Narrative 4’s Digital Platform

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing racial injustice, students are struggling with disconnection, loneliness, and isolation in record numbers. According to a 2021 study published in The Journal of Adolescence, loneliness in schools increased sharply in 36 out of 37 countries around the world from 2012 to 2019. In English-speaking countries, that rate has doubled. And these statistics don’t even account for the multiplier effect of 18 months of separation, fear, loss, and anxiety created by the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged after the research was complete.

At N4, we are fortunate that our mission puts us at the forefront of helping students build the skills that lead to connection instead of isolation. We allow empathy instead of apathy. We first saw the need for our programs in 2008, when the National Endowment for the Arts released their “Reading at Risk'' report, detailing declining reading rates among youth and the correlated negative effects on engagement in “civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.” This report, along with Van Kleef’s empathy-focused “Power Distress, and Compassion,” shaped the vision behind our organization.

Technology can be an exacerbating factor for challenges like loneliness and apathy, but we believe it also offers 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 Re-Engaging Learners Challenge, we are looking to solve the gaps in the education sector for meaningful social-emotional learning opportunities, and to increase their engagement with their classrooms, communities, and among a global network. Ultimately, we want to address the empathy gap and foster global understanding by building a high-quality digital learning environment.

N4’s solution is a digital platform and global classroom for students and educators to connect through empathy-building programs. In June 2022, we will launch our secure and robust content management system and website that will provide a superior user experience and enable easy access to our programs, resources, and training. The platform will serve as N4’s hub for global connection and student-led change.

The platform will drive a new kind of digital connectivity, built on a foundation of radical empathy, to help young people step outside of their mindsets to understand the perspectives of those who are different than they are. It will significantly expand our network—and increase our depth of relationship with it—so we can equitably and sustainably transform the education sector and develop compassionate and civically engaged leaders. The platform will anchor and underpin our mission achievement and the participant journey, from the entry point of a story exchange to our comprehensive programming mix

Through the platform, we will:

1. Scale the story exchange. The platform will provide a safe virtual space for high-school-aged students and educators to participate in our core methodology—the story exchange. It will accelerate our efforts to globally scale this evidence-based practice (as verified by University of Chicago and Yale University studies) to impact as many students as possible. By expanding digitally, we will transcend geographic constraints to reach students and educators who are under-connected and underserved by SEL opportunities, increasing the equity of our programs. Further, the platform’s data capabilities will improve our ability to track performance standards in order to increase efficiency and maximize impact.

2. Close the gaps faced by young learners in developing social-emotional learning skills. Our platform will serve as a high-quality digital learning environment to address the empathy gap. Through it, educators will have access to our arts-based learning resources, professional development, and N4 facilitator training. These tools will allow for students’ continued engagement with N4 programs beyond the story exchange to sustain empathy increases over the long term. We will provide a thoughtfully-designed forum for meaningful connection between students and their classrooms, communities, our Artist Network, and a global community to foster global understanding. These SEL pathways will build upon our success in instilling the value of diversity within participants. According to our story exchange participant surveys, 83% of participants appreciate diversity more after participating in a story exchange.

3. Integrate access to action by embedding community-engaged learning and civic action into the curricula of schools worldwide. Our platform will serve as a digital home for global change—a place where students from across the world can connect and host campaigns to inspire change in their communities. We will facilitate opportunities for students to lead and support hands-on community service projects that help partner communities in need. This arm of the platform will represent the culmination of N4’s empathy-building programs – inspiring tangible action and reaffirming the conviction that we can navigate and heal our divided world by acting together.

Our solution will primarily serve high school-aged students and their educators. Through our mission—to use the power of stories, art, and education to equip young people to become powerful forces of change in society—we aim to fulfill the promise of today’s young adults as tomorrow’s leaders. Our work to date has demonstrated that high school students are at an impressionable age, eager to engage with society, and open to absorbing the lessons of empathy and compassion. Sowing the seeds of compassion and empathy now will create whole generations of young leaders who will lead and live with understanding and civic-mindedness.

By harnessing the power of stories, we build capacity for compassion and 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 this innate power and implements intentional practices to slowly build empathy, ensuring that individuals from different identities see one another as whole and complex beings and not as a “single narrative,” representatives of an ideology, or mere caricatures. Once we form this emotional bridge, we are 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 retell 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 will see the world, 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 right after doing story exchanges. Lower-baseline empathy students maintained those immediate gains after ten days, and all students saw their partner as more similar to themselves. Additionally, since partnering with N4, one school has reported increased attendance rates, increased graduation rates, and decreased suspension rates.

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 the 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 launch process to ensure we meaningfully incorporate their feedback.

While the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the communities we work with and our own team in many ways, it also gave us space and time to test program delivery in a virtual format, and our online programming (such as virtual story exchanges, online workshops and training, etc.) proved to be very successful. We designed a survey to evaluate the impact of our virtual programming, and the results were promising: 93% of respondents agreed that they feel a deeper empathic concern for others during this tumultuous time and 89% of participants reported that they felt a motivation towards positive action in their communities. These results affirm that our empathy-building programs translate well into the digital realm and that our impact and reach could be dramatically increased with a unique digital platform. 

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.

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.

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 will anchor our mission achievement in a short amount of time as a driving force across all of our programs. This tool will serve as a conduit for virtual story exchanges, a thoughtfully designed forum for global connectivity, and an entry point for all story exchange participants.

Narrative 4 underwent robust planning and groundwork-building over the last two years in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which we identified our path to substantial growth over the next several years in terms of impact, reach, and program mix. Building on nearly 10 years of experience, we are primed to dramatically increase our global growth in time for our 10th anniversary. By 2026, in North America alone, we plan to reach 500K students in 1,100+ schools. Ultimately, the programs delivered through our digital platform will promote positive relationships between students and teachers, address students’ SEL needs, create a global classroom when students connect to other communities, and increase civic engagement through community-engaged learning.

We have established several quantitative measures by which we’ll measure progress for our work in its entirety over the next year. In 2022 alone, we aim to introduce the N4 story exchange to 200 institutional partners, through which more than 92,872 stories will be exchanged with approximately 15,480 students, and 1,290 educators will become N4 facilitators. 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, and we anticipate that every program participant will be part of the digital platform once it launches.

Our solution is built upon N4’s theory of change that through the exchange of personal narratives, youth will see the world, themselves, and one another more empathetically, and therefore be more willing to act compassionately. We enact this theory of change through our core methodology, the story exchange. The story exchange is based on a simple idea backed by reputable research and cutting-edge neuroscience: If I can hear your story deeply enough to retell it in my own words as if it happened to me, and you can do the same for my story, then we will have seen the world through each other’s eyes. Our story exchange methodology builds community and helps individuals to walk towards one another and find common ground. Though seemingly simple—you tell my story in the first person, and I tell yours—research demonstrates that our method enables participants to practice empathy in real time. The digital platform will allow us to scale these results and our impact, while increasing our ability to reach communities outside of the geographic proximities in which we currently work. 

Studies conducted by the University of Chicago and Yale University support this hypothesis. 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 right after doing story exchanges. Lower-baseline empathy students maintained those immediate gains after ten days, and all students saw their partner as more similar to themselves. Additionally, since partnering with N4, one school has reported increased attendance rates, increased graduation rates, and decreased suspension rates.

Our solution will be powered by a combination of existing advanced digital technologies to drive a high-quality user experience and engagement. Over the last several months, we completed our digital audit that includes integrating and customizing five SaaS (software as a solution) platforms. The digital platform will combine utility (useful service with repeat use, asset created by repeat engagement), interaction (linked to identity and specific group engagement), and content crowdsourcing (initially by N4 but to eventually include user-generated content). We are now in the implementation phase of the development to prepare the platform to deliver on the value proposition and individual, school, and community-level impacts once it launches in June 2022.

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.

In addition to our programming, we are committed to advancing equity by creating an open, diverse, inclusive, and equitable internal environment. We are proud that our staff and board makeup represent diverse backgrounds; 12 of our 25 global staff are people of color (five senior positions), and 18 are women (six senior positions). We have created a values document that articulates the culture we aim to maintain and implemented a board-approved DE&I plan to keep staff accountable. In 2022, we will work with Pope Consulting—experts specializing in diversity, inclusion, and culture change for over four decades—to ensure we live into our commitment. These experts will help us develop a full DE&I strategy, to include a DE&I maturity analysis, strategy workshop, action plan, and company-wide training.

Narrative 4 is a nonprofit mission-driven organization that provides significant value to high school-aged students and educators through our radical empathy-building programs. Our value proposition is our ability to equitably meet students’ social and emotional needs, inspire civic engagement, and transform the education sector.

As previously discussed, the key method through which N4 has delivered value to date has been through our core methodology, the story exchange. The story exchange is seemingly simple, but one that has led to transformational changes among students, schools, and at the community level. 

We know the story exchange is a proven model, and one that is in high demand as evidenced by our rapid growth and reach. As such, it’s our responsibility to ensure that our impact endures and branches outside of the walls of the classroom and the individual with comprehensive programming offerings to meet the needs that have been elevated to us by students and educators. We will continue to provide value by:

• Developing and implementing Learning Modules to ensure that our resources are deeply embedded in classroom curricula and community action programs. We will continue to convert books written by renowned authors into learning resources, with content co-created by authors, educators, and students and delivered by teachers in classrooms.

• Building our Artist Network and integrating these experts across our programs. Our global Artist Network of world-renowned authors and musicians creatively contribute their greatest skills by developing materials and engaging with students.

• Formalizing our community-engaged learning projects to inspire civic engagement and tangible action. We will inspire our network to lead and support hands-on community service projects that help partner communities in need, inspire civic engagement among students, and reaffirm the conviction that we can navigate and heal our divided world by acting together.

Narrative 4 has become one of the education sector’s most impactful change-makers, and we will continue to harness our momentum to spark collaborative change and build empathetic leaders.

As a nonprofit organization, we fund our work thanks to the generosity of major donors, foundations, and philanthropists. We are grateful that our budget continues to substantially increase alongside our efforts to scale up. Between 2019 and 2020, we increased our annual expense budget by 28% (from $1.66M to $2.13M), and again by 54% between 2020 and 2021 (from $2.13M to $3.3M). For 2022, we have projected an even bigger increase of 24% (from $3.3M to $4.1M). We are confident in our upcoming plans to increase fundraising efforts and diversify our revenue sources to ensure we have the resources necessary to deliver on our goals moving forward. We also continue to build strategic alliances with partner organizations, companies, and leaders to tee up N4 to the point where, with the proper partnerships in place, our impact and reach are primed to scale in a short amount of time.

Over the past several years, we have secured grant revenue from funders including the Bezos Family Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation, Moriah Fund, and Stand Together Foundation. We are also thrilled to be one of the initial round of 116 nonprofits worldwide selected by philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to receive a substantial multi-year, unrestricted gift after a deep vetting process to our high potential for impact. We are actively fundraising for grants and donations to support our solution, which we anticipate will cost $5 million over the next five years.