​October 1 · 60 minutes · Virtual via Zoom

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

​You lead or influence employee volunteering, CSR, or social impact strategy. You have distributed or hybrid teams that are genuinely hard to engage. Your champion model depends on a small number of committed internal advocates who are already stretched thin. You've looked at empathy-building programs before and found them either too shallow to matter or too resource-intensive to run.

​This salon is for you. No commitment required. Come curious.

​What you actually get

​Six weeks. Six hours per employee. $35 per seat, all-inclusive, covering the conversation platform, the reflection environment, research measurement, and program coordination. No facilitation staff required. No travel. No scheduling overhead.

​The program runs through Acquaint's conversation platform (matching and sessions) and Inqli's reflection environment (capturing what participants are learning and why it matters). Your champions, meaning internal employees you designate, lead a one-hour brief at the start and a one-hour debrief at the end. That's the full ask on their time.

​The design structurally solves the champion problem. In the CSR programs RW has worked with, teams average around 2.5 FTE per 100,000 employees and need roughly one champion per 40 participants. Those champions are already carrying more than their job description. Programs fail when champions don't show up. Programs scale when champions are embedded and accountable. The Empathy Project makes the brief and debrief a platform requirement, which means champions can't be skipped. Along the way, you learn which of your champions are actually driving change and which aren't. You keep that data.

​Measurement is strict and honest. Individual data never goes to your company. What you see is anonymized, aggregate results with minimum reporting thresholds, grounded in peer-reviewed frameworks and independently validated by our research partners.

​Why now

​Right now it is politically expensive for a company to say the word empathy out loud. Leaders are quietly stepping back from exactly the work their teams keep asking for. The Empathy Project is structured so companies can invest in human connection without political exposure. No public campaigns. No declarative statements. A volunteering experience that does what volunteering is supposed to do.

​Founding companies set the terms. They're also the case study for everyone who signs on after them.

​How this fits the larger picture

​The goal is one million hours of structured empathy work across 100,000 employees by the end of 2027. Five companies have committed. Partner organizations have confirmed they have people ready to serve as conversation partners. Research partners are formalizing their involvement in the measurement design. The supply side is ready. The science is being built. What's needed now is the corporate side. Companies willing to move first, and willing to say so.

​This salon is 60 minutes. No commitment required. Come with your questions. The hard ones are the most useful.

​About The Empathy Project One Million Hours of Empathy is a six-week corporate volunteering program that connects employees with vetted global conversation partners for structured, cross-cultural dialogue. $35 per seat, all-inclusive. Strict 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. Since 2021, Acquaint has facilitated more than 15,000 hours of one-on-one conversations across cultures. 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. Through structured prompts and guided social learning, Inqli helps participants turn individual conversations into lasting insight, and generates the qualitative data the research depends on. inqli.com