Narrative 4’s Digital Platform

Narrative 4 (N4) originally emerged in 2013 in response to empathy gap studies in youth. It has since evolved into a global organization addressing that empathy deficit in a divided world. We build capacity for compassion through story-based arts, helping students unlock their potential to create positive and ongoing change. Our proposed solution is a comprehensive digital platform for students and educators to connect globally through our programs. The Platform will provide a safe virtual space for high-school-aged students and teachers to participate in our core methodology—the story exchange. It will help build global understanding, while accessing arts-based learning resources and professional development. The Platform will also host empathy-into-action campaigns. If scaled globally, our solution would help us significantly increase the reach and impact of N4’s evidence-based social-emotional learning programs. Our solution would positively change countless lives by emboldening the next generation to lead with empathy and compassion.

N4’s digital platform will address the global empathy gap that has been exacerbated by challenges like COVID-19 and the incidence of ongoing racial injustice. Research estimates that empathy levels among students in the U.S. declined by 48% between 1979 and 2009 (Personality and Social Psychology Review). Technology can be an exacerbating factor in this disconnection, but we also believe it has the innate capability of offering a solution. By building a digital platform underpinned by a vision of global connection and understanding, we will harness technology to address the global empathy divide. Within the Equitable Classrooms Challenge, we are looking to solve the gaps faced by young learners in developing social-emotional learning skills. We aim to increase the students' engagement not only within their classrooms and communities, but among a vast global network of students, teachers, and artists. Ultimately, we want to address the empathy gap and foster global understanding by building a high-quality digital learning environment. This solution is both local and universal - we aim to harness technology so that the barriers of misunderstanding can, eventually, begin to dissolve.

Narrative 4’s solution is a digital platform and global classroom for students and educators to connect through empathy-building programs. We will design a secure and robust content management system and website that will provide a superior user experience. It will enable easy access to our programs, resources, and training. The platform will serve as an extension of the classroom. It will be built through a unique combination of existing utility and interaction platforms, content crowdsourcing, video conferencing, and analytics capability.

We will design the platform to drive a new kind of digital connection, built on a foundation of radical empathy. The platform will help young people understand the perspectives of those who are different than they are. It will provide a safe virtual space for youth to participate in story exchanges, our core methodology. It will enable social and emotional learning (SEL), host empathy-into-action campaigns, and allow meaningful connection in a thoughtfully designed forum. Educators will have access to our arts-based learning resources, professional development, and N4 facilitator training. 

The platform will significantly expand our network so we can equitably and sustainably transform the education sector and develop compassionate and civically engaged leaders.

Our solution will primarily serve high school-aged students and their educators. Our mission—to harness the power of the story exchange to equip and embolden young adults to improve their lives, their communities, and the world—puts us squarely at the forefront of addressing this empathy shortage. We aim to fulfill the promise of today’s young adults becoming  tomorrow’s leaders. 

Our work to date has demonstrated that high school students are eager to engage with society, and are open to absorbing the lessons of empathy and compassion. Sowing the seeds of compassion now will help create generations of young leaders who will lead and live with understanding, creativity and civic-mindedness.

By harnessing the power of stories, we build capacity for compassion and we  drive action-based change—especially among and for the under-served, underprivileged, and communities in conflict. Through our programs, individuals from over a dozen countries are working to drive progress in understanding and equity to heal our divided world with N4’s trademark “radical empathy.” 

Our work harnesses the innate power of storytelling and implements intentional practices to slowly build empathy, ensuring that individuals from different places/geographies/identities can see one another as whole and complex human beings.  They do not become mere caricatures within a single narrative or representatives of narrowly-focused ideologies. Once they form an emotional bridge across these supposed divides, these young people are significantly more likely to act compassionately on another’s behalf. This ability to humanize the perceived “other” is the foundational step to promoting and advancing diverse and inclusive societies. Our model allows participants to imagine and re-tell the stories of lives that are not our own, to instill a sense of curiosity, wonder, and imagination.

Our core belief—that through the exchange of personal narratives, humanity can see the world kaleidoscopically and engage with it more empathically—is supported by the experiences of story exchange participants and our research from the University of Chicago and Yale University. Though many factors contribute to increased empathy and a positive school climate, research shows that our program fosters empathy and builds relationships between students, teachers, and staff, increases school engagement, and decreases conflict between students. We found that, on average, all students who participated in story exchanges at one of our partner schools showed increased levels of empathy and civic engagement. This change was profound and lasting. The majority of students saw, and continued to see, their partners as more similar to themselves than previously thought. Additionally, since partnering with N4, many schools have reported increased attendance rates, increased graduation rates, and decreased suspension rates.  

We believe that the N4 solution can harness the power of digital technology, and impact countless lives around the globe.

The problem, solution, and target population for our solution align with the Challenge because we will create a new platform for social-emotional learning specifically built to facilitate global connection and understanding through the lens of radical empathy. Research demonstrates that our in-person programs, like the story exchange, increase learner engagement and foster positive peer interaction. By expanding into a robust digital platform, we will transcend geographic constraints to reach students and educators who are under-connected and underserved by SEL opportunities. Ours is a global solution in a local environment.  

Our solution is between the concept and prototype stage, as we have invested in a digital audit to arrive at a scope of work and its potential costs. We are one short step away from building the prototype. 

During this phase, we will also continue to build upon lessons learned when we transitioned our programs to a digital format during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have developed the idea with a combination of agility and careful consideration. We recognize the vital opportunities presented by the dynamics of change.

Our solution is innovative because it will expand upon N4’s programs, which have already been proven to increase learner engagement and build empathy among students. The digital platform will expand our reach and ensure we continue to impact students and educators in underserved communities. It will also build upon our core story exchange methodology, as new programs offered through the platform will ensure empathy gains are sustained over the long term and inspire action among participants. These programs include learning modules co-created by authors, artists, educators, and students; Empathy-into-Action campaigns that drive hands-on service projects to help communities in need; and our global Artist Network of world-renowned authors and musicians who contribute their greatest skills by developing materials and engaging with students.

Overall, N4’s work is innovative because we harness storytelling—the most accessible and universal of all human activities—to break down barriers, shatter stereotypes, and develop action-oriented empathetic leaders. We equip educators, students, and other community advocates with the tools and training they need to practice and teach radical empathy. While our story exchange methodology is relatively simple (you are paired to share a true story from your life with a partner based on prompts, then retell your partner’s story in the first person in front of a larger group), its impact leads to data-proven empathy shifts. This model is inherently sustainable and scalable, leading to global ripple effects as we equip educators, students, and advocates with the tools they need to practice and teach radical empathy.

Our digital platform is still in the Concept phase, so we do not currently serve any participants through it. We have not yet developed specific projections for the number of people it will serve, but we assume that we will give every student and educator who has participated (or will participate) in an N4 story exchange their own digital identity and an invitation to join the platform. As such, our organizational expansion and impact projections for the next several years (as described in more detail in the next item) articulate the number of people we will directly and meaningfully affect. By the end of 2022, we project that we will reach more than 250,000 story exchange participants annually. By 2025, in the U.S. alone, our plan is to reach 84 cities, 2,664 schools, and 5.7 Million students, potentially carrying out over 360,000 story exchanges.

Since we are still in the concept phase, we have not yet projected the reach and impact numbers that relate directly to the digital platform, but have established several quantitative measures by which we’ll measure progress for our work in its entirety over the next year. By the end of 2022, we aim to: 

• Extend our reach to over 250,000 story exchange participants annually.

• Expand the N4 train-the-trainer model to include 2,500+ active story exchange facilitators (1,500 in active hubs and 1,000 online).

• Certify 200 Master Practitioners responsible for leading programs and training facilitators.

• Develop and disseminate 15 replicable learning modules based on Common Core Curriculum standards and independent missions that combine literature, art, and empathy.

While we partner with research entities like the University of Pennsylvania to assess our programs’ impact, we are still in the early phases of establishing and measuring impact. The digital platform will significantly improve our ability to develop and track outcome and impact measures.

Currently, two full-time staff (CEO and COO) and a four-person contract team are directly involved in the platform’s development. Many more contribute to the content that will eventually be distributed on the platform, including N4’s global staff of 25 and our Artist Network of authors and artists.

N4 is led by its visionary co-founders, Lisa Consiglio and Colum McCann, who, before officially creating N4 in 2013, had been working for over a decade to envision and establish a global network of artists and activists who wanted to change the world with a new type of leadership. They built this organization from the ground up and are best suited to lead our solution, bringing to bear their professional experience working with nonprofits dedicated to humanistic ideals (Lisa) and expertise in storytelling as an award-winning, world-renowned author (Colum). Lisa has extensive experience building organizations fueled by the potential and power of young people and has explored countless stories of people in anonymous corners of the world. Her experience and passion for revolutionizing education make her well-suited to lead N4 to equip young people to explore the world, learn from it, and change it. COO Gautam Gangoli joined the organization in early 2020 to help lead our expansion efforts, leveraging his proven abilities to drive business turnarounds in for-profit industries and lead cross-functional teams through scale-up.

We design programming in partnership alongside our facilitators, who are embedded in their communities and aware of their audiences' needs, opportunities, and values. These partners are typically local leaders who are experts on their communities' key issues and larger cultural contexts. Our team will consult with key stakeholders during our digital platform audit to ensure we meaningfully incorporate their feedback during the design and implementation phases.

In the face of continued racial injustice, N4 continues to drive progress in understanding and equity across the world while creating an open, diverse, inclusive, and equitable internal environment. We are proud that our staff and board makeup represent diverse backgrounds; 10 of our 25 global staff are people of color (five senior positions), and 18 are women (six senior positions). To ensure we continuously learn and take action in our DEI efforts, we have created a values document that articulates the culture we aim to maintain and implemented a board-approved DEI plan to keep staff accountable. We continue to consider new ways to ensure our DEI plan is actionable and continuously evolving to meet changing needs and are currently assessing two potential partners to help guide our diversity, equity, and inclusion work. We are confident that our global empathy-building work will embolden the next generation to improve global equity.

We are applying to Solve because we truly believe that our platform will provide a unique, first-of-its-kind solution to address SEL gaps among global classrooms. We are applying in hopes that we will be able to access the Solve and MIT communities of impact-minded leaders and that we can leverage their expertise to improve our ideas and programs. We are especially interested in learning about monitoring and evaluation to measure our impact, ensuring we meaningfully incorporate participant perspectives and feedback, ways to integrate equity into our reach (ensuring we reach hard-to-reach students) and impact. This knowledge and experience will help us address the barriers we face not only as an organization but also across the education sector.

For Public Relations, we would benefit from support in expanding our reach globally in a way that is sustainable and equitable. For Monitoring & Evaluation, we are continuously exploring ways to measure our impact beyond the quantitative output numbers we have projected. For Product / Service Distribution, we would love mentorship in how to reach underserved communities through our digital product. For Technology, we are eager for insight into our platform development and its ongoing evolution.

First, we are eager for the opportunity to partner with MIT faculty, especially those involved with the MIT Media Lab’s Deep Empathy project. This work directly relates to our mission and the prospect of working with such well-aligned individuals excites us. We are grateful to be partnering with several Solve members already and we would love to expand these partnerships even more. For example, Stand Together is one of our largest funders and partners. We also receive grant funding through the Amazon Literary Partnership and from Comcast NBCUniversal. 

Additional Solve Members we would like to work with include:

• Nike, since they are the ultimate storytelling brand with which we have dreamed about collaborating since our inception.
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to learn from their experience fighting global inequity and connect with their grantee network.
• Microsoft, because empathy is a core value of its leadership and to learn from their wide range of expertise in the digital field.

We are eager to learn more about additional MIT partners and Solve Members and potential opportunities for collaboration!

N4’s digital platform would provide opportunities for high school-aged students to learn about themselves and others by meaningfully engaging in our social-emotional learning programs. When we connect students on both local and global levels, we open students' eyes to possibilities beyond their immediate circumstances and communities. Our digital platform will engage learners in our radical empathy-building programs. We embolden these young leaders to understand that their voices, stories, and actions matter, and that they have the power to improve their lives, their communities, and the world. This understanding is foundational as these young people consider the impact they want to make in the world and the meaningful actions and career paths they can take to improve their communities and the lives of others.

Additionally, our digital platform will provide learning modules for educators to use in their classrooms. We co-create these learning modules alongside artists and authors, based on their famous works, to provide authentic learning contexts. These modules combine literature, art, and empathy to help students explore how they can extend their learning beyond the classroom and engage in their communities to make positive changes.

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