2. Project Description 
 

Provide an overall description of the project.

East Bay Stories of Empathy

This project is an exploration, through story-telling, of the human capacity for empathy – a social value that is fundamental to achieving the California Council for the Humanities’ goal of ‘fostering understanding’ and ‘breaking down barriers’ between people. In this project we make use of the transformative experience of story-telling and coordinated forms of artistic expression to create a greater awareness of empathy, with the goal of fostering a deeper sense of connection and inclusivity among citizens of the East Bay.

President Obama has repeatedly spoken about the need for more empathy in our society. He said, "I often say we've got a budget deficit that's important, we've got a trade deficit that's critical, but what I worry about most is our empathy deficit. When I speak to students, I tell them that one of the most important things we can do is to look through somebody else's eyes."
(See Video: Obama on Empathy  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6504935098489252112)

This project is founded on President Obama’s premise that “our empathy deficit” – that is, the widespread, socially acceptable and socially accepted lack of empathy – causes rifts and conflict within our society.  An inability or unwillingness to empathize with others may be expressed as selfishness, indifference, greed or violence. It can collapse economies, divide communities, and fuel wars.  The people developing this project agree with our president that we have a national, state and local imperative to break down barriers and connect with each other, so that we can deal with the enormous challenges facing our families and communities at this critical juncture in our shared history. The purpose of this project is reduce our society’s empathy deficit by collecting and then sharing stories about the place of empathy in the lives of ordinary citizens – citizens whose backgrounds may be wildly diverse, but who share a common humanity and a common citizenry. The project’s strategy is to draw out participants’ stories by asking them simple questions:  What is empathy? What does it feel like? How does it work? What is its opposite? When have I felt empathy for or from someone? The East Bay Stories of Empathy Project will seek out, document, and then give back to the community a set of unique answers to these and other questions.  In this project, participants will grapple with these questions by telling their unique personal stories in the contexts of videotaped interviews, workshops, and coordinated works of art. They will explore when and how they have managed to be empathic, or have experienced empathy expressed toward them, or when they have been unable to feel empathic toward another person, or have felt that lack expressed toward them. We will invite a diverse group of people, of ages, genders, ethnicities, religions, and political persuasions, to share with us stories that reveal the nature of empathy. Then we will return these stories to the people of Richmond and the East Bay through a public event that brings empathy and art into contact with broader issues of social responsibility and inclusivity, giving local relevance to our new president’s vision of a society no longer burdened by an ‘empathy deficit’.

The Importance of Story Telling

By hearing, telling, and sharing stories about empathy, this project explores this value from various angles. Moreover, we know that telling and listening to stories about empathy is a powerful way for citizens to learn to empathize, to further develop this capacity in themselves.  President Obama has pointed out the importance of storytelling, listening and reading in cultivating empathy; he has said, "The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. We are in great need of people being able to stand in somebody else's shoes and see the world through their eyes. And the great power of books is the capacity to take you out of yourself and put you somewhere else. And to suddenly say, "Oh, this is what it's like" – maybe not perfectly – but it gives you some glimpse of "This is what it is like to be a woman", or "This is what it is like to be an African-American". Or "This is what it is like to be impoverished in India". Or "This is what it's like to be in the midst of war". And so much of what binds us together in society and allows it to function effectively depends on it. And so much of what is wrong with how we interact, and so much of what is wrong with our politics has to do with the absence of that quality." (See Video: Obama on Empathy)  The goal of our project is to gather and then give back to our fellow citizens in Richmond and the East Bay some of their own unique glimpses into what it would be like to stand in their own neighbors’ shoes, so that our local politics might function more effectively through the power of empathy.

The five phases of the East Bay Stories of Empathy Project

The East Bay Stories of Empathy project has five basic phases. It is modeled on a previous art and video project on the theme of inspiration, created and implemented by the project’s director Edwin Rutsch and assistant director Joan Kuenz. In that project, 45 members of The Art of Living Black (TAOLB) annual art exhibit participated in a series of interview workshops to tell their personal stories about the nature of inspiration. We will expand on this model for the East Bay Stories of Empathy project.
(See Website:  'Inspiration and TAOLB  http://humanityquest.com/themes/inspiration/TAOLB/).

Phase 1. Outreach and Volunteers
In Phase 1 (April to August, 2009), the project’s volunteer staff will approach a variety of local community organizations to ask them to participate in this project and join with us in our efforts to address the empathy deficit. We will contact governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, artistic groups, businesses, social groups and religious organizations. We will begin by doing casual 15-20 minute videotaped interviews with the organization’s leaders and ask them for their stories and insights: how have they personally experienced empathy? how has it informed the work of their organization? how has its absence impeded their work? This first step will create a personal connection between our project and the leaders of the organizations. In addition, in this way we model the establishment of empathic connections.  Subsequently, the interviewees will be able to see their own interviews online, as well as those of the other leaders of local organizations.  We will share our connections with the NPA program and vice versa.  So far, the growing list of collaborative partners includes: Richmond Arts and Culture Division, Richmond Arts and Culture Commission, NPA, Richmond Art Center, City of Richmond, ArtsChange, California College of the Arts - Center for Art and Public Life, RYSE Youth Center, Pinole Middle School and The Art of Living Black (TAOLB). We anticipate another 10 to 20 organizations will become involved.

Our second step will be to ask each leader if they are willing to involve their organization’s membership in our project.  We hope, in this way, to draw on the membership of these diverse organizations as participants in our Interview Workshops.  The RAC and the Richmond Arts and Culture Division are connected to all sectors of the community, and have expressed excitement about introducing us to a wide variety of local leaders; in fact, they have already begun to do so. 

In addition to the Project Personnel described below, the project currently has nine core volunteers; the tasks they have volunteered for are also listed in the Personnel Section. During this phase, we will continue to reach out and recruit more volunteers through word of mouth and postings on local email lists.

Phase 2.  Interview Workshops
Having established connections with community organizations and recruited our key volunteers, in Phase 2 (August to November, 2009) we will shift our methodology and record people’s stories of empathy in a series of arts-based video interview workshops. From the recommendations offered by the diverse population of community leaders and organizations, we will choose 10 young people and 30 adults to participate in four separate workshops; this breaks down to one group of 10 youths, and 3 groups of 10 adults each. (We will run these workshops using accepted methods for obtaining ‘Informed Consent’)  Through the use of a variety of arts activities, suggested questions, and peer conversations, we will facilate each participant’s telling of their own story. In the end we will have a visually rich, two to five minute story from each participant. We have used this interview workshop process extensively in the past with significant success; documentation on our previous work is available at:
(Video: About Interview Workshop Process  http://youtube.com/watch?v=1IF-Kq_rkyQ)

Phase 3. Post Production
During Phase 3 (December, 2009 to April, 2010) we will review and evaluate all the video footage, then edit the 40 stories to be placed on the internet, and finally create a 30 minute video crafted from the most compelling stories.  Raw video, artwork, photos, and B-roll will all be digitized onto a computer and edited into final stories. The final videos will be converted and uploaded to the internet where they can be publicly viewed. The video will be placed onto a DVD so that it can be projected or viewed on TVs.

Phase 4. Final Art Exhibit and Presentation
In Phase 4, (April – June, 2010) in the RAC galleries we will exhibit the body of artwork created during the interview process and show the completed East Bay Stories of Empathy video. The exhibit and showing will be followed by an open community discussion on empathy and citizenship.

Phase 5. Follow-Up
In Phase 5, four months after project completion, we will host a reunion party at the RAC and tape short interviews of participants and other community members for a summation of their experience.
(See Video: Artists Feedback Workshop  http://youtube.com/watch?v=QZQJABxqBoQ)

We anticipate scheduling numerous other exhibitions and showings of East Bay Stories of Empathy in locations in and around the East Bay in 2010; we hope to build momentum locally in 2010 so that we will subsequently find an even broader audience for this exhibit and video in other parts of California and the USA.

Deliverables
In the end we will have created a body of work that looks at empathy from many points of view and demonstrates the relevance of empathy to the cultural life of Richmond and beyond. Some of the tangible products created by the project will be:

• 30 Minute video: East Bay Stories of Empathy

• 40 edited personal stories from 2 to 5 minutes in length

• A large series of short interviews about empathy

• Stories of Empathy website

• Youtube Empathy Stories Channel

• Art exhibit

• Public presentation of video with community participation

• A documented and replicable model of the project

• Final report for the California Story Fund

Community: Describe the community in which this project takes place.
Stories: Tell us whose stories will be told and/or interpreted and why.

The epicenter of our project is Richmond, California. The 2000 census shows Richmond to be a culturally, economically and racially diverse city. The racial makeup of the city in 2000 was: Black or African American 36%, Hispanic or Latino 27%, White 21%, Asian 12%, 2 or more races 3%, Other 1%.  This gives us a rich source of diversity on which to draw and we will reach out to the various communities and neighborhoods in Richmond for participants in our interview workshops.  Our outreach activities in Richmond will lead us to connections in the East Bay more generally. In addition, the project’s personnel and core volunteers bring to this project a parallel set of connections in their home communities, neighborhoods, and social organizations. Finally, the project’s Youth Workshops will be based at Portola Middle School, which is in El Cerrito, CA, adjacent to Richmond.

Our criteria will be to select a cross section of people to take part and tell their stories. To involve the youth, we will host an interview workshop with 10 students at the Portola Middle School. For the adults, we will select participants from the various organizations that we partner with. We believe that by having a diverse group of storytellers that it will show that empathy goes beyond identities and is a universal human value that arises out of our common humanity.

In Phase 1, participants will be self-selecting, simply based on their willingness to talk to us and participate in casual interviews. We anticipate gathering a very large body of short, relatively unstructured interviews on empathy in this phase. In Phase 2, we will select participants for the Interview Workshops in a manner that maximizes the diversity of participants, in terms of age, race, cultural background, socioeconomic class, and community of residence, so that our storytellers themselves will experience their common humanity through empathy across apparent divides of difference.

Methods: Describe the methods and process you will use to identify, select and present the stories.

The stories that compose the East Bay Stories of Empathy will emerge from the series of four interview workshops to be held in Phase 2.  The design and activities of these interview workshops, and the creation and presentation of the videos, will be guided by ongoing collaboration, discussion and interaction among Edwin Rutsch (project director/filmmaker), Michele Seville (fiscal sponsor manager), Joan Kuenz (assistant director & workshop facilitator), Susan Wehrle (youth workshop facilitator), Sanjit Sethi (academic advisor) and volunteers. This happens through weekly meetings with the core group of Edwin, Joan and volunteers, and bi-weekly meetings of the project director and Michele. Meetings with the NPA project manager, Susan and advisor will be held as needed to advance the project.

The workshops will take place at the RAC and Portola Middle School. Storytelling will be prompted through a series of art activities including pictorial brainstorming, drawing, writing, acting, photo collection, discussion and reflection, etc. The workshops will begin with a discussion of the meaning of empathy, metaphor creation, pictorial brainstorming and writing exercises. The activities all lead to the recall, sharing and illustrating of a personal story. We will follow wherever the participants’ creativity leads. We will see many aspects and sides of the nature of empathy. All workshop curriculums and video clips will be posted to the website to be viewed and discussed as they appear.

Presenting the Stories. The material gathered in the workshops will be edited into visually rich 2 to 5 minute stories. These will be posted on our Empathy Stories YouTube Channel. We will use appropriate procedures for informed consent with all participants, and all participants will have veto power over the showing of their own material.

The final 30 minute video will be developed by selecting the most compelling stories we have gathered, that is, the ones that best serve the overall narrative by shedding the most insight on empathy and conveying the deepest emotional essence of the experience of empathy. We will prioritize including stories that convey the storyteller’s moment of recognition of the role of empathy – or its lack – in their personal experience. In this way, we hope to stimulate our project’s audience to share these moments of recognition and the emotions that go with them, and thus, as a result, experience empathy through the viewing of our video. Our project is not only ‘about’ empathy – if successful, it will itself be a vehicle for empathy.

Role of the humanities: Explain how the humanities will inform your project, and what role the humanities advisor will play in the project.

Our project is founded on interests that are key to the humanities: it explores the history, thoughts, experiences, practical philosophies, and emotions of it participants as these relate to the project’s theme of empathy; and then it will present this exploration to the public with the goal of stimulating discussion of and engagement with this theme. By documenting and disseminating a set of related forms of participants’ expression, including storytelling and visual media, this project explores the ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity that defines the East Bay; and it documents thematic aspects of the oral histories of its participants that are key to their lives, activities and choices as citizens of their communities and our shared nation.

The academic advisor will provide suggestions and commentary on the design of the overall project, interview workshops (questions and art activities) and the final documentary narrative. Our advisor, Sanjit Sethi, is Co-Director of the Center for Art and Public Life - California College of the Arts (CCA).  "The Center's mission is to create community partnerships based on creative practice that serve the college and the diverse population of Oakland, San Francisco, and beyond. Our programming is woven across disciplines into the structure of the college and delivered through a variety of academic, professional, extracurricular, and experimental approaches. The Center focuses on important issues in community development, service learning in arts education, new models of practice in community-based arts, and cultural diversity and youth development through the arts."  Sanjit is working on an NPA project with his students, through the Richmond Arts and Culture Division together with the Ryse Youth Center located in Richmond.  The project’s goal is to examine the effects of community trauma; it explores the ways that art and design can be used to assist communities in coping with those experiences. There will be ongoing cross pollination between this and the East Bay Stories of Empathy project. Community trauma is one unambiguous example of the empathy deficit.  Sanjit will also connect us to the resources and community of CCA as we provide opportunities for the expression of empathy through storytelling and the arts.

Goals: Tell us the goals of your project and how you will measure your success in achieving them.

Our broadest goal is to reduce our nation’s “empathy deficit” (see Overall Description of Project above) by promoting public discourse and raising awareness of the value of empathy in our society through storytelling.  By helping to break down barriers and connecting people with each other, we hope to create a more inclusive community in the diverse city of Richmond, California, in the East Bay more generally, and beyond.

Specifically, our project’s concrete goals are:

1. To collect as many short, informal interviews on empathy as we can during Phase 1, which will form a thematic base for the Interview Workshops in Phase 2, and make these interviews available via our project’s website and the Empathy Stories YouTube Channel. We aim to collect 20 to 40 short interviews in Phase 1.

2. To hold 4 Interview Workshops (one with 10 youths and three with 10 adults each) in which we video record a diverse set of participants sharing their personal stories of empathy. These videos will also be made available via our project’s website and the Empathy Stories YouTube Channel; in addition a selection of the most compelling excerpts from these video recordings will be edited, compiled, and produced as a 30-minute video entitled East Bay Stories of Empathy.

3. To hold an art showing and video premiere, followed by an open discussion, in May of 2010, at the Richmond Arts Center.

4. To show the video East Bay Stories of Empathy and its companion art exhibit in as many locations in the East Bay as possible between June and December, 2010.

5. To show the video East Bay Stories of Empathy and its companion art exhibit in as many locations outside of the East Bay as possible in 2011 and beyond.

Quantitative Success

In Phase 1, we will measure our success in terms of the number of casual interviews we are able to obtain video record and post online.

In Phase 2, we will measure our success in terms of the number of participants we are able to recruit for our Interview Workshops.

In Phase 4, we will measure our success in terms of the number of attendees at our video premier and art exhibit, as well as the number of subsequent showings we are able to schedule as a result of our first public event.

Four months after completing the project, we will hold a follow-up party for all participants. After they have had time to reflect on the experience, we will tape short interviews and ask for their impressions of the project. We will ask if any change has taken place in their life because of this project. This will be an important measure of success in terms of the lasting impact our project has, or has not, made on participants’ daily lives.

To measure the overall success of our project in generating interest in the theme of empathy, we will keep track of the hits the videos receive on the Empathy Stories Channel; we will evaluate the level and kinds of discussion that take place on the online discussion group; we will document the size of the audience at the initial video premier and art exhibit, as well as at future showings; and we will document what and how much media coverage our project generates. In addition, as we develop this project, we will create a reproducible model program, documented on the internet, which other communities can use for similar project and we will keep track if and when others use our program model and template.

Anecdotal Success - Making a Big Splash
Anecdotal success is like throwing a pebble into the still pond and seeing the waves move out. The size and reach of the ripples are a measure of success. Just the process of developing this grant proposal has been successful in starting the ripples moving about the theme of empathy. Already we have been an inspiration to the Richmond Arts and Culture Division, which has decided to do an empathy project with their Neighborhood Public Arts program because they were inspired by the idea of our East Bay Stories of Empathy project. Already a group of community members have come together and committed to work together on the project.  And each time we are able to inspire another local organization or community to take up the theme of empathy, that will be another successful ripple.

The more people think about, discuss and express empathy, the wider the ripples will have reached. Interviewees will reach into their experiences - sharing their stories, overcoming the anxiety and fear that may exist. Storytellers will take ripples of experience home to their families and communities. The promotion, implementation, exhibition of the project will raise awareness of empathy. People working on the project, people hearing about it, those attending the final events, and the permanent stories that will be available for viewing, each in there own way are a ripple.

Youth: If working with youth, describe your organization’s prior experience in youth programming.

At least ten of the project’s interviewees will be youths. The youth Interview Workshops will take place at the Portola Middle School where the youth workshop leader, Susan Wherle, is an art teacher. Susan says, "Portola Middle School has an award winning art program! Approximately one third of the students take visual art classes while they attend our school. They study art and artists from many cultures and different places in the world. The students work with two and three dimensional art materials, including clay, paint, papier-mâché, charcoal, pastels, wood. Through art, we are able to share ideas with our community, sometimes by participating in art competitions, other times as art exhibitors in displays at the local libraries and in other public spaces. We have done a series of murals at our school, have decorated the school garden. The students in our art classes have a sense of commitment to each other and to the school by sharing art experiences that go beyond the classroom."

Our project partner, the Richmond Art Center, has over 70 years experience offering art classes for both adults and youths. The RAC has separate art studios and workspace for youth and holds classes in drawing, pasting, sculpting, puppet-making, painting, clay, cartooning, art and creative writing.