AE Grant Showcase 2024: Community-Relevant Empathy Infrastructure – Amplify Empathy

Zoological Society present on their projects: Building Community-Relevant Empathy for Wildlife (CREW) Infrastructure, and Amplify Empathy: Volunteer Impact on Public & Zoo Employees. The first project developed a community-focused program design process and organization-wide evaluation framework to ensure their offerings achieved their vision of fostering empathy for wildlife and provided culturally responsive learning spaces. The second project enhanced the ZSM Zoo Pride volunteer program by restructuring the program to amplify empathy as an organizational value. Empathy leaders were recruited and trained on key aspects of empathy for wildlife and used this knowledge to model the ways empathy can consistently and intentionally be incorporated into volunteer roles when engaging with the public among other things to enhance the volunteer program.