🔬 The Empathy Project: A Research Briefing for Academic and Applied Partners
🔬 The Empathy Project: A Research Briefing for Academic and Applied Partners
What happens when 100,000 employees across a global portfolio of companies spend structured time with people from different cultures, and you can actually measure what changes?
Join us for a 60-minute virtual briefing on The Empathy Project, a six-week corporate volunteering initiative designed from the ground up as a research platform. Employees complete four one-on-one intercultural conversations with vetted global partners, supported by guided reflection and champion-led group sessions. All under strict anonymity and data governance protocols.
The ambition is one million hours of "empathy work" by end of 2026. The research opportunity is what makes that ambition worth pursuing.
🧪 What You'll Learn
The experience architecture: what participants do, how the six-week journey is structured, and why the design choices matter for data quality
The anonymized dataset: what gets collected, at what timepoints, and under what governance rules
Three research lenses already in development: complexity science, behavioral science, and employee volunteering outcomes
Where the open questions are, and what kinds of collaboration we're looking for
How the cross-company design creates a dataset that single-organization studies can't produce
🎙️ Who You'll Hear From
Chris Jarvis · RW Institute · Project design, theory of change, and research governance
Acquaint · The intercultural conversation platform: matching, vetting, and session protocols
Inqli · The reflection environment: structured prompts, social learning, and qualitative data generation
📋 This Is For You If...
You study empathy, prosocial behavior, intergroup contact, or perspective-taking
You work in complexity science, behavioral science, organizational psychology, or employee volunteering
You're interested in large-scale, multi-company field research with real operational data
You want to explore collaboration on measurement design, analysis, or publication
You care about how micro-level empathy interactions propagate through complex social systems
🔍 Research Streams Already Forming
Complexity & Systems · Dr. Kirsten Wright, Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation · How empathy signals propagate through teams and organizations
Behavioral Science · ideas42 · Enrollment nudges, drop-off mitigation, and what drives sustained prosocial behavior
Employee Volunteering & Business Outcomes · Academic partners (in development) · Well-being, performance, retention, and volunteering identity
⏱️ Format
60 minutes · Virtual · Briefing + Q&A
This is an open conversation, not a pitch. We're building the research architecture now and want the right people involved early.
💬 The Short Version
A structured six-week volunteering experience running across dozens of companies, generating anonymized data on empathy, intercultural contact, and behavior change at a scale that doesn't exist yet. We're looking for research partners who want to help ask the right questions.