The Empathy Archive is committed to working for and with youth to help create educational tools for the expression of youth voices and experiences in a way that supports self-determination and creates the opportunity for young people to share their own experiences as a form of empowerment for social change through educational dialogue.
By providing a structured platform for education on discrimination, The Empathy Archive aims to have a direct impact on the public conversation on racial and sexual inequality in the United States.
The Empathy Archive centers the voices of youth in the US to empower these communities.
We employ a strategy of ethnographic archiving that allows young people collect and share experiences of racial and sexual discrimination from within their own communities. This strategy allows for young people to interrogate the experiences and issues that have informed their own identities while creating a dialogue between communities on timely issues that continue to impact our society.
The Empathy Archive’s mission is to create spaces for meaningful dialogue around racial and sexual discrimination within the classroom to help young people from all backgrounds understand that racial and sexual discrimination lowers the quality of life for all.
The vision of The Empathy Archive is that young people take a leading role in determining the shape of the contemporary institutions that inform their lives.
The Empathy Archive aims to create safe and productive classroom spaces for the development of empathy through dialogue and education. It provides access to an always growing database of first-person narratives on youth experience with issues such as racial and ethnic discrimination, “coming out”, and police brutality, among others.
The Empathy Archive provides sample lesson plans and tutorials so that educators from all backgrounds can expertly facilitate conversations on discrimination and incorporate professionally collected narratives and oral histories into their current curriculum and lesson plans for full control of implementation.
The ever-expanding archive is a learning tool that can be applied to all existing social science, humanities, ethnic studies, and writing courses. It can also be utilized by smaller educational institutions, community groups, and individual researchers.
The Empathy Archive utilizes a social science approach to create a platform that is specifically designed for engaging youth and creates an interactive user community that enhances the archive the more educators and students use it.
The Empathy Archive creates a safe space for trauma relief and dialogue without singling out specific individuals in the classroom, thereby avoiding the trauma associated with first person storytelling and becoming an “example” for the benefit of others.
The Empathy Archive offers an interactive digital platform with unique content for addressing social and emotional learning and education about racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination through a low cost and easy to use platform that is easily integrated into the classroom environment.