Compassion revolution
#10 | 9/3/23
“If you have the choice between being right and being kind, choose being kind”
Compassion seems to be tired
The term ‘compassion fatigue’ is used a lot by charities ascribing this as being the reason for the decline in their support.
Compassion in a time starved age
Equally our ‘time-poverty’ amplifies our demand for brevity, as we seek bite size ways to understand huge, complicated issues. Charities respond by condensing complex issues into 140 characters, tik-toks, reels or memes and nuance is lost. This leaves us all somewhat tired by numerous ‘short’ messages in an age of mass information.
Many feel we have lost our ability to deeply listen and fully understand despite having something of a desire and vision to respond to the issues. It seems that unless it’s an ‘action’ movie style presentation, we don’t mobilise.
Perhaps what is tiring, is not compassion, but rather the same old, same old presentations and expectations of how we perceive it. This, indeed, is tiring.
Compassion Revolution? A time to grow the Social Innovators
In our experience, we believe and would advocate that compassion is alive and thriving. It is evolving and in our culture of mass information we would be wise to explore innovating older ‘social technologies’ rather than simply re-hashing them.
Compassion is not static but in-motion.
We’ll let you into a little secret (from our point of view) these innovators are not the charities… but they are people who ‘care’ deeply about these issues… these people have had an empathy moment and have been in or found an environment that allows them to innovate, with others, and find opportunities to act. Some of the social innovators work in charities and some are yet to set them up! They are people, like you, who care… and care a lot… let’s not get in their way… viva la revolution!
We ran a ‘Social Hackathon’ for 15 UCL students looking to design and test newer immersive empathy exercises for issues. We explored 4 issues of climate justice, cost of living, modern day slavery and homelessness.
The newer ‘Empathy Consultancy’ arm of our work has just put a concept note for funders about a new immersive workshop concept on rehabilitation of former child soldiers.
Several years ago we ran a Poverty Trap in N Devon at Braunton Academy (see pic beneath). We’ve been back visiting the area to re-connect with the schools and groups to see whether there’s scope to comeback.
What we are watching, listening, reading, attending…
"If people coming out of Calais are legitimate refugees why aren't they claiming asylum in France, Italy, Spain or Greece?"
Zoe Gardiner’s answer:
Zoe also explains Gray Lineker’s tweet saga beautifully here
Other reads, clips, podcasts, events, films from around the team
Where Desperate Journeys meets The High Life … a thought provoking article in the Guardian entitled: Think Sunak’s anti-refugee stance is bad? Just wait till the climate crisis truly ravages poorer countries
As we continually look at crafting ‘Empathy’ moments, ‘The Power of Moments’ - by Chip Heath & Dan Heath has been a great read about crafting what they call ‘peak moments’.
How to Fail podcast with Mo Gawdat on dealing with stress… Mo was one of our Claire’s fav interviewees
Last week was ‘Empathy Week’, some phenomenal content and there’s some of these here
Good news for the planet where countries take action: how Nepal regenerated its forests also check out this NYT article.
Giving Voice to Values podcast - Mary Gentile:
Johnathan Pryce reads ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire:
training your empathy muscle
If a stranger needed help, how long would it take you to help?
According to psychologist the answer to that question may depend less on who you are as a person and more on how many people are around you at that time.
This month’s exercise is understanding the roadblocks to you and you showing your empathy.
5 ways to help us…
Volunteer - we really need a bunch of regular helpers (eg a few hours or more(!) a week or for our immersive workshops from time to time).
Share the news! - please forward, share any social media posts. Ta!
Spread the word! - we’d value an intro… to any potential vols, customers or even clients! Word of mouth is the best!
Become an Empathy Angel - this year we are looking for 100 ‘Empathy Angels’ to help invest into us as we reboot empathy action to build a ‘Culture of Empathy’. Could you spare us the price of a cuppa (£2.50) a week… We can’t and don’t want to do this alone!
Host a coffee morning with a table of our handicrafts to sell and invite interested people to learn more and enjoy a cuppa
Thank you!