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When we strip away our luck and privilege and consider where we'd be without them, it becomes easier to see someone who's poor and sick and say "that could be me." This is empathy; it tears down barriers and opens up new frontiers for optimism. |
Stories on how our students made a positive impact in their communities will be updated soon. Stay tuned!
Jonathan ('16), Hong Kong
Jonathan’s school offers two humanities courses for freshmen: “Humanities I”, a more traditional world history course, and “Humanities in Action”, a service-learning, social conscience course that aims to “break the bubble” of students’ privilege and engage them emotionally with global injustices, ranging from genocide to climate change. Jonathan is concerned that there are few other courses similar to Humanities in Action in the following three years of high school, so many students who have taken the course report feeling “stunted” in the development of their social conscience. Therefore, Jonathan’s Action Plan was to create a continuation of Humanities in Action. He was determined to create an avenue for students to continue developing their social conscience after finishing their freshman year.
After Summer 2016, Jonathan entered his junior year and got in touch with the freshman humanities teacher and other teachers who created “Humanities in Action”. With their encouragement, Jonathan solicited feedback from various teachers, students, and administrators, and created a team of six students who were interested in working on the project as well. Over the course of the year, they met with a range of humanities teachers, gathered more ideas, and assessed which ideas were viable for them to pursue. Eventually, he settled on a goal to create a “Humanities II in Action” course for sophomores, which would serve as a direct successor to its freshman year counterpart., and spent the first five days of summer vacation with his team drafting a curriculum.
Currently, Jonathan is finishing and revising the curriculum, meeting with different humanities teachers for feedback, and making changes accordingly. He will also “pilot” this course during his senior year by taking this course as an independent study, seeing which parts of the curriculum work best and adjusting those that don’t work as well. Should the Humanities Department and the school administration approves it, the course Jonathan designed will be implemented the following year – the year after he graduate, as one of two required humanities courses for all sophomores in his high school.
Dani ('16), Los Angeles, California
After spilling the dark secret that she kept hidden while a middle school student, Dani came to the Brown Leadership Institute to find a way to share the story of her journey back from the edge of a cliff, while providing hope for other teens facing serious depression and considering suicide. An important part of Dani’s own path to hope and healing has been reaching out to help others and sparking conversations to de-stigmatize depression and mental illness.
Through her course on “Leading with Empathy,” Dani designed an action plan to partner with her rabbi and a professional therapist to lead a mental health workshop at a Jewish teen retreat. The workshop revealed that many teens who look “fine” are actually struggling with stories like Dani’s own. Illuminating faces and stories that personalize the statistics in the “teen mental health crisis” being reported widely in the media has proven powerful. Dani has moved onward with empathy from her original Brown Leadership Institute “action plan” to additional workshops for teens and teachers, public speaking (see one of Dani's speeches here), and even publication of her mental health journey in a blog, Confessions from the Edge of a Cliff: My Teen Mental Health Journey
So far, Dani’s message has reached thousands of people and sparked countless conversations.
Laith ('16), New Jersey
Entering the course Leading with Empathy I was unsure what to expect, two weeks later I left the course with an idea in mind and a plan to execute it - thanks to the support exhibited by Xuan throughout my tenure as a Leading with Empathy student. What my idea consisted of and what it still stands as today, as I continue to build upon it, includes something very personal to me, as well as something that is very timely and significant to society today. That is how society often paints Islam in an unfavorable/negative light that has lead to people viewing this peaceful religion as one of great violence. After continuously bearing witness to this bashing of my own religion I could take no more; and I did not, I had the goal to bring awareness to my religion in my town, and that goal has been achieved. Throughout the 2016-2017 school year I was a speaker on three separate occasions to three separate groups throughout my town. In these informative presentations I settled any misconceptions present, I provided the fundamentals of Islam and what the religion is truly based off of, and lastly I ended each presentation not with me challenging the audience to merely be accepting of Islam but to challenge themselves to dig deeper and to not believe all the information you here. However, to inform yourself with facts about all cultures and religions to make an overall more accepting environment wherever you go.
It is with this broad message of acceptingness for all that has lead me to further develop this project and is the reason I founded the Cultural Diversity Club in my High School; in hopes to bring my peers together by learning more about one another's background. Outside of my school I have started to develop a website in hopes to bring this message to an overall wider array of people. My goal is for this website to provide curious individuals with a wealth of information pertaining to several major cultural and religious groups throughout the world and later on allow people to interactively communicate with each other to start a dialogue about religion or cultural differences. My goals moving forward for bringing this outside of my town is to work alongside the Superintendent of Schools to take this initiative to students of surrounding towns to try to influence at least one of them to start a club such as mine in their school. As I continue to progress with this project I can only hope that my message continues to be received as well it has been. It is in thanks to those life changing two weeks of the Leading with Empathy Class that I could take everything I had learned there and now thrust them into the real world, in hopes of changing it for the better.
Jonathan ('16), Hong Kong
Jonathan’s school offers two humanities courses for freshmen: “Humanities I”, a more traditional world history course, and “Humanities in Action”, a service-learning, social conscience course that aims to “break the bubble” of students’ privilege and engage them emotionally with global injustices, ranging from genocide to climate change. Jonathan is concerned that there are few other courses similar to Humanities in Action in the following three years of high school, so many students who have taken the course report feeling “stunted” in the development of their social conscience. Therefore, Jonathan’s Action Plan was to create a continuation of Humanities in Action. He was determined to create an avenue for students to continue developing their social conscience after finishing their freshman year.
After Summer 2016, Jonathan entered his junior year and got in touch with the freshman humanities teacher and other teachers who created “Humanities in Action”. With their encouragement, Jonathan solicited feedback from various teachers, students, and administrators, and created a team of six students who were interested in working on the project as well. Over the course of the year, they met with a range of humanities teachers, gathered more ideas, and assessed which ideas were viable for them to pursue. Eventually, he settled on a goal to create a “Humanities II in Action” course for sophomores, which would serve as a direct successor to its freshman year counterpart., and spent the first five days of summer vacation with his team drafting a curriculum.
Currently, Jonathan is finishing and revising the curriculum, meeting with different humanities teachers for feedback, and making changes accordingly. He will also “pilot” this course during his senior year by taking this course as an independent study, seeing which parts of the curriculum work best and adjusting those that don’t work as well. Should the Humanities Department and the school administration approves it, the course Jonathan designed will be implemented the following year – the year after he graduate, as one of two required humanities courses for all sophomores in his high school.
Dani ('16), Los Angeles, California
After spilling the dark secret that she kept hidden while a middle school student, Dani came to the Brown Leadership Institute to find a way to share the story of her journey back from the edge of a cliff, while providing hope for other teens facing serious depression and considering suicide. An important part of Dani’s own path to hope and healing has been reaching out to help others and sparking conversations to de-stigmatize depression and mental illness.
Through her course on “Leading with Empathy,” Dani designed an action plan to partner with her rabbi and a professional therapist to lead a mental health workshop at a Jewish teen retreat. The workshop revealed that many teens who look “fine” are actually struggling with stories like Dani’s own. Illuminating faces and stories that personalize the statistics in the “teen mental health crisis” being reported widely in the media has proven powerful. Dani has moved onward with empathy from her original Brown Leadership Institute “action plan” to additional workshops for teens and teachers, public speaking (see one of Dani's speeches here), and even publication of her mental health journey in a blog, Confessions from the Edge of a Cliff: My Teen Mental Health Journey
So far, Dani’s message has reached thousands of people and sparked countless conversations.
Laith ('16), New Jersey
Entering the course Leading with Empathy I was unsure what to expect, two weeks later I left the course with an idea in mind and a plan to execute it - thanks to the support exhibited by Xuan throughout my tenure as a Leading with Empathy student. What my idea consisted of and what it still stands as today, as I continue to build upon it, includes something very personal to me, as well as something that is very timely and significant to society today. That is how society often paints Islam in an unfavorable/negative light that has lead to people viewing this peaceful religion as one of great violence. After continuously bearing witness to this bashing of my own religion I could take no more; and I did not, I had the goal to bring awareness to my religion in my town, and that goal has been achieved. Throughout the 2016-2017 school year I was a speaker on three separate occasions to three separate groups throughout my town. In these informative presentations I settled any misconceptions present, I provided the fundamentals of Islam and what the religion is truly based off of, and lastly I ended each presentation not with me challenging the audience to merely be accepting of Islam but to challenge themselves to dig deeper and to not believe all the information you here. However, to inform yourself with facts about all cultures and religions to make an overall more accepting environment wherever you go.
It is with this broad message of acceptingness for all that has lead me to further develop this project and is the reason I founded the Cultural Diversity Club in my High School; in hopes to bring my peers together by learning more about one another's background. Outside of my school I have started to develop a website in hopes to bring this message to an overall wider array of people. My goal is for this website to provide curious individuals with a wealth of information pertaining to several major cultural and religious groups throughout the world and later on allow people to interactively communicate with each other to start a dialogue about religion or cultural differences. My goals moving forward for bringing this outside of my town is to work alongside the Superintendent of Schools to take this initiative to students of surrounding towns to try to influence at least one of them to start a club such as mine in their school. As I continue to progress with this project I can only hope that my message continues to be received as well it has been. It is in thanks to those life changing two weeks of the Leading with Empathy Class that I could take everything I had learned there and now thrust them into the real world, in hopes of changing it for the better.
