tEAm news #60 | 06.10.21 — Empathy Action

As we get into October the weather is changing along with the leaves. Change is all around us both in our organsation and the world in general as we come out of Covid. We are working to adapt and find new ways to deliver our message.

“Everything is change. Embrace that. Flow with it.”

— Ryan Holiday

Dates

Mondays, 9 - 915 (on Zoom) - Moment of Prayer: a moment to pause, prayer, light candles for our work & team. All welcome!
Link here (Meeting ID: 708 452 7633 Passcode: empathy)
Tues 12th Oct, 4.30pm (TBC) - How to run a THL webinar (on Zoom)
Weds 13th October, 7.30pm Eli & the Golem play (part of the TW Puppetry festival that we will be basing our school workshops on).
Little Amal (the giant 9 year old Syrian girl puppet) comes to the UK. She’s in Folkestone on the 19th Oct and then in London (22-25th Oct)
Wed 20 – Fri 22 Oct, Mon 8 – Wed 10 Nov & Fri 12 Nov: Tunbridge Wells Puppetry Festival workshops with Strange Face - Empathy Exercises. (Here’s their flyer)
25th October - Warehouse move date! From Tonbridge to Penshurst. 6 People required. Richard is orchestrating
‘COP 26’ - some of the focus for the Autumn will be around the UN Climate Change ‘Conference of Parties’ (aka ‘COP’) 26th gathering in Glasgow (31st October - 12th November). We are hoping to promote The High Life and take up of this new workshop around this time.
Christmas campaign on The Empathy Store - involving a few new products!

Empathy Exercises Update

Since the beginning of this term a small group - Ben, Heather P & Alison T have been working at developing a set of Empathy Exercises that we can offer to schools, both Primary and Secondary. This builds on our successful day at Brentwood School in June when we trialled a number of these activities, experiences and discussion sessions.

We used some old favourites, Some Tonne None, the Compassion Truth or Dare developed for the International School of Yangon and a couple of new sessions that adapted the following ideas:-

All that we share

Worlds Apart

We are hoping to trial these types of activities with schools later this term to help children ‘ flex their empathy muscles’.

Other News updates

Recruiting Help! Can you help us to identify any groups that we can speak at about our need to find more people? We’re looking for natural links that we have through our team to find people. Could you help by letting us know of 3 groups that you know who would be worth approaching? Thanks and we’d love to be inviting.
Still time to help for the warehouse move on the 25th Oct - can you help. A couple more people might be really helpful. Let Richard know.
How to run The High Life webinar is in production. We’re looking to a host and produce a live zoom event (which we will record) that we can use to help people use the THL simulation. Initially we’re looking at next Tuesday afternoon at 1630. We hope that this will be help more schools be equipped to run a THL independently.
We’re also focusing on a campaign to use THL as an activity on a Friday as part of the Fridays For Future movement. If you know any school who are interested please share!
Ben met with three groups of business students from Activate Learning to invite them to apply to use Empathy Action as their employment placement for the coming year yesterday.
We’re meeting with a student who fled Zimbabwe and came to the UK later today to speak about his story. We hope to work with him to position his openness to share in our TWPF workshops (and hopefully more - he’s keen!) You may recall some of the stories that we shared from Zimbabwe last Christmas with the Meet the Makers (which was among the hardest stories that we’ve written about). As we grow we would like to increase our community of friends who are willing to make themselves vulnerable through such sharing to help increase compassionate action (the student said we need more caring people like some of the people he’s met… 100% agree with this. And some!).