​September 30 · 60 minutes · Virtual via Zoom

​You're the right person for this if...

​You study empathy, prosocial behavior, intergroup contact, or perspective-taking. You work in complexity science, organizational psychology, behavioral science, or employee volunteering outcomes. And you've bumped into the same limitation most social scientists face: the datasets that would let you study behavior change at real scale don't exist in the right form, or they're locked inside single organizations that can't share them.

​This salon is for you.

​What The Empathy Project is

​The Empathy Project is a six-week corporate volunteering program running across dozens of companies simultaneously. Employees complete four one-on-one intercultural conversations with vetted global partners, supported by guided reflection and champion-led sessions. Research instrumentation is built into the program from the start, not retrofitted.

​What that produces: pre/post measurement across cohorts designed to reach 100,000 participants, cross-company comparison that no single-organization study can generate, qualitative data from guided reflection sessions captured through Inqli, and a natural experiment in what happens when empathy-building interventions run at genuine scale.

​Data governance is strict and non-negotiable. No individual-level data goes to companies. Aggregate reporting only, with minimum cell sizes of 10 to 20 participants. Research partnerships are built on collaboration, not extraction. Access to the dataset comes with co-authorship and publication rights, not just a data transfer agreement.

​Three research streams are 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, retention, performance, and volunteering identity.

​There is room for more.

​How to get involved

​Research partnerships are built around what you want to study. That might mean measurement co-design, access to anonymized datasets after each cohort, co-authorship on publications, or a more formal collaboration with IRB coordination. The September 30 conversation is about finding the overlap between your research interests and what this dataset can actually answer.

​No commitment required. Come curious.

​How this fits the larger picture

​Measurement is what turns a good program into a credible one. Without rigorous, independent research, the Empathy Project is a corporate volunteering initiative making claims it can't support. With it, it becomes a longitudinal, multi-company study of empathy at scale, the kind that establishes whether and how this work actually changes anything.

​The Conversation Partners salon asked partner organizations whether they have people willing to show up on the other end of the call. The Corporate Partners salon asks employers whether they'll send their people. The research question, what actually happens when they do, is what makes both of those conversations worth having.

​This salon is 60 minutes. Come with your research interests and your hard questions. The most useful thing you can do is tell us what you'd want to know.

​About The Empathy Project

​A six-week corporate volunteering program built on structured, cross-cultural one-on-one dialogue. $35 per corporate seat, all-inclusive. Strict participant anonymity. Research-grade measurement. empathy-project.lovable.app

​About the RW Institute

​The RW Institute designs and validates transformative volunteering experiences grounded in behavioral science and intergroup contact theory. For The Empathy Project, RWI leads program design, research governance, and the champion model that makes large-scale rollout possible.

​About Acquaint

​Acquaint is a nonprofit intercultural conversation platform. Acquaint reports facilitating over 15,000 hours of one-on-one cross-cultural conversations since 2021. For The Empathy Project, Acquaint manages conversation partner matching, vetting, scheduling, and platform support. acquaint.org

​About Inqli

​Inqli is the reflection and sense-making environment built into The Empathy Project. Structured prompts and guided social learning help participants turn individual conversations into shared insight, and generate the qualitative data layer that makes the research meaningful. inqli.com