2021-07-18 Bristol UK

Empathy Tent/Stall Report

Location - Hotwells, Bristol

Date: July 18th 2021

A Brief Report by Katrina with some contributions from Aaron

We were invited to hold an Empathy Tent at a Health and Wellbeing event in one of the most heavily polluted (particulates and Nox) parts of Bristol. This was billed as a chance for the local community to regroup and reconnect after the pandemic. The organiser liked the idea of helping people to share feelings with each other through the Empathy Circle model.

It was the first time I’ve organised such a thing so I spoke at length to Edwin and Lou about the best approach and decided the best way was to keep it simple. In the back of my mind was the fact that it could get cancelled at the last moment.

From the Empathy Circle online group, I enlisted one volunteer, Aaron and he recruited two more. Unfortunately, one of them had to cancel due to catching Coronavirus prior to the event.

In the end there were 3 of us which was an okay number as the event was quite low key.

What worked:

Short Empathy Quiz – this was a great way to get people interested and engaged with us

Longer Empathy Quiz – quite a few wanted to do the longer quiz and seemed to really get it.

Having chairs for people to sit and chat and do their quiz was appealing to people.

Only offered to one person but listening to public but 10 mins too long maybe, and they also wanted a go at reflecting. So maybe 3 minute goes.

Having the resources from Edwin and watching the “How to” videos he’s posted made it much easier to plan and put into action

What didn’t work:

We had to share a space with the Clean Air Alliance which made it a bit cramped (but it was good to have the cross fertilisation).

We didn’t get to hold a circle – having only 2 trained facilitators would have made this tricky and also there wasn't the space.

To do with the quiz: Someone mentioned that the faces in the quiz could be more diverse in terms of race. Also, some of the ‘emotions’ are verbs rather than feelings.

Both Aaron and I felt the scoring for the Empathy Quiz was a bit out of kilter - I.e., if you got all 36 right it was classified as “Quite Good”. Is this a case of British reserve or just that no one can have enough empathy?

What was fun/what we learned:

Sharing the idea of empathy circles and engaging with the public about how powerful a more empathic culture could be.

Providing the service of listening and giving people the lived experience of being heard.

One of the people taking the quiz was really interested because he had had to do something similar when he applied to join the police force (but he failed) – we had no idea that this was a requirement for joining the police.

I made A5 flyers instead of business cards – they worked okay. If I was to organise more events getting cards printed might be worthwhile.

What we would do differently next time

Maybe laminate the pictures of the eyes used for the short quiz – they blew about a lot in the wind and we had to stick them down with tape. (NB Ask Edwin how he got round this issue.)

It was quite tricky to get the pictures of eyes printed out because of the US layout. As I don’t have access to a printer, I sent the links to a local printer for printing. He was unable to open the original document without messing up the layout – we got round this by Edwin creating a PDF file for the document.

NB It cost around £10 to pay for all the printing so it would be good to re-use it rather than throw it away.

It would be good to set up a tent in a location like the Bristol University or Uni of West of England (UWE) on Freshers Day for example.