For Empathy Week 2024 Live in-person event, Empathy Action co-wrote an immersive journey, “Empathy Explorers”

BACKGROUND 

Our goal was to allow the students to learn through their empathy muscle about the hopes and aspirations of leaving home whilst meeting the challenges of the freedom of movement and immigration.

‘Empathy Explorers’ is an empathy exercise that takes the students on an imaginative journey to another world, harvesting the richness of ideas, diversity and hope and then have these taken away on impersonal and systemic grounds to help them feel the injustice of a migration system that discriminates on grounds of vocation, money and ethnicity. However, the debrief is designed to allow the story to not end there but continue in conversations with the students and schools to explore hope-building and empathy-inspiring resolves that they can adopt as their choices.

Beneath are a number of suggested resources and facts to help follow up with the conversations with the students.

Please keep us posted on these as this is where the real hope-building happens!

#BuildingTheEmpathyGeneration

Written and produced with the help of UCL Social Hackathon Students, Empathy Week & Empathy Action

  • The Power of a Passport

    EXPLORE The Power of a Passport

    The European passport that currently gets you into the most countries without a visa is the French passport 137 countries

    Singaporean passport holders can travel without a visa to 138 countries.

    UK currently has 129 counties that allow free movement without a visa.

    South African passport holders can enter 67 countries without a visa

    Rwandan passport holders can enter 32 countries without a visa

    Source: Global Passport Power Rank 2024

  • 'Some 20,000 people have been returned this year' - Rishi Sunak

    The prime minister was talking about the number of people who have been returned to other countries from the UK.

    Mr Sunak did not make clear what type of return he was referring to, but the combination of voluntary and enforced returns this year does add up to about 20,000.

    The latest data shows that 5,095 people were forcibly removed from the UK between January and October 2023. A further 15,204 left the country voluntarily in the same period.

    About a fifth of the 20,299 people returned so far in 2023 were Albanians.

    Not all of the 20,000 people returned were failed asylum seekers - some of them were foreign national offenders.

    Source: BBC (Nov 2023)

  • Minimum salary for UK skilled worker visa to increase

    To be eligible for a skilled worker visa to come to the UK, your job offer must meet a minimum salary requirement.

    At the moment this is whichever is highest out of £26,200 per year, £10.75 per hour or the "going rate" for your job.

    From this spring, this will rise to £38,700 per year.

    However, crucially health and care workers - who account for almost half of people on work visas - will be exempt from the increase.

    Source: BBC (Dec 2023)

  • Healthcare surcharge to rise

    The annual fee visa holders must pay to use the NHS - known as the immigration health surcharge - will rise from £624 to £1,035.

    There are some exemptions, for example health and care workers do not have to pay the charge, and there is a reduced rate for students and under-18s.

    Source: BBC (Dec 23)

  • How many migrants come to the UK?

    In the year ending June 2023, 1,180,000 people came to the UK expecting to stay for at least a year, and an estimated 508,000 departed.

    That means net migration - the difference between the number of people arriving and leaving - stood at 672,000.

    In the 2022 calendar year, net migration reached a record 745,000.

    Source: BBC (Nov 23)

  • 5 Days of exercising the empathy muscle with the global refugee crisis

    5 exercises of empathy curated for Refugee Week -from holiday makers, VR films of refugee camps, “why I choose to volunteer?”

    5 Empathy Exercises with refugees

If you are interested in crafting empathy exercises with your groups, check out the Empathy Collective Blogs - each contains an exercise designed to help stretch the empathy muscle

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