doing away with long-standing hierarchies, and both sides must recognize they have something to teach and something to learn. Through Christa Gannon’s Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY), for example, police and probation officers switch roles with incarcerated youth in a “mock trial,” with a dramatic impact on both parties.

Link “other” awareness to self-awareness. Imagining what another is feeling begins with careful self-reflection and an examination of the events, people, and circumstances that lead us to behave in a certain way, and ultimately make us who we are. “Empathy is about understanding how a particular set of behaviors have made you feel, and how you’ve demonstrated those same behaviors,” explains Aila Malik, Associate Director of Fresh Lifelines for Youth. Juvenile offenders participating in FLY's leadership development training begin with a close examination of moments in which they have felt oppressed, mistreated, or hurt. Together, they begin to disentangle those feelings from their causes, and to explore moments in which they have acted not as the victim, but as the perpetrator.

Unlock motivations through personal stories. For Dorothy Stoneman’s YouthBuild USA, building a sense of common purpose amongst participants is critical to getting the job done and sustaining students’ motivation. On their first day together, they begin by sharing their life stories, a process that forces them to look beyond their initial assumptions and stereotypes, and to understand both their personal motivations and those of others.

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III. Transforming Individuals ! Foster an Empathy Economy Spotlight: Cindy Blackstock, First Nations Child and Family Caring Society “Empathy to me is not just having a sense of interest in and regard for other people: it’s taking your understanding of another and putting it into action for the common good,” explains Canadian Fellow Cindy Blackstock. Through the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, Cindy is working to achieve culturally-based equity for First Nations children in Canada. But unlike a lot of citizen sector organizations that highlight a problem over and over again without empowering people to effectively contribute, Cindy wanted to a way to channel the skills and offerings of any citizen toward a more just future for First Nations children. So she created the 7 Ways to Make a Difference, offering Canadians young and old, rich and poor, free and easy ways to act on their empathy, all in under two minutes. Kids have contributed everything from dance, to poems, artwork, gardens, and t-shirts; they have organized marches, and written letters to the government. For many, it's the first time they've felt needed, and that their voices mattered. Thanks largely to this youth-driven effort, a number of territories have already adopted their policies, and their campaigns have been referenced in the Prime Minister’s address. Today, children make up the Caring Society's biggest funder, and their impact continues to be profound.

Link empathy to clear action and visible impact. Traditional attempts to unlock empathy involve loading people with extensive data and statistics about a problem. Yet “part of the problem is that people feel overwhelmed by the whole issue,” explains Cindy Blackstock, founder of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. The key, she says, is to offer people simple ways to get involved, and to lay out in clear terms what those actions will accomplish. She has devised a simple— and just as importantly, free—set of steps that can be done in two minutes or less, using these as a door-opener for deeper engagement. Mark Hanis’ Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net) is expanding on the work of the human rights community—known for its lengthy reports on shocking abuses—by providing global citizens with the tools to more effectively advocate and fundraise to prevent genocide. His technology-driven platform for public action is distributing the power to effect change from a concentrated few to an expansive network of citizen activists. It includes the world’s first anti-genocide hotline that connects callers directly to their Congressional representatives.

Link applied empathy to professional development. First-year students at Edgar Cahn’s Antioch School of Law are required to complete a six-week homestay with a client family in order to understand a client’s underlying motivations. Similarly, Bernard Amadei’s Engineers Without Borders enables engineering students to put their skills to use to help meet the needs of developing communities. Students work hand-in-hand with local communities to identify a clear need, and to develop a long-term sustainability plan. Having worked hand in hand with the communities they are serving, students return with a deeper appreciation of local knowledge, a commitment to applying their skills for social good, and a deeper understanding of development as a two-way street.

Link personal progress to community progress. While service-learning and volunteerism are widely upheld as a critical means of cultivating civic engagement, programs often suffer from being “service for service’s sake.” YouthBuild USA takes a new approach. They bring together young people from low-income backgrounds to work together to build affordable housing units. As they collaborate to develop the community, participants learn job skills and earn a high school diploma or GED. !

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IV. Transforming the Educational Infrastructure ! Treat Empathy as a Skill Spotlight: Eric Dawson, Peace First In the face of skyrocketing youth homicides in the early 1990s, young people were largely treated as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. Preferring a proactive approach to one that was inherently reactive, Eric began Peace First as a college student. Aiming to build a new generation of peacemakers, Peace First developed a curriculum that follows students as they move from kindergarten through 8th grade. For one hour each week, students learn communication and conflict resolution skills through experiential activities, acting out the conflicts they see in their neighborhoods and exploring effective responses. They are then tasked with putting those practices into action, designing projects to make their neighborhoods and schools safer. Past projects have included kindergartners who launched recycling programs, 2nd graders who reclaimed brownfields, and 8th graders who taught workshops for their teachers on sexism. The curriculum is integrated into the academic framework, and is accompanied by techniques designed to transform the school’s overall climate and culture. .

Spotlight: Jill Vialet, Playworks Ashoka Fellow Jill Vialet works with low-income schools to foster a positive learning environment through play.

Beginning before the first bell rings and continuing long after the school day has ended, trained coaches use recess, in-class exercises, extracurricular programming, and interscholastic sports leagues to teach games, fair play, positive conflict resolution, and leadership development. The result? In the 2009-10 school year, 88% of 1,900 teachers and administrators polled in Playworks schools reported a decrease in the number of disciplinary referrals, and 86% reported a decrease in the incidents of bullying during recess. !

Embed empathy in the curriculum. For Eric Dawson, founder of Peace First, peace-building is not simply the absence of violence; it is a skill in itself. Through an hour-long course each week, students learn peace-building just as they would any other subject, beginning in elementary school and going all the way through the 8th grade. Peace First schools have been known to include peacebuilding on students’ report cards, and to integrate lessons into all subject matter.

Make play the cornerstone of the school day. Numerous Fellows have demonstrated why play matters—not simply as a means of improving health and expending energy, but as a critical learning tool in itself and an essential experience for developing empathy. Through play, kids learn the value of cooperation and how to work effectively in teams. They learn to resolve conflict, and to explore imagined worlds and experiences. And they perform better in class.

Activate changemaking. Applied empathy involves both understanding and acting. Thus, developing empathy does not end with simply “stepping into another’s shoes.” Students at Kiran Bir Sethi’s Riverside School in India, for example, undertake a four-step experiential learning process: Feel, Think, Do, Share. They identify a problem within their community that they care about, and then carefully examine the causes behind it, looking at a combination of visible factors, non-verbal indicators, and systemic gaps. Then students design solutions to their chosen challenge, putting empathy into action.

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Transforming the Educational Infrastructure ! Create Conditions for Open Exchange

Spotlight: Molly Barker, Girls on the Run Molly Barker’s Girls on the Run is out to educate and prepare girls for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living.

Through an after-school program for girls in grades 3-8, GOTR offers an alternative to the “Girl Box” culture, in which preadolescent girls face sudden pressure to conform to social norms. The three-part program begins with a series of lessons around life skills, ranging from how to be a good listener, to values clarification and employing a positive outlook, all of which are taught through a combination of running games and reflective dialogue. The program includes a community service component in which girls identify a problem they care about in their community and implement a solution, and culminates with a 3.1 mile running event. And because empathy begins at home, Molly is now launching a voluntary curriculum for parents. The program leads to dramatic improvements in girls’ self-esteem and cooperative skills, and has produced a powerful effect on school culture, leading to less bullying, more and more girls running for student council, and academic improvement. !

Model empathy in the learning environment. Empathy cannot be learned in isolation; it must be modeled by teacher, principal, and staff behavior. Founded on the belief that to inspire students, you must first inspire teachers, Aleta Margolis’s Center for Inspired Teaching has spent 15 years helping teachers to reach their full potential. One of the key tenets of her philosophy is that the student-teacher relationship, along with the principal-teacher and principal-student relationships, be one of mutual respect and shared learning, in which each contributes independently to the overall learning community. Using the same participatory and cooperative learning strategies employed in today’s best schools, she and other Ashoka Fellows are working to provide educators with transformative life experiences and chances for deep reflection, so that they too are equipped with empathetic skill.

Treat children and young people as clients, not charges. It’s hardly a secret that kids who are acting up in school are often facing other challenges at home. Yet excessive reliance on procedures, combined with too little time, can mean that unique circumstances and “grey areas” affecting individual behavior are overlooked in favor of a rigid application of established rules—with the result that, too often, we treat the symptom rather than the cause. Fresh Lifelines for Youth founder Christa Gannon and Claudia Vidigal of Brazil’s Making History Institute have established successful alternatives in their respective systems. Christa is reducing recidivism rates by developing mechanisms for the players in the juvenile justice system to listen to young people rather than just punish their behavior. Similarly, Claudia works with youth in shelters to unlock and share their personal stories through writing and the arts, and then feeds those stories back into the hands of the social workers, judges, and other decision-makers in the court system. Kids are thus treated as individuals rather than case numbers.

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VI. Transforming the Educational Infrastructure ! Foster an Empathy Economy Spotlight: Vicky Colbert, Escuela Nueva Through Escuela Nueva, Colombian Fellow Vicky Colbert has set out to transform classrooms into places of participatory and cooperative learning, and in the process, to change the very way we conceive of, prepare for, and institute teaching and learning. Recognizing that learning involves far more than the teacher alone, she has systematically embedded empathy into teacher training, instructional materials, and even classroom design. Children sit at modular tables, looking into one another's eyes rather than the backs of their necks. Teachers act as catalysts rather than conveyors of information, and learn via the very same experiential processes as their students. Escuela Nueva's own line of textbooks are part workbook, part teacher guide, and part conversation facilitator, designed to develop students' abilities to dialogue. Students take on autonomy through a participatory governance structure that works both in the classroom and the school at large. Parents may likewise receive training, and are invited in as active participants in the process. The model has been integrated into Colombia’s national education standards and evaluations of teacher performance, with the result that nearly 20,000, largely rural, schools in Colombia now operate according to the Escuela Nueva model. It has been adopted in a host of oterh countries in Latin America and beyond, and any educator anywhere may take advantage of her materials.

Include empathy metrics in teacher & school performance standards. Today’s focus on teacher accountability, while opening the door to innovation and improved performance strategies, has also placed extraordinary burden on today’s educators, with the result that recess, arts-based subjects, and social and emotional learning are often the first to be cut when resources—whether time or money—are scarce. To make empathy more than a tagline, principals must declare it to be a core priority, and rate teachers—and themselves—against schools’ ability to cultivate it. To that end, Ellen Moir’s New Teacher Center has created a clear set of performance standards for principals and teachers that rate their efforts to improve their schools’ social and emotional well-being. Principals are rated on their ability to put themselves in the teacher’s place, and teachers are evaluated based on their ability to do the same with their students. Having made mentorship for new teachers a core education policy in dozens of districts throughout the country, she is working with those same administrators to spread the tool.

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VII. Transforming Communities ! Treat Empathy as a Skill Spotlight: Vishal Talreja, Dream a Dream Vishal Talreja saw that many of the teenagers coming out of India’s children’s homes lacked the life skills they needed to cope effectively with challenges, be they at work, in relationships, or simply through independent living.

Faced with their first conflict, they would turn immediately to the streets and the world they knew best. So he and the team at Dream a Dream designed an after-school model using sports, creative mentorship, the arts, computer education, and career-based programs to bridge the gap between technical skills and life skills. He soon found that the presence of well-trained facilitators—ones who had themselves undergone the same transformative life experiences as the kids they were serving—dramatically accelerated kids' mastery of those skills. Together with Ashoka Fellow Charlie Murphy, he thus developed a powerful training model for the volunteers who serve as Life Skill Facilitators. Like the kids they work with, facilitators spend significant time on reflection, learning to ask better questions and to articulate how particular insights learned on a football field and elsewhere apply to other aspects of their daily lives. Volunteers are expected to serve as standard-bearers for a more empathic society, applying these same skills and challenged preconceptions regarding class, caste, and privilege to their home communities.

Train future leaders in systems-thinking. A common strategy for embedding empathy skillsets across entire communities involves creating transformative life experiences for future leaders, thereby leveraging the “trickle down” effect. Following a rigorous selection process, Rebecca Onie’s Health Leads trains college volunteers to connect low-income patients with the basic resources— such as food, housing and heating assistance—they need to be healthy. By working side-by-side with doctors, lawyers, social workers, and patients and their families, students quickly learn to take multiple perspectives, and through active listening, discover how to bridge connections between players in the system. The result is a corps of future medical professionals equipped with the knowledge, understanding, and efficacy to identify and tackle the social determinants of health.

Uncover, understand, and deconstruct discriminatory attitudes. Too often, educators and community organizers rely on tools and formulaic interventions to tackle pressing social challenges, without examining the reasons behind their existence, and the means through which they are perpetuated. Through the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, Ron Chisom has pioneered a new approach that allows people to put empathy into practice. He works with government agents, non-profit leaders, educators, and social service providers to understand the foundations of race and racism and how they continually function as a barrier to community self-determination.

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VIII. Transforming Communities ! Create Conditions for Open Exchange Spotlight: John Marks, Search for Common Ground Unlike the leaders behind most conflict resolution organizations, Ashoka Fellow John Marks wanted to do more than bring two sides to the negotiating table: he sought to fundamentally transform the way the world deals with conflict.

So he established the first NGO-run television and radio production company to tackle deep-seated cultural misunderstanding, and to replace adversarial attitudes with a commitment to collaborative problem-solving.

Leveraging the world-wide popularity of soccer, each series typically tells the story of a soccer team, and their various relationships and adventures. The make-up of the 11-person team depends on the cultural context: in Kenya, writers chose to make the team half women; elsewhere, the themes may implicitly focus on religious, economic, or ethnic diversity. Today, Search for Common Ground Productions produces more dramatic content than anyone other than the BBC. !

Treat vulnerability as an asset. Core to unlocking empathy is creating a trust-based environment, often termed a “safe space”—one where vulnerability is a learning asset, where genuine reflection and emotional expression are encouraged, and where traditional boundaries that separate what’s happening at school from what’s happening at home are absent. This means inviting vulnerability, and allowing individuals to look beyond narrow preconceptions and stereotypes at the person beyond the performance. For example, students at Antioch School of Law, founded by Ashoka Fellow Edgar Cahn, begin classes with an essay about an injustice they were witness to, in which they examine what they did at the time and what they would do now. The first day and a half is spent sharing that story.

Highlight shared values. At its core, empathy is about recognized the shared humanity in another: approaching others—be they team members or negotiating parties—as equals, and finding ways that advance the good of the whole. Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core is out to create “interfaith literacy,” wherein members of different faiths understand not only one another’s specific practices and traditions, but how the two faiths relate to one another. To that end, they use what they call a “Shared Value Methodology,” in which all dialogues and shared service projects begin with a look at the values and personal histories participants share, and what they can do to act on those shared values. Similarly, Pastor James Wuye and Imam Mohammed Ashafa of the Interfaith Mediation Centre have designed a curriculum to combat the idea that one faith is superior to another: a notion commonly advanced through religious instruction in Nigeria, particularly in conflict-prone areas.

Through a combination of Peace Clubs, a new curriculum guide, and public dialogue between religious leaders of different faiths, they are bringing new attention to their religions’ shared emphasis on peace and the common humanity of people everywhere.

Ritualize shared responsibility. Sharon Terry and the Genetic Alliance have found that the best way to resolve tension and conflict is through what they call “identification.” Whether dealing with a team project or negotiating with partners, they consciously reframe their frustration and complaints in terms of their own contribution to the problem, rather than project blame on others. Instead of saying, “you’re being an obstacle,” staff flip the question to say, “how is it true that I’m being an obstacle?” Both sides thus become partners in solving the problem. !

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IX. Transforming Communities ! Foster an Empathy Economy Spotlight: Princess Olufemi-Kayode, Media Concern for Women and Children In Nigeria, it is estimated that one in three girls and one in seven boys will be sexually abused before the age of eighteen. Thanks to widespread stigma around childhood sexual abuse, individuals and families, as well as law enforcement and the medical community, often have little in the way of proper recourse: absent any public dialogue, resources are few and hard to find, and when available, often misleading. Princess Olufemi-Kayode is lifting the curtain on the subject by monitoring media coverage of cases, equipping journalists with reporting manuals, and rewarding balanced and progressive coverage. Her work doesn’t end there, however. Leveraging the ensuing public awareness, she offers victims practical tools for healing, including a counseling hotline, crisis centers, and a powerful referral network, made up largely of men and women who have themselves benefited from support. Volunteers and mental health professionals receive training to work with sexually abused children, and the public gains access to tools and effective response strategies through large-scale awareness campaigns. These services have opened the door to new services and attitudes within the law enforcement community, and the public at large.

Spotlight: Darell Hammond, KaBOOM! With education funding cut across the country, playgrounds have largely become the responsibility of Parent Teacher Associations. In the absence of parents able to dedicate discretionary time to raising money, safe playspaces have thus become a luxury and not a right. KaBOOM! is out to change that by forging partnerships between local communities and corporations. Through its partners, KaBOOM! supplies 85% of the cash, while the school or community is responsible for raising the remaining 15%, and for volunteering on the day of the build. The result is far more than a gleaming playspace, and the ensuing benefits to kids’ health and social development: the approach has redefined the role of the customer, transforming a one-time recipient of goods and services into a participant and collaborator. By forging new alliances between community members and businesses across varying economic levels, the process—from conception to delivery—serves as the catalyst for continued community engagement and development.

Capture “psychic income.” Edgar Cahn has designed an alternative currency system to reward neighborly acts of kindness and volunteerism. At first, he feared this new system—called TimeBanks—would be of use only for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, who lacked any other form of currency. But he found that there are two kinds of benefit: one based on exchange, and one based on intrinsic value and the sense that you’re contributing to something bigger than yourself.

Time Banks captures both, allowing users to exchange one hour of services given for one hour of services received. As a result of this psychic benefit, the supply of volunteers and people wanting to offer time has exceeded demand ever since Time Banks’ first inception.

Showcase the triple-bottom line. Too often, empathy is looked upon as a “nice to have,” bearing little relationship to personal or economic performance. Across fields, Ashoka Fellows are replacing false dichotomies mired in “either/or” thinking with a triple-bottom line mindset. The result is a growing recognition that students learn best in a safe and emotionally supportive environment; that the best teams in sports are those that are both competitive and cooperative; and that the most effective business practices promote social and environmental benefit in addition to profit.

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

5.0 Results: Metrics & Evaluation= Applied empathy encompasses various skills, making measurement complicated. Ashoka Fellows have devised, however, a number of assessments that measure some of its component parts, and their accompanying outcomes. The tools they use to gather and analyze that data vary widely. Vishal Talreja, for instance, teamed up with two U.K.-based psychologists to develop Dream a Dream’s Life Skills Assessment Tool, which tracks participants’ progress across a series of five distinct categories, including their interpersonal skills and their ability to manage conflict. The team has used it to build a dispersion map, allowing them to look at the highest, lowest, and median scores, in order to devise appropriate interventions for participants of varying levels of need.

By contrast, Jim Thompson of the Positive Coaching Alliance has athletes fill out a Triple Impact Competitor Self-Assessment, in which they rank their performance against a series of statements.

These statements include, “I’m on the lookout for leadership opportunities that help my team achieve its goals,” and “my teammates would say I’m a positive teammate” and one who builds “strong team chemistry.” The process invites continual reflection and personal goal-setting, encouraging participants to take ownership over their own progress.

Whatever the assessment tool, metrics used by Fellows tend to take three forms: 1. Decreased aggression & negative behaviors " Reduced violence and bullying " Decrease in disruptive behaviors " Reduced ethnic and racial tensions 2. Increased pro-social & positive behaviors " Conflict management and resolution " Inclusive behavior & openness to others 3. Improved school culture and performance " Improved morale " Improved learning environment & academic achievement " Reduced injury " Fewer suspensions " Increased attendance As empathy is increasingly recognized as a core skillset in the workplace, Fellows are similarly devising measures of empathy tailored specifically toward business and professional development.

Since 2007, Dialogue in the Dark has conducted more than 300 business workshops in 12 countries, serving more than 4,500 participants. In studies thus far, 75% of participants in these workshops have reported increased self-awareness, improved communication, and greater openness toward others.

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

6.0 – Fellows by Region The following is a geographic snapshot of 275 Fellows around the world whose work delivers a specific insight into the importance of empathy as a critical skill, and the mechanisms for developing it in individuals, schools, and communities. These innovators represent only a fraction of the total number of Fellows for whom empathy plays a key role: indeed, unlike most spheres of innovation, “Empathy Fellows” can be found in every country and every field in which Ashoka works, and grouped largely according to the preceding grid. To read more about each Fellow on the map below, click here.

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative Appendix

Fellow Profiles The following are brief descriptions of the innovations of the Ashoka Fellows featured in Figure 1. They are arranged alphabetically by organization.

Center for Inspired Teaching – Aleta Margolis Aleta Margolis is revitalizing public education by unlocking the personal creativity of teachers and thereby dramatically improving student learning. Center for Inspired Teaching encourages teachers to incorporate spontaneity, critical thinking, and problem solving into their instruction. Aiming to involve their heart, mind, and body, Aleta reengineers the way teachers see themselves and the way they teach. She motivates them to see themselves less as "providers of information" and more as "explorers" in the classroom, professionals who learn just as much as their students through the course of a day. Center for Inspired Teaching has worked with over 5,000 educators from nearly every school in the District of Columbia, improving instruction and student productivity for more than 125,000 students. The organization has also instituted partnerships with over 3dozen schools.!http://www.inspiredteaching.org/ Dialogue in the Dark - Andreas Heinecke Andreas Heinecke is overcoming the barriers between "us" and "them" by creating exchange platforms that immerse people in worlds very different from their own, in order to break down prejudices, to communicate and understand barriers that exist across different cultures, and to empower marginalized people. Andreas’ first and most widespread platform is “Dialogue in the Dark,” where participants experience darkness and blind people teach them how to see. The platform does not inspire pity but instead enables interaction and builds respect, understanding, and even wonder by redefining “disability” as “ability” and “otherness” as “likeness.” Andreas builds in workshops around the experience that train people in companies and schools to deal effectively with people with different abilities. The emphasis is not on the difficulty and the problem, but on the new, often quite superior skills that blind people must develop to function in the sighted world—and how we can learn from them. To date, “Dialogue in the Dark” has reached over 4 million people in 19 countries. http://www.dialogue-se.com/ Dream a Dream - Vishal Talreja Vishal Talreja has built a network of volunteers that offer vulnerable children opportunities to increase their chances for normal childhood development. Vishal’s initiative, Dream A Dream, helps to transform the lives of vulnerable children by offering them a wide spectrum of enrichment opportunities. At the forefront of his effort is a broad network of citizen sector organizations and community-minded businesses, and a large cadre of well-trained and highly effective volunteers. To sensitize the larger community to issues faced by vulnerable children, Vishal and his colleagues create arenas for meaningful exchange between children and volunteers of various backgrounds. Dream Fun Days, for example, are daylong outings that expose children to new and diverse people and environments while encouraging relationship building across social strata. Activities are intentionally designed around themes that naturally lead to the integration of diverse groups. A focus of Vishal’s five-year plan is Dream House, a center that will offer all Dream A Dream services under one roof and provide a volunteer training center and model for the creation of other such centers. Mainstream children will pay for services at Dream House, thereby strengthening its sustainability. http://www.dreamadream.org/

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Engineers Without Borders - Bernard Amadei Bernard Amadei is transforming the field of engineering by revamping the traditional training model and establishing professional standards to integrate the field more closely with global issues such as poverty alleviation, hunger, and disease. By engaging students, professors and professional engineers in an experiential framework, he is trying to shift the field to focus on truly sustainable engineering. The core of Bernard’s work is to offer rigorous, meaningful opportunities to integrate two things: learning engineering skills in an applied context, and changing lives through substantive, sustainable engineering projects in the developing world.

Through the engagement of professors and practitioners, sustainable engineering is spreading and changing the way that the engineering profession is both thinking of and educating itself across the country, causing it to become an even more powerful piece of the solution for some of the world’s most pervasive problems, such as poverty, pollution, hunger and disease. http://www.ewb-usa.org/ Escuela Nueva – Vicky Colbert Victoria (Vicky) Colbert has designed and spread a revolutionary model for rural education in Colombia: Escuela Nueva, or New School. As she continues to push that innovation forward, she is simultaneously developing a new methodology to address the unique educational needs of children displaced by Colombia's armed conflict. Escuela Nueva’s strategy is rooted in focusing on the student, including such aspects as active learning centered on student participation, a new role for the teacher as facilitator of cooperative learning, and interactive self-teaching texts and guides. It also introduced new elements into the curricula that are more applicable to the students' daily lives and families; such elements include mapping the area where they live and learning about the agricultural calendar. Moreover, the learning and teaching materials direct students to share what they learn in school with their families and communities. http://www.escuelanueva.org/ First Nations Child and Family Caring Society - Cindy Blackstock Cindy is changing the mindsets of citizens – including politicians, businesspeople and public servants – toward First Nations populations. In the process, she putting an end to the discriminatory policies and actions toward First Nations children in Canada through a reconciliation process that relies on a combination of truth-telling, acknowledging inequities, restoration and long-term dialogue. Cindy seeks policy change through research that defines the problems First Nations children face from the legal, economic, political, cultural and social perspectives. Cindy’s complaint filed with the Canadian Human Rights Commission alleging that Canada was racially discriminating against First Nations Children has become the most watched tribunal in Canadian history.!http://www.fncfcs.com/home.html Fresh Lifelines for Youth – Christa Gannon Christa is reducing juvenile incarceration and recidivism rates and changing the culture of the juvenile justice system by getting the system to listen to young people and turning it into a place of transformation. Adapting evidence-based best practices in youth development to a previously unconsidered population (juvenile justice youth), she equips this neglected population with a positive, supportive community and the tools they need to imagine and pursue productive futures for themselves. A combination of legal education, mentorship and leadership development helps make the criminal justice system intelligible to these young people and empowers them to shed the “delinquent” label and change their behavior. By presenting a cost-effective alternative to incarceration, and one that has demonstrated a transformative effect on young people, Christa is also showing the juvenile justice system a better option. Fresh Lifelines for Youth (FLY) supports young people in the system to serve as reform consultants to judges, district attorneys, public defenders, and probation officers. This approach both aids leadership development of the youth and shows the system actors how listening to these young people can help them do their jobs better. By serving both young people and the !

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

Genetic Alliance - Sharon Terry Sharon Terry is improving health outcomes for patients who have genetic diseases by aligning incentives and structures so that they facilitate, rather than obstruct, the continuum of research, drug development, treatment, advocacy, and support. She bridges the gap between science and the health needs of society by enabling parents and patients living with genetic conditions, science, government, industry and the citizen sector to collaborate in the development of treatments for rare and neglected genetic diseases. Her goal is to create systems that catalyze communities of scientific excellence, healthcare equity, and effective systems speeding the translation of knowledge gained in the laboratory into medicines. In the process, she unites the genetics community around shared goals and resources, and shifts the tenor (and action) of the community from staid advocacy to proactivity and changemaking. Sharon redefines citizen advocacy in this realm so that patients and their families share in the solution and work together to build a common community, set of practices, and agenda to aid in the development of treatments. http://www.geneticalliance.org/ Genocide Intervention Network - Mark Hanis GI-NET is providing global citizens with the tools to more effectively advocate and fundraise to prevent genocide, thus fulfilling their moral and civic duties as citizens of the world. This represents a significant shift in past practices as it distributes the power to affect change from a concentrated few to a much larger group of citizen activists. Whether “grading” United States members of Congress on their voting records, or encouraging individual and institutional divestment from companies doing business in corrupt regions implicated in the atrocities, GI-NET’s national network has designed a comprehensive strategy that creates roles for citizens at all levels of engagement. GI-NET is an example of how organized citizens can pressure governments, raise resources, and ultimately protect civilians from genocide and mass atrocities wherever they might occur in the world.!http://www.genocideintervention.net/ Girls on the Run - Molly Barker Molly Barker is building a new women’s liberation movement that breaks the cultural stereotypes and barriers preventing girls and young women from living healthy, authentic lives. Girls on the Run aims to increase each girl’s capacity to make positive, healthy choices while at the same time reduce risky behavior among its participants. This intervention at a vulnerable point in a girl’s development can reduce the likelihood of adolescent pregnancy and eating disorders, depression and suicide attempts, as well as substance abuse and encounters with the juvenile justice system. Molly is building a social movement that will provide quality, lifechanging experiences for girls and women; promote positive, healthy images of girls and women; support the development of healthy, resilient girls; ensure that girls and women have the opportunity to develop and express themselves with joy and authenticity; encourage millions of people to change the systems that constrain girls and women; and enable girls and women to reach their highest potential.! http://www.girlsontherun.org/ Health Leads – Rebecca Onie Rebecca Onie is building a movement to break the link between poverty and poor health by mobilizing undergraduate volunteers to provide sustained public health interventions in partnership with urban medical centers, universities, and community organizations. Recognizing that social determinants play a critical role in determining health outcomes, Health Leads enables doctors to write “prescriptions” to meet basic needs, ranging from food, to housing, to job training. Trained volunteers staff desks in hospital and doctors’ office waiting rooms, where they then work with patients to match those prescriptions to existing resources.

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

Interfaith Mediation Centre – James Wuye & Mohammed Ashafa James Wuye, a Christian pastor and Imam Mohammed Ashafa, a Muslim cleric, are working together to end violent clashes between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. Their goal is to achieve peaceful coexistence through inter-faith cooperation and community education. Both believe the only way religious violence can be reduced or stopped in Nigeria is by having leaders of each faith promote religious teachings of peace and nonviolence. Their organization, the Interfaith Mediation Center of the Muslim -Christian Dialogue Forum, deals with the psychology of religious violence and addresses its causes and effects. Wuye and Ashafa are influencing schools, houses of worship, and community centers to prevent violence and intervene when conflicts erupt.

Their education and media outreach strategies have afforded them unprecedented, widespread support and legitimacy for their efforts to promote peaceful coexistence. http://imcnigeria.org/ Interfaith Youth Core – Eboo Patel Dr. Ebrahim “Eboo” Patel is leading the movement to engage young people of various religious identities in the United States in interfaith community service. His work aligns the deeply held principles and shared values of public service, religious freedom, and pluralism to enrich society and reduce the ignorance that has made religiously motivated attacks the second most common form of hate crime today. Eboo founded Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) to bring young people from different faith communities together to work in social action projects, fostering cooperation instead of conflict among youth of diverse religious beliefs. IFYC’s program involves young people around the world as they work on social action projects addressing problems ranging from homelessness and hunger to education. IFYC also encourages young participants to identify values they share with one another and then articulate how their religious traditions speak to those shared values. IFYC is the first organization to use a service learning methodology to engage religiously diverse teenagers and young adults in community service that teaches them to live in understanding and cooperative service to others. www.ifyc.org KaBOOM! – Darell Hammond Darell Hammond has created an effective delivery mechanism to get playgrounds built by bringing together communities and corporate volunteers in underprivileged communities in the United States. In poor communities, the pent-up demand for spaces to play results in young people turning to television or video games, or worse, to gangs and drug abuse. Darell is seizing the historical moment to move beyond playgrounds to institutionalize the "right to play" for every child. His organization has worked to hone a delivery system to build playgrounds in low-income neighborhoods through partnerships with corporations who match costs and volunteers with community resources. As a nonprofit in a for-profit industry, KaBOOM! has remained competitive by introducing a series of services like maintenance manuals and a Playground Institute training conference for community leaders. KaBOOM! is now educating communities so they can independently replicate the KaBOOM model. http://www.kaboom.org/ MEDIACON – Princess Olufemi-Kayode Princess Olufemi-Kayode raises public awareness and seeks institutional support to meet the needs of abused children and to prevent the long-term effects of abuse from seeping into the health, safety, and productivity of Nigerian society. Leveraging her position as a public figure, Princess reaches out nationwide through print and television media to children who may be suffering abuse and to family members at a loss about how to address the problem. Princess capitalizes on the opportunity to not just expose, but begin to treat and solve the issue !

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

New Teacher Center – Ellen Moir Ellen is accelerating new teacher effectiveness--and with it, student learning--by building the world’s first corps of professional education mentors composed of expert teachers. Beginning with a simple premise—that the best teachers of new teachers are expert teachers—Ellen is working to establish a comprehensive Induction program for all new teachers, and to build a corps of professional mentors made up of expert teachers.

Through the Induction program, new teachers receive one-on-one mentoring with highly trained veteran teachers, tailored professional development, and a Formative Assessment System designed to identify specific areas of need in their classroom, and to match those areas with learning goals and teaching tools that can be easily embedded into day-to-day practice. The result leads to increased retention of beginning teachers and improved teacher effectiveness, in turn producing higher student learning and performance outcomes. http://www.newteachercenter.org/ Papilio - Heidrun Mayer Heidrun is changing the face of early childhood development through the teaching of empathetic ethics and emotional literacy in German kindergartens. A central element of her program is the use of storytelling, which is incorporated into the daily routine of the classroom. As an illustration, stories are told with four puppets representing four distinct emotions of anger, sadness, fear and happiness. Evaluation of the program over a two year period revealed a decrease in violent behavior among already aggressive children. To this day, there are 137 trainers of the technique who have trained over 3,200 kindergarten teachers, reaching 58,000 children across Germany. Heidrun is now working to expand her program to children under three years old as well as to elementary schools.!http://www.papilio.de/ Peace First - Eric Dawson Eric is counteracting youth violence by engaging young people in peacemaking and conflict resolution. Peace First works with Pre-K-8 schools to build safe, effective school climates where children learn how to be engaged and active citizens, resulting in a 60 percent reduction in violence in the schools where they work, and a 70-80 percent increase in instances of children breaking up fights. Using a three-tiered approach, they begin by teaching children the skills of conflict resolution and civic engagement. Next, they provide educators with the critical skills and knowledge to integrate social-emotional learning into the school’s curriculum and culture, and finally, they are creating effective social messaging about the power of young people through nationwide partnerships and campaigns. Approaching children as problem-solvers, rather than witnesses or victims of their surroundings, they are equipping a generation of children with the skills they need to be effective peacemakers. http://peacefirst.org/ People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond – Ron Chisom Ron Chisom has developed a method for combating racism and founded the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISB) to teach it to individuals, organizations, and institutions. His teachings became the backbone for the entire field of Undoing Racism and the PISB has become a major source for thousands of grassroots and institutional forays into empowering people without racism limiting their vision and effectiveness. The PISB reconvenes those who have taken its training into campaigns that focus on common goals across multiple communities. For example, in 2004 the PISB organized a “health equity” summit for health care providers interested in better serving grassroots communities. By teaching the framework to both the healthcare providers and organizers in five local communities and working with them in a coordinated way, Ron !

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Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

Playworks - Jill Vialet Jill founded Playworks as a comprehensive program to create safe and inclusive environments for play and physical activity both within and beyond the school day. Through Playworks, she collaborates with school staff to orchestrate lunchtime and recess activities and to reintroduce physical education into the classroom. She develops and coordinates afterschool programs that include homework help, healthy snacks, and organized sports and games. Finally, Playworks runs inclusive interscholastic sports leagues and uses sports to increase family and community involvement in schools. Playworks helps schools break free of the false tension between physical health and academic achievement; its programs drive significant progress in both areas. The program benefits all populations in the school: students come to classes with more energy and excitement; administrators cut down on discipline problems; and teachers learn how to meet state-mandated standards for physical education while having fun with their students. http://www.playworks.org/ Positive Coaching Alliance - Jim Thompson Working against the dominant conception of sports as a sphere for flamboyant and ruthless competition, Jim Thompson re-establishes competitive athletics as a space in which all youth can acquire the skills and values they need for lasting success. Jim Thompson is leading a movement to make character education the primary focus of youth sports without sacrificing competitiveness. In sports he recognizes an unparalleled opportunity for young people to build skills of leadership, communication, and cooperation. Where many others have failed, his Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) has succeeded in crafting practical tools to enable parents and coaches to teach core social values through sport. In their work with the PCA, coaches learn to support respect, reciprocity, and emotional resiliency in their players. Through his large and committed membership base and partnerships with major players in the sports-entertainment industry, Jim achieves a cultural shift by redefining community relationships tosports.!http://www.positivecoach.org/ Riverside School - Kiran Bir Sethi Kiran has developed an innovative educational environment at Riverside School that focuses on “nurturing a spirit of curiosity and…opportunities for exploration in a safe space within the spirit of community.” Riverside offers a curriculum and experiences of engagement with the city that enables children to better understand their skills, potential, and responsibilities as citizens. Kiran is also developing city-wise social intervention initiatives, community quality-of-life programs and after-school programs to provide a wide array of activities (cultural, instructional, and recreational) to synchronize with the regular school curriculum. Children at Riverside - and as part of Kiran’s A Protagonist in every Child (aProCh) campaign - learn how to be protagonists in their environment, to exercise full citizenship, and to find affirmation for their needs and ideas.

Her curriculum in the classroom hones individual potential which, paired with the experience of engaging their city and community, prepares them to become active stakeholders in society. http://schoolriverside.com/ Roots of Empathy - Mary Gordon Mary Gordon's program, Roots of Empathy (ROE), works to reduce childhood aggression by teaching students emotional literacy and fostering the development of empathy. Roots of Empathy makes emotional literacy–the ability to recognize and understand each others' emotions–a core school subject. It brings a living example of the loving relationship between parent and child into the classroom. Targeted to children's varying levels of emotional development, Roots of Empathy provides young people with strategies to effectively recognize and respond to the emotions of others. http://www.rootsofempathy.org/ !

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Search for Common Ground - John Marks John Marks, a former U.S. diplomat and investigative journalist, has pioneered the use of TV and radio soap operas to facilitate peacebuilding and conflict resolution around the world. John’s organization, Search for Common Ground (SFCG), specializes in the use of popular culture to create understanding among ethnic communities and to achieve measurable changes in behaviors and attitudes. In the last twenty-seven years, SFCG has grown to become the world’s biggest citizen-sector, peacebuilding organization. SFCG currently operates programs on the ground in seventeen countries in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. Though SFCG is commonly described as the ‘world’s largest peace-building citizen organization,’ John is focused on spreading its work both in terms of geographic reach as well as product/portfolio expansion. For instance, in 2008, SFCG received a large grant from the Department for International Development—the U.K.’s foreign aid agency—to create separate TV and radio series in ten countries around the themes of conflict resolution and soccer. http://www.sfcg.org/

Ashoka’s Empathy Initiative

TimeBanks USA - Edgar Cahn Edgar Cahn offers a way to combine monetary and service credits so that informal social care networks can grow and flourish across the country. As a result, he has created dynamic, self-sustaining social networks that promote trust, reciprocity, and citizen engagement. The CareBanks program, which has since spread worldwide as Time Banks, was launched as a powerful tool for meeting a range of needs that government benefits and private insurance will not cover In its simplest form, a TimeBank allows its members to earn one Time Dollar for every hour they spend helping others. They can use their Time Dollars to purchase assistance— exchanging an hour of assistance provided for an hour received. Because people earn more service credits than they can use for mutual care, the surplus is “banked” and used for community projects such as energy audits or tutoring. The CareBanks “assurance model” takes the service exchange approach a critical step forward, with important new strategies (e.g., premiums of cash and service) to assure members that they’ll receive help when needed, and to build the capacity to support a broad network of financially sustainable local sites. http://www.timebanks.org/ YouthBuild USA – Dorothy Stoneman Dorothy Stoneman has built an international network of programs that offer disadvantaged youth the opportunity to develop skills, vision, and attitudes to take themselves and their communities out of poverty.

YouthBuild is a youth and community development program that simultaneously addresses core issues facing low-income communities: housing, education, employment, crime prevention, and leadership development. In YouthBuild programs, low-income young people ages 16-24 work toward their GEDs or high school diplomas, learn job skills and serve their communities by building affordable housing, and transform their own lives and roles in society. The work of Stoneman and her colleagues is reaching people that other programs often do not, including tens of thousands of America’s most disenfranchised, poor, and neglected teenagers and young adults, who have enormous intelligence and positive energy to contribute to society once they are engaged.

YouthBuild empowers young people with the inspiration, as well as the technical and emotional skills, to take control despite daunting circumstances in life, leading to remarkable accomplishments. It has been replicated in Canada, Mexico, Central America, South Africa, and Israel, with many other countries interested.! http://www.youthbuild.org/

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