Playground of Empathy

Our virtual and soon to be app-based immersive experiential learning program has four specific paths that allow you to 'walk in the shoes' of an individual from a marginalized intersection. A black, queer, first gen university student, a non-binary white professor, a trans man of mixed racial background, and a white woman during pregnancy. Yet, with just these 4 identities, we've already impacted 10,000+ people. If we are to depolarize, people need to have experiences that allow us to truly walk in the shoes of dozens upon dozens of different people, effectively. This 'need', is legitmized by research continually pointing to POV interventions as an effective tool in integrating lessons and an awareness of bias, vs. the current paradigm of fact based training. We have academics like Lisa Feldman Barrett and Mahzarin Banaji rooting for us, yet, the grant boards are generally composed of elder white men who simply don't get it and red tape us. With 300K, we could do so much. With 1/2; develop the next 38 identities for the app. With the other 1/2; conduct an extensive pilot and feasibility study that would provide longitudinal data on habit formation currently missing in the bias research space.

A world lacking emotional education has failed and forged us, yet our generation’s evolution of emotional awareness is a guide for me and those who sense it. My commitment is to cultivate emotionally nuanced spaces, because humanity will not ‘abandon the old until we glimpse’ something brighter. (F.M. Lappé) I believe many dream of this new dawn of equal human flourishing.

I’ve concepted experiences for 15 years with governments, Disney, Google, the Diabetes Fund, and, as a founder of Sherlocked-Amsterdam, designers of the world’s top-rated escape games. Making 101 mistakes in my first startup gave heaps of learning in authentic leadership. I left my entertainment focused partners to enrich experiential design’s capacity to create empathy. 

Studying emotion science with Dr. Barrett is an incredible honor. But like many, life's sages form us early on. Parents divorce, grasping for a modicum of emotionally nuanced space at seven - son of a Korean refugee and Jewish zen master - absorbing world-class direction at the MET - becoming a sexual abuse survivor - living in four countries - speaking five languages: all teachers in how to bridge flourishing across adversity and diversity with Playground of Empathy as my answer to designing human flourishing.

Polarization limits human potential: it is a public health burden for all, not just the most marginalized among us, slows our economy, limits the human capacity for innovation and creativity, and puts democracy at risk. We are living in an era of casual brutality, resulting from broken dialogues and a lack of empathy in our education system. Depolarization is an urgent need, but current cognitive training doesn’t deliver robust results. Research suggests that actual meaningful exposure between people - from a first person POV - is the antidote to a polarized and fragile world. This is the very definition of empathy: sharing the experience of another person as your own, with sufficient subjective realism to impact behavior. 

“Walk in my shoes” has over 400 million search results, but 99% of those are making a suggestion. We offer the opportunity. As an online experience and mobile app, we bridge the chasm between hearing the bias statistics and actually awakening to our biases. Through 'Walk', participants consistently grow advocacy. Like a new cone for our vision, scaling 'Walk' holds the potential to embolden the spectrum of global equality, open eyes to celebrate our diversity, and revisioning belonging's benchmark, within our lifetime. 

When marginalized populations experience other’s stories, it contextualizes their own experiences. Feeling less alone and more seen is cathartic and community building. Bias trainings generally completely ignore that. 

Playground also benefits those society centers; ready to change, but lacking exposure to know how. We’re being told that to heal polarization, we must pull the ends toward the middle. Yet, research overwhelmingly shows we can make radical change without changing the radicals. If in 2020, you asked, ‘how can I do more for BLM?’, or uttered, ‘tell me what to do to not be racist or sexist’; this is for you. Because voices in the middle get heard, the silent middle learning to speak up will shift the system.

The UI of the app allows folks to enter one five minute POV experience daily. Change your life five minutes every day: imagine that.. We want to disrupt the 90 minute costly training paradigm, creating defensiveness and not habit forming. Instead, let's give people opportunities to learn asynchronously through regular exposure. Further, the app keeps a recording of your responses, so you can reflect on them later. It's an opportunity to remove the didactic pressure, and really teach yourself through observation.

We’ve reached 10,000+ participants, and 100+ institutions/organizations, 40% pro bono. Equal to participant impact was our reach to 100+ key decision makers at Universities. Teaching these individuals the importance of experiential learning in forming new habits for their communities is essential to better methods towards depolarization. 

We’ve shared by invitation at the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education Conference - AISNE - the Society for Neuroscience and Creativity Conference - with five Chiefs of Staff at MGH - and to a audiences at the Boston Museum of Science. We’ve won the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund Award, chosen by their DIB council, resulting in impacting Harvard throughout 2021. 

Our success, supported by cutting edge methodologies for demonstrating robust and replicable effects, pioneers a paradigm shift to motivate and transform the utilization of both public spaces and digital mediums to teach the tools of human flourishing through emotional education. 

Since Playground’s beginning, June 2018, I’ve allowed the income from engagements to grow our team, and offer the experience for free for the institutions who cannot afford it. It’s paid off. WillowTree App’s in-kind contribution totaled $540,000. The greatest support is the culture of our team, IASLab, and dedicated advisors.

We’ve served 10,000+ participants and over 100+ organizations, 40% pro bono. This included 100+ leaders, who deepened understanding of the importance of experiential learning within organizational change. Of note were 60 chief diversity officers from the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education Conference - AISNE - the Society for Neuroscience and Creativity - the Chiefs of Staff at MGH - Ford, Cisco, and the Boston Museum of Science’s public. 

Following September’s app launch we aim to scale to 50,000 participants conservatively, and 500,000 in a best case scenario. The conservative ‘bootstrapped’ estimate would anticipate that the majority of app users will be within organizations and institutions. 

In a best case scenario: the 50,000 users would help determined that walking in another’s shoes is of high public appeal due to it's ubiquitous nature, and 500,000 would be reached by working with public hubs (municipalities, and nonprofits through their community foundations, health foundations, and collective impact groups.) We’d focus on conflict areas and learning environments. Experiences would be created specific to dense service areas to increase their local engagement, eg. a Boston-based person of color’s (POC) urban youth’s experience, and a conservative middle-class white Bostonian, so both feel invited.

Our underlying goal is to create a more authentic, measurable and sustainable disarming of prejudice. Organizations remain challenged to measure shifts in gender and racial equity beyond retention, demographic change and wage measurements, while such measurements miss the importance of psychological safety and sense of belonging - albeit a key factor in creating authentic perspective shifts - towards inclusion. Applying perspective change tools with such sincerely intentioned policy focused organizations will impact their effectiveness in gender and racially oriented SDGs such as expectations of women to bear additional household burdens, and gender minorities (GM’s) and POC receiving unequal wages.

The focus of the first 50,000 will be motivated U.S./Canada-based individuals taking measurable actions towards greater advocacy within their organizations: 40,000 participants within the 10 largest organizations of this group and 10% at places of learning at no cost. 

Progress will be measured by showing increases in advocacy, as well as comfort and willingness to speak up for the rights of peers and colleagues. These measurements will observe shifts in emotional granularity, affect, climate, state empathy measure (affective, cognitive, associative), implicit bias, behavioral intentions (e.g., to join clubs, read books, learn more, interact more, volunteer and especially behavioral follow-through on intentions.

A great barrier of discord exists between our praise and enthusiasm from D&I staff, and the business outcomes-focused discussion that happens with their non-D&I superiors behind closed doors. 

We enter from a national backdrop of mundane, box-checking D&I solutions creating malaise and defensiveness. D&I staff have minuscule to no external budgets without the sign off of those in HR, deans or executives relatively unscathed by marginalization.  Such barriers will be partially surmounted by iterating on messaging to appeal to the gatekeepers of D&I budgets. 

Because radically innovative approaches to intervention require significant team expertise and resources to break dulled market mindsets, this barrier is highly financial. 

While constantly writing grants, our development team works to grow our donor base, but winning the Elevate prize would allow us to take greater risks in launching 1,000-10,000 person pilots to a) high brand-equity organizations, whose D&I staff could approve such pilots without financial bottlenecks, and b) groups in conflict areas in the U.S. Success in these environments would advance our impact story greatly. We’d also create 20+ more experiential identities, each representing niche advocacy organizations and publics. To do so our team would need to expand to c.15 specialized full-time employees in 2022.

Imagine 1,000,000 people walking in the shoes of different individuals monthly for an entire year. If we could measure their viewpoints shifting - if we were equipped to follow and interview hundreds on this journey - if we could bring that together in a media campaign and afford to broadcast it with a sizable and well-funded team - how could walking in each other’s shoes become a highly invitational cultural phenomenon?

This is just one goal that we'd strive to achieve through a powerful media campaign, leveraging Elevate's expertise, development support, and platform. With the proper guidance, network, and financial backing, we'd finally become staffed enough to carry out exciting media campaigns. It's then we can reach the potential power of this highly understood concept to impact millions of polarized people and cultured across the globe. 

Creating an experiential identity, highlighting every kind of marginalization would open channels for partnerships with identity-advocacy nonprofits whose audience could benefit from more immersive understandings of how society treats those with similar challenges. While our theory of change values organizational focus, we hope that ‘Elevate’ will be the pathway to balancing our reliance on organizational buy-in to reaching a broad public starved of empathy.

Our leadership, advisors and team members are radically diverse across race, gender, age, body-type, sexual orientation, neurology, physical-ability, and religion. Even our internship selection process deliberately lead to choosing gender diverse students born in Ethiopia, Iran, Japan, China, and Ghana. We also open our arms to trauma survivors, including two members of our leadership team. This is because the values of DE&I must also acknowledge and embrace the intersectionality of marginalization with its mental impact, and support ongoing resilience.

Our deepest value is lived out by celebrating our variations, as the key to the equality of human flourishing. As a male founder, most of my heroes and chosen guides are racially diverse women pioneers, such as Lisa Feldman Barrett, Mahzarin Banaji, Dallas Ducar, and Jasmine Hamilton, all from diverse ethnic or gender expansive backgrounds. 

Playground’s experiential identities also strive to represent as many intersectional lenses of identity imaginable. It's our goal to not only consider principles of DE&I in our experiences, but also how identity-focused advocacy partnerships can bring broader audiences to their organizations, expanding their donor base. We reach out to advocacy-based non profits weekly, aiming to forge long-term brand relationships that will lift advocacy aims together.

Life-long, I’ve designed bridges across cultural perspectives: Son of a Korean refugee and Jewish zen master, singing at the MET, learning resilience as an abuse survivor. Through living in four countries, speaking five languages, I’ve worked on experiences with Disney, Google, the Diabetes Fund, Scandinavian governments, and founded the world’s top-rated escape game. I’m Design-Lead at the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Lab, and will advise on digital-experience for Dr. Banaji, pioneer in implicit bias research, who approved of our theory of change. 

There’s no better strategist for experiential emotion-behavior approaches than Dr. Barrett: among the top 1% most cited scientists globally for her revolutionary research in neuropsychology.

Dallas Ducar advises on our gender-expansive experiences as a leading trans mental health practitioner at MGH, and CEO of Transhealth Northampton. 

In framing narrative, we’re blessed by Lulu Miller, Peabody award-winning science writer, and co-host of NPR's Radiolab. 

Jasmine Hamilton leads as a Senior Policy Advisor at the federal public service, with interdisciplinary research experience at the WHO.

Marketing and business strategy is supported by Joel Mier, former Director of Marketing at Netflix, and senior business analyst at Adobe, and by Matt Wallaert, chief Behavioral Scientist at Frog Design. 

We are an exceptional team.

Many had pandemic setbacks. We had total halt. That’s the life of a physical, giant immersive shoe where you enter with someone else’s suitcase and try on their clothing... in a pandemic. 

Rewind to January 2020. Our prototype (made for under $5,000) received invitations from MGH, the AMA, APS, and Gender Spectrum conference: in total, $100,000+ of expected revenue. Things looked good. Then things didn’t look at all. 

With literally no resources and no plan B, I did the only thing I could: work on understanding leadership in a U.S. culture. April 19th, I personally took on twelve full-time interns to iterate this experience virtually and meet our nation’s crisis. As we all watched Floyd’s murder, we reached out to all developers we knew. The lift seemed too great and costly. 

But we had done something unknowingly vital before the pandemic, besides building a giant shoe. We shared it without cost with hundreds, to educate the public. Amongst them was HBO’s app developer, WillowTree's LGBTQ+ ERG. They loved it, and when they heard about our dilemma and their CEO found out, I leaned into a 6 month negotiation with their business team. This lead to a $540,000 in-kind donation.

Boston Museum of Science Playground of Empathy event:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syUneSmOnmw

Creative Mornings:

https://creativemornings.com/talks/micah-kessel

Charlottesville Design Week:

https://vimeo.com/406088922/c366546640

$1m - $5m would expand our radically diverse team, and pave a 1.5 year runway to focus primarily on the total impact of 1,000,000 participants within 2-3 years, with less need for revenue from organizations. We'd hone in on the public and conflict areas while measuring and publicizing their perspective shifts and growing advocacy.

I’d spend my time as an ambassador instead of a sales person (hallelujah). We’d make 5 - 10 full-time value-centered, seasoned hires, spanning outreach, marketing, grant writing, operations, and a larger development team. We’d contract a film team to increase experiential identities to 24. Each would focus on a specific advocacy group, and we’d aim to partner with other nonprofits to enhance their advocacy work.

The film team would also work on an authentic documentary-style campaign following the empathy-growth journey of five ‘teams’, eg. a gender minority youth and their conservative parent, a couple where one is coming out as trans and the other is struggling, a small town middle school classroom, or a classroom of nursing students. These teams would walk in other’s shoes over six months, inspiring potential app users. 

Our goal is aimed at nothing short of a global cultural shift in perception.

-Native Women Lead, to frame the identities of three indigenous people from different tribes.

The Sexual Assault Resource Agency (SARA) who have supported us in preparation around potential triggers resulting from inter-participant comments during facilitated experiences. 

In 2020, we've won the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund Grant, chosen by their council for diversity, inclusion and belonging. This puts us in a partnership with their culture lab, to conduct work in impact and research at multiple schools throughout Harvard.

We are in similar planning discussions for smaller pilot groups with Princeton, Columbia, NYU, a dozen other colleges, and dozens of businesses throughout the U.S. and Canada. 

We're in an early stage of partnership with the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), who seeks to work with Playground to create identities of early career researchers from marginalized backgrounds in STEM. Their goal is to then leverage these identities to better educate DE&I practices with their 42 higher education institutions partners in the NY area.

EQ Labs, an app-based anti-bias training organization, whose CEO has offered to share complimentary AI focused elements of their code-base, including an analysis and correction tool which measures/automates private, gender neutral suggestions on Slack to become more inclusive.