Otter.ai Summary

Edwin Rutsch, founder of the Empathy Center, emphasized the need for a shared empathy movement training curriculum to foster mutual empathy and address societal fractures. He highlighted the importance of an open-source, public domain curriculum to complement existing proprietary trainings, facilitating collaboration and public access. Rutsch proposed a curriculum encompassing personal, relational, group, and societal empathy, with modules on defining empathy, overcoming barriers, and specialized applications. He called for a curriculum development team, fundraising efforts, and collaboration among various empathy-based practices to create a cohesive empathy movement.

Outline

Introduction of Edwin Rutsch and Empathy Movement

• Janna Weiss introduces Edwin Rutsch, highlighting his role as the founding director of the empathy center and creator of empathy circles.

• Edwin Rutsch begins by emphasizing the need for an empathy movement training curriculum to transform individual efforts into a broader social and cultural force.

• He stresses the importance of an educational infrastructure to deepen and facilitate empathy in relationships, communities, and public life.

• Edwin mentions the social and emotional fractures in society, including political polarization, war, fear, loneliness, and breakdowns in trust.

The Role of Empathy in Social and Emotional Healing

• Edwin Rutsch discusses the significance of mutual empathy as a foundation for building trust, care, collaboration, and overall well-being.

• He explains that the empathy movement aims to raise the level of empathy and mutual understanding to address societal issues.

• The Summit Series is presented as a platform for building the empathy movement, emphasizing the need for shared language, training, and organizational infrastructure.

• Edwin highlights the existing inspiring people, methods, and initiatives within the empathy movement but calls for a shared educational foundation to support the movement as a whole.

Challenges and Opportunities in Empathy Training

• Edwin Rutsch identifies the issue of proprietary trainings that are behind paywalls, which limits collaboration and public access.

• He advocates for an open-source, public domain empathy movement training curriculum that draws from the best practices of various trainings.

• The proposed curriculum would be a shared resource that could be easily adapted and used by different trainers and facilitators.

• Edwin emphasizes that this curriculum would complement existing trainings and not replace them, aiming to create a foundation for broader collaboration and application.

Components of the Empathy Movement Training Curriculum

• Edwin Rutsch outlines the different levels of the curriculum, starting with personal empathy, relational empathy, group and community empathy, and societal and cultural empathy.

• He mentions potential training modules, such as defining empathy, deepening empathic listening, overcoming barriers to empathy, and specialized applications like conflict resolution and social action.

• The curriculum would also include self-care practices like focusing, which is based on empathy for personal growth.

• Edwin stresses the importance of creating a free entry-level training, like the empathy circle facilitation training, to lower barriers to participation.

Forming a Curriculum Development Team and Fundraising

• Edwin Rutsch calls for the formation of a curriculum development team to collaborate on creating the training curriculum.

• He suggests that fundraising efforts would be facilitated through a collaborative approach, mapping different empathy methods and approaches, and identifying core competencies.

• The curriculum would include different units or training modules that could be piloted and refined to create a comprehensive empathy training program.

• Edwin emphasizes the need for effective collaboration to ensure the curriculum is accessible, practical, and widely applicable.

Expected Outcomes and Invitation to Join the Movement

• Edwin Rutsch outlines the expected outcomes of the training, including easy onboarding, expertise development, and a multiplier effect where participants can teach others.

• The goal is to create a curriculum where everyone can become a trainer, enabling the training of millions of people worldwide.

• Edwin invites trainers, facilitators, curriculum designers, researchers, educators, organizers, and funders to join the effort and contribute to the development of the empathy movement training curriculum.

• He highlights the importance of bringing together different empathy-based organizations and practices to create a shared foundation for the movement.

Conclusion and Call to Action

• Edwin Rutsch summarizes the vision of building an educational empathy commons and training more people to spread empathy practices and strengthen community and democracy.

• He encourages participants to join the project by signing up on the provided URL and contributing ideas, modules, and collaborative efforts.

• Janna Weiss expresses her appreciation for Edwin's vision and the importance of making the empathy curriculum accessible and far-reaching.

• The meeting concludes with a call to action for trainers and organizers to get involved in the initiative and contribute to the empathy movement.

Otter.ai Transcript

Janna Weiss  0:00  

It is really my joy to introduce Edwin Rutsch as our next speaker. And Edwin Rutsch is the founding director of the empathy Center. He created the empathy circles and is the leading organizer in the global empathy movement. Creator, longtime advocate of the empathy circle practice, a simple yet powerful tool for building understanding and bridging divides. And Edwin will share with us today an invitation to co create our shared empathy movement training curriculum.

Edwin Rutsch  0:31  

Thank you. Okay, thank you, Jana and let me do a screen share, bring up my slides. Oops,

Edwin Rutsch  0:53  

Okay, everybody see that we good. So yeah, Hello everyone, and thank you for being here. I want to talk today about something that I believe is important for the empathy movement to grow from a collection of just individual efforts into a real social and political and cultural force, and that is the need for an empathy circle, movement, training curriculum, and if we want to, you know, really make mutual empathy a core personal, social, cultural value. We need more than good intentions. 

We need an educational infrastructure, I believe, and we need a way for people to learn, deepen, facilitate empathy, and bring empathy into relationships, communities and public life. And a lot of the posts I saw here in on the chat just now were really about that. So today I want to share the vision and invitation for how you can help co create the public domain empathy movement training curriculum. So why does this matter? And as part of meta mentioned, we just have all these social problems that are going on. There's a deep social and emotional fracture, and things are really coming apart. The pieces of the puzzle are coming apart, kind of using that metaphor. And so we see political polarization. 

You know, there's war. We have war in Iran and many other places right now. We have fear, loneliness, depression, alienation, general breakdown in trust between people and people just don't are having difficulty just learning how to speak to each other, and are not truly, really listening to one another as deeply as we could. And when people don't feel heard and seen or understood, you know, fear tends to grow and divisiveness and you know, and all the kind of negative dysfunction, defensiveness and dehumanization grows.

 So I believe it's been mentioned in this summit so far that it's really mutual empathy, the capacity to hear and be heard and to understand as a foundation and the core value of how we get out of this mess and really put things back together again in an effective way. And to do that, we need an empathy movement. And that's what we're trying to build here in this summit, is a movement to raise a level of empathy and and that mutual empathy is really the fact, you know, the core of, you know, building trust, the care, collaboration, and just a whole series of well being and constructive human values come out of that. 

But the question is, you know, how do we build that empathy movement? And that's what this Summit Series is really about, is how do we go about building that movement? And so what I want to talk about is that, you know, every movement needs infrastructure and organization, and it needs it's helpful to have a shared language and training to and it needs a way for new people to enter, you know, to get involved in this empathy Summit is a way for people to join the movement. And right now, the empathy movement has a lot of inspiring people and methods and initiatives that are going on. 

They're really great. A lot of people are working on on that and but if we really want to grow the movement and make it scale and from a bunch of different being disjointed, you know, people just working on their own projects, I think we need a shared educational foundation that sort supports the movement as a whole. And if we can sort of have this, this foundation. I think it'll build, you know, just better way to pass on practices and develop leaders and, you know, bring people on board. And this is why I believe, you know, the next step for the movement is to co create a shared training curriculum.

Edwin Rutsch  5:18  

The current problem with with trainings is that many of the trainings are proprietary, you know, they're behind the pay wall. And that's really understandable, because, you know, people need have put in years of work and developing their trainings and approaches, and they need an income and a livelihood. So, you know, you got to get paid for that. But a movement, but from a movement building perspective, I think this creates a problem.

 And when the all these different trainings are sort of isolated from one another, collaboration becomes harder, and public access is is limited, and to really spread the in the practice and empathy practices, I would say, are slowed down so the movement can't grow as quickly as it possibly could. And so the issue is not the existing trainings are bad, you know, they're really excellent, but the issue is that we, we don't have a open source, public, shared movement curriculum, that services are common ground. And that's really what I'm, you know, wanting to advocate for 

So the opportunity is that we can create that open source, public domain empathy movement training curriculum, and by that, I mean a shared curriculum that draws from the best from all the different practices, and, you know, that makes that available in a form that can be easily used and adapted.

Is, you know, it's like an open source project, and it wouldn't replace the existing trainings or work of all the individual trainers, but just be adding to it. And, you know, building, I think, a foundation that others could tap into. And it would also create this educational comment comments. And think it would help people learn to enter the field, you know, learn practices and and build from there. And would make empathy education more available and wider publicly available. There is someone that has that is not muted, if you could mute, appreciate that. So a foundation already exists. That's the good news. We already have a strong foundation with the active listening practice, you know. 

Thank you, Carl Rogers for having developed that. And we also have the empathy circle practice, which I think is a very powerful practice that builds on that. And we also have the, have a 10 hour empathy circle facilitation training, thanks to Bill filler, who is here, and to Lou Swire for initiating that. And that gives us a, really, a base from which a broader curriculum can grow. And so the task is not to, you know, reinvent everything from scratch. The task is to build what already on, what already works, and inviting wider collaboration and broader application, what the curriculum could include. You know, it's just different levels, I think. You know, there's a personal level of, you know, self empathy, emotional support, healing and, you know, personal growth. 

We've got a relational aspects of empathy, you know, just how to have healthier friendships, romantic and family relationships, and then group and community, where we bring empathy into, you know, different communities, like schools, you know, work, religious institutions, community institutions, and then also societal and cultural so we can do political healing and bridge, you know, social political divides, and for a democratic community building, and also for creativity and innovation. Like through the there's a lot of practices that use empathy as gateway to innovation, creativity and innovation, like human centered design. So some possible training modules and topics it would be. 

One is defining empathy, you know, grounding the definition in actual practice of the empathy circle. And I've done a talk on that, and I'm also working on a training module for that, just so that we can have sort of a framework for discussing, you know, what are we really talking about when we talk about empathy, there's a lot of people using the words differently, and then there's advanced skills, you know, deepening empathic listening and listen and speaking more empathically. 

There's overcoming barriers, you know, model modules, maybe on blocks to empathy. There's, you know, so many blocks, and you know, talking about that and responding to the criticisms of empathy that was brought up in the summit today. To some of the critics that have been writing books negative about empathy and needing to address those, and also specialized applications empathy for

Edwin Rutsch  10:14  

conflict resolution. We have lute Swire in our team. He's been working on that and empathic social action, citizens assemblies. These are other. Empathy is sort of a gateway to these different practices and self care practices like focusing, which is a technique that based on empathy for self empathy, basically so access and livelihood. So the idea is to have a free entry level for the for the training. We have that with the empathy circle, facilitation training. So we're really trying to lower the barriers to participation, but also these other training modules that are pathways for facilitator development and also generate an income for trainers, because we really want to create a, you know, a healthy ecosystem where people can enter the empathy movement, 

You know, get, have easy entry, but then learn these skills and can spread the skills more widely and to, you know, how do we build that? First we need to form a curriculum development team, and we have, you know, I put a link in for our sign up page for that. And then I think if we're working in a collaborative effort, it would help us get do fundraising too, for creating the curriculum. And then we would want to map different empathy, you know, methods and approaches that are out there, and there's many of them, which I'll mention in a few minutes, and then identify the core competencies, you know, what is really the skills and the mindset and that you need to develop that empathic way of being, develop different units or training modules, and then pilot and refine those, you know, test them out and and then create a whole empathy. 

You know, training collaborative sort of a project and an ecosystem for good. You know, effective collaboration, some of the expected outcomes of the training is, first, is that it's easy to for people to get onboarded. You know, it's easy to get involved. And there's a, you know, it's a fun, easy path to, you know, grasp the core concepts. There's the expertise development that we have, you know, step by step ladder of training to, you know, from beginner to master, and that the we can have the multiplier effect, and we do that with the empathy circle training, that you learn the practice, and then you can go out and teach, teach others. 

So we want, really, a curriculum where everyone can become a trainer. So we can train the 1 billion or 8 billion, you know, people in the world you know how to raise a level of empathy and sort of build that shared learning journey. You know that strengthens when people learn together. I think it really strengthens bonds and connections with people. 

So the invitation is so I want to invite you know, trainers and facilitators, curriculum designers and researchers, educators and organizers in general. You know, anyone wanting to build the movement, and especially funders you know, to join this this effort and to help us identify the key modules you know, develop the learning pathways and help us and collaborate on to create something that can serve the movement and the wider public.

Edwin Rutsch  14:12  

And what we want to do also is bring together what I would call the empathy tribes. There's a lot of different organizations and practices that are really empathy based, and it's sort of tapping into all of those. 

And, you know, seeing if we can create a framework for working together, maybe on this curriculum, for example, active listening, and which is developed by Rogers. And you know, he created the person centered approach community. There's the whole community for that. There's all kinds of therapeutic processes, like based on empathy, motivational interviewing, for example. And we have the whole academia community, academic community, who has a lot of different practices and research they're doing. There's process. 

This is like focusing, which is also sort of a therapeutic practice, but is very empathy based. Nonviolent Communication is another conflict mediation, you know, internal family systems, empathy circles, human centered design, which I mentioned, people's assemblies, which is taking empathy into politics and policy development and restorative justice, dynamic facilitation. There's so many other practices that you know really people are part of, really the empathy tribe. So let's move the empathy movement from, you know, scattered efforts to shared foundation. You know, this is just in summary. 

We can build the educational empathy Commons and and, you know, start training more people. And we have, in the summit, we have several trainers too, which is really great to have you taking part here, and to spread the empathy practices and strengthen community and democracy and to really make mutual empathy a core cultural value. So that's what we're really talking about here. And to join this project, I did put the link in. You can go to that URL and add your name to the list, and we can start contributing ideas, modules and and maybe even hold the summit on, you know, specifically, this topic, and so inviting you to work together to build the movement. 

And as you notice, it's the puzzle. Was a theme that we're putting together the puzzle, and you're part of that missing piece of the puzzle for creating, for creating the the movement. So that's it, you know, I hope, I hope to you feel a little bit inspired, if you're a trainer, to get involved, and even if you're not, you can, you know, be an organizer, you know, find some some role in this initiative, which is, you know, we'll be working on over the next couple of years. So that's it, and I'll bring you back at spotlight. Jenna, so thank you very much.

Janna Weiss  17:20  

Thank you so much. Edwin, I think the puzzle metaphor works. I was really struck by how across that canyon, that ridge, you know, where the two sides are separate, each side is holding pieces to the puzzle and part of the solution. So that really brought home. And thank you for your vision, for creating an empathy curriculum, and for working on that, and for inviting everyone to join, and for thinking how to make it accessible and as far reaching as possible. Thank you.