Felicia Darling

Equity and Inclusion-Focused Empathy Circles Help Create a Culture of Empathy and Belonging at Our Organizations. 

Speaker: Felicia Darling  (15 min) To Video, Summary, AI, Outline, Full Transcripts 

Bio:  Dr. Felicia Darling promotes inclusion and empathy in math classrooms, meetings, campuses, the world.


Abstract:  Equity- and Inclusion-Focused Empathy Circles Help Create a Culture of Empathy and Belonging at Our Organizations. Circles that focus on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility (DEIA) topics bring colleagues together and help everyone feel like they belong. DEIA-focused Empathy Circle participants have said, "After what we have experienced in this Empathy Circle... We are all brothers and sisters now (smile)" and "This is the first time I have felt completely heard [at work]."

OTTER.AI Summary

Felicia Darling discussed her work with Hilleary Zarate on inclusive empathy circles to foster a culture of belonging in higher education. They use "Empathy Unchained" cards to facilitate reflective listening and address systemic inequities. Felicia offered to mail these cards to organizations for free to support their empathy initiatives. She emphasized the importance of slowing down conversations, understanding inclusion, and reducing cultural taxation. Felicia also highlighted the challenges of cultural taxation and the need for organizations to take responsibility for creating equitable environments. She concluded by encouraging contact for free empathy card bundles and emphasized the role of empathy circles in building a global empathy movement.

Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/MtnTxLI2R1XD65ym6U2s-jzWiug?view=transcript

Action Items


Outline

Empathy Circles and Inclusive Education


Distribution of Empathy Cards


Importance of Empathy Circles in Higher Education


Structure and Topics of Empathy Circles


Challenges and Positive Outcomes of Empathy Circles


Quotes and Personal Experiences from Empathy Circles


Call to Action and Contact Information


Transcript

https://otter.ai/u/MtnTxLI2R1XD65ym6U2s-jzWiug?view=transcript
Speaker 1  

I did notice that Hilleary Zarate is here today, and she and I are the ones who did the inclusive and equity focused empathy circles. And what I've been doing with Hilleary is using empathy circles as a tool to tackle like larger systemic inequities at education institutions. Basically, we're trying to help education institutions create a culture of belonging. Can everyone hear me? Okay, good. There's there's my little website link. If you want to click on there, it's up to you. Okay, so a little bit about me. So I teach social justice pre calculus at UC Berkeley math at the Santa Rosa Junior College. 

I do a lot of research, books, articles that promote inclusion. I'm gonna have to read that and belonging in classrooms and campuses. Unlike mentor, I focus on higher ed, not necessarily businesses. And then I believe that healing our past hurts, exploring our biases and finding our true north promote empathy. I believe this is part of creating the global empathy movement. So in that way, Hilary and I have been doing these empathy circles that focus on equity and inclusion at higher ed institutions, especially because we're focused on campuses, in classrooms and so too many aerial pop ups. 

There we go. So I just going to show you, I have these Deia empathy cards. We use those in the empathy circles. And if you know an organization who wants to use some of these empathy cards, I'm willing to pop eight or 20 into a mailing thing and mail it to them for free. I want to give some away to an organization. I gave away 30 to our own organization and not using Amazon anymore. 

So you can just contact me by email if you want me to send a free bundle to some particular organization who's working on conversations, and maybe they're doing empathy circles, and they want to create a culture of belonging. I also have my book out here, empathy Unchained, heal your trauma, uplift the world, and my book teaching it breaking breakout rooms that break down barriers for community college students that was published by Teachers College at Columbia University. So there's some of my things, but please do reach out to me if you want a bundle of free ones. 

I don't send out single ones because it costs me too much to send, but I want to get them out there. I want people to have some conversation cards. It can help organizations kind of have a common set of vocabulary and common conversations around building a culture of belonging and empathy at their higher ed institution. So, so why Equity and Inclusion focused empathy circles? Why is that important? It helps colleagues. Like, like all empathy circles, they help colleagues become better at reflective listening and understanding each other, and it slows down conversations in higher ed it's the biggest challenge with empathy circles, we're fast talkers. We talk over each other, and it is shocking to help people to slow down reflectively, listen, have more mindful conversations. 

That's probably the biggest challenge in higher ed. It also helps colleagues become more informed about inclusion, equity, accessibility. Gives them a common framework, a common set of vocabulary. So they're talking about color blindness, cultural taxation, and they're getting familiar with these words that are really important in order to be more empathic to people who are outside their identity groups and backgrounds. Also it helps to create a culture of belonging at your workplace and in the workplaces that Hillary and I are working around is mostly higher ed so far, that's where we're that's where we're situated with these Equity and Inclusion focused empathy circles. Okay, so what do they look like? Right? So we, all, many of us, have seen empathy circles.

 You know how that is your reflective listening. You have a speaker. We do all that, but we have a different set of topics that we use to start the conversation, different set of conversation starters, and we'll frequently have little brief pre reading assignments, like a little one alone give throw away, like a little or give people a little excerpt from my book or an article or that I've seen or article I wrote. 

So like, if we're going to be talking about color blindness or cultural taxation, or some other people first language. We'll do a little pre reading for people optional so that when we come into the circle, there's kind of a common set of understanding. And we start with the personal questions. I love these questions. I learned them in the facilitator training. I learned them in the very first empathy circle I did with Edwin and whatever. How long ago that was? Because these get at the core. We always start with personal questions, like, what do you need to feel like you belong or whatever is alive for you?

 Or what do you need to feel like you are being treated fairly or whatever is alive for you? We always start with the personal questions. So. It puts people in the empathic frame mind, like empathy, as in Jamil Zaki empathy, where they're actually going, hmm, this is what I need to belong. Oh, other people maybe aren't getting that at our institution, people with different identities.

 So I start there with the personal core values that I learned from in the empathy circles in the facilitator training, because it really resonates with people. And then we move on to some topics are a little more academic, from the empathy unchained dei deck, or the little readings that we give out. And so some of these questions from the Deia deck are a little bit more specific to actual academic topics about inclusion, equity, diversity, accessibility, justice, or belonging, and that's what that means. So so we start with, we've done this quite a bit. What is one core value still about them personally that makes you interested in doing diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, justice, belonging. Work, probably more letters now, or whatever is alive for you, we always add that is or whatever is alive for you. 

That's an empathy circle protocol, and it lets people to broaden their frame. They're like, well, this really isn't about inclusion. But this came up for me because it probably is. It's about what they feel inclusion is, so is whatever is alive you allows people to relate to things the way they want to relate to them. So another question from the cards is, how can we implement more people first language at our organization?

 And so we're using the empathy circles to start to move out and talk about inclusion, equity, discrimination, bias at the organization still maintaining the empathy circle, which, again, as I said, it's really hard for people in higher ed. We found that's one of the biggest confessions, is like, this is really, really hard to slow down the conversation and reflectively listen what can be done to reduce cultural taxation. So again, that may be a pre reading happens there. Cultural taxation is when we put the burden of educating us on the people who are discriminated against. You know what I mean? 

Like putting the burden like what it's like to be discriminated against and experiencing psych lack of psychological safety onto a black woman in the group like no, we don't want to do that. We want to we want to talk about what cultural taxation is in the group and talk about how we can reduce that. We don't want the people in the group who identify with groups from LGBTQ plus who might be discriminated to have to educate the rest of us. We want to take the burden of educating ourselves and doing that inclusion diversity work on too. So that's one of the topics we talk about.

 This is a great one, the positionality statement that's directly from the cards. Which identities, race, class, language, gender, sex, sex, expression, orientation, ability, disability, for example, make you powerful in our society, which make you less powerful. That's one of the topics. It's a big one. A lot of times you can ask people to do a little work on that before they get to the circle, like because on the card, it says you spend 30 minutes by yourself to answer this question. Then you would come to the circle, and you could talk about that. And then why is culture color behind this not an effective tool for creating a culture of belonging? So now we're talking in the empty circle to move from the core values to talk a little bit more about some of the academic definitions and some of the research on what works and doesn't work to create a culture of belonging that's inclusive and equitable. I'm going to pop up a few of my cards here, just this is what the cards look like. 

And again, I want to give away. If you have an organization, contact me, I'm going to pack up send some cards to an organization that's like, we want to have those conversations. Send us your cards. So if you know, someone contact me, my emails on the thing, and also on the thing, on the slide point presentation. And it's also, I get that little QR code, alright? So those are just something. There's, it's, you know, it's card deck like this, like a regular card, 52 cards, so there's 13 in each of the categories and then challenges, yeah. So especially in this climate right now, being a dei specialist, right? 

So I like this quote, the campus we have is the campus we built. So these must be the, I would say, inequitable outcomes we want. And in my book empathy and change, heal your trauma, uplift the world, I say the world we have is the world we want. So these must be the outcomes we want, right? So we built this world,


and so only we can change it, and that's true with equity. It's true with empathy. So that's where we gotta like, you know, you. Come to bear, you know, is really show our stuff and do some work here, because we built this and it serves some of us, it doesn't serve all of us, and that's true at the campus level, at the world level, and we need to change some of those systems and structures. And I think the inclusion, equity oriented empathy circle is a great place to start that. Start at the beginning in the small, small pods, and move outwards like the global empathy movement. 

Because, you know, you do see organizational resistance to new ideas, right? That the systems exist on campuses, businesses the world, because they work for somebody. They're working for people, and so they exist for that reason. So therefore, going to put a lot of effort into and get those conversations going, to get people to buy in, to start a global empathy movement, to keep pushing for that, to push for Equity and Inclusion, because it's serving some people, and some people just don't care. Some people really like it that way for a variety of reasons. So there is, there is that kind of push and cultural taxation is big. People kind of want to sit back some time and let other people do the work. And in these Deia empathy circles, people bring their implicit bias. We all have implicit bias. They bring it into the room, and it's not the job of people of color or people from LGBTQ plus community to do that work for us. 

So those are some of the challenges, some of the positive outcomes. These are quotes that just are very dear to me. And people who are in empathy circles are used to this. I used to not hear what people said because I was so busy thinking about my response. I learned to really hear from doing empathy circles, especially in higher ed where people just don't slow down. Another quote, using people first language helps me put the human first and the group label second. It softens the edges of my bias. I did not even know what cultural taxation was before empathy circle. 

That's really great. Now they do, and so now they can, you know, make sure that people of color, people with disabilities, aren't doing the work to educate everyone else. This is the first time I have felt completely heard at work that was said with tears. I felt more included when I feel more included when there is diversity around me, it means that everyone's ideas are different, therefore no one gets othered because their perspective is an outlier, and this was after a particularly challenging empathy circle with some tears. It was a Deia empathy circle, after what we have experienced in this empathy circle, we are all brothers and sisters. Now smile, right? That was we came a long way in that one. So that's my little presentation. 

If you want to contact me, there's a website, link my emails there, I really want to give away, you know, pack them up, send some cards out to organizations that are interested in doing that work. And could, you know, spread those cards out in an organization make some difference. All right, ring the bell. Thank you.

Speaker 2  

Thank you so much for that diversity, equity, inclusion, access, justice and belonging. And thank you so much for your generosity. And so I'd like to, yeah, appreciate that. So I would like to now introduce.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai