Narrative 4’s Global Learning Lab and 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. The U.S. Surgeon General recently declared rebuilding social connection to be a top public health priority in the U.S., and stated that “social disconnection is associated with reduced productivity in the workplace, worse performance in school, and diminished civic engagement.”

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.

Our work to date has helped us understand the need to bring this focus to the forefront, and how intrinsically linked social-emotional skills and civic engagement truly are. According to a 2018 study of 2,500 students, those with greater social and emotional skills—like empathy, emotion regulation,  and moral reasoning—reported higher civic engagement (Metzger et al.). Being more empathic  correlated to increased volunteerism, willingness to help neighbors, environmentalism, political  involvement, and other socially responsible activities. In fact, Forbes magazine recently named empathy “the most important leadership skill,” citing research on positive impacts on innovation, engagement, and inclusivity.

Technology can be an exacerbating factor for challenges like loneliness, but we believe it also offers a solution. By building a Global Learning Lab underpinned by a vision of global connection and understanding, we will harness technology to address the global empathy divide. Within the Learning for Civic Action Challenge, we are looking to solve the gaps in the education sector for meaningful opportunities to practice the skills that are foundational to civic action, and to increase students’ engagement with their classrooms, communities, and among a global network. Ultimately, our solution is a high-quality digital learning environment that will build students’ social-emotional and civic skills simultaneously, while providing access to tangible action in their communities and communities across the world.

Narrative 4’s Global Learning Lab, a digital platform, will connect students and educators through social-emotional learning, community-engaged learning, and civic action programs. We soft-launched the platform in September 2022. The new website (content management system) and the platform (integration of 5 SaaS platforms) are publicly available, and we are in the process of collecting feedback from teachers and students before the official, public unveiling later in 2023. The platform will serve as N4’s hub for global connection and student-led change.

The Global Learning Lab 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 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 our core methodology. The platform provides a safe virtual space for high-school-aged students and educators to participate in our core methodology—the story exchange. It will help to accelerate our efforts to globally scale this evidence-based practice to impact as many students as possible. By expanding digitally, we have transcended geographic constraints to reach students and educators who are under-connected and underserved by SEL opportunities, increasing our programs’ equity. Further, the platform’s data capabilities have improved our ability to track performance standards for efficiency and impact.

2. Close the gaps faced by young learners in developing social-emotional and civic skills. Our platform serves as a high-quality digital learning environment to address the empathy gap. Through it, educators have access to our arts-based learning resources, professional development, and N4 facilitator training. These tools allow for students’ continued engagement with N4 programs beyond the story exchange to sustain increases in social-emotional and civic skills over the long term. We provide a thoughtfully-designed forum for meaningful connection between students and their classrooms, communities, our Artist Network, and a global community. These SEL pathways build upon our success in instilling the value of diversity within participants. According to 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 vision is for the platform to 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. Eventually, we will use it to 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 community-engaged learning programs – inspiring tangible action and reaffirming the conviction that we can navigate and heal our divided world by acting together.

Our solution primarily serves high school-aged students and their educators. Our mission is to build a global community of compassionate youth by bringing joy, sparking imagination, and fostering meaningful connections. Through this mission, we equip young people to become powerful forces of change in society and 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. Additionally, since partnering with N4, one school has reported increased attendance rates, increased graduation rates, and decreased suspension rates.

External research indicates that students with greater social-emotional skills, like empathy, had higher levels of civic engagement. Anecdotally, we have seen this research play out from the individual student level all the way up to school-level community action projects through Empathy-into-Action (EIA) campaigns, our quasi-pilot community-engaged learning program. Each EIA project has functioned as a “campaign” driving hands-on service projects to help partner communities in need. The projects not only inspire tangible civic action in the short term, they also ensure that empathy increases for our program participants are sustainable. They foster conversations about challenging social issues and amplify the stories of impacted communities. We have seen this story come to life, time and again.

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.

Ly Lo Cong, N4’s Global Director of Information Technology, oversees the digital platform, and was also instrumental in developing it. Ly graduated from the University of Ottawa with a Computer Engineering Degree and from HEC Montreal with a Certificate in Business Management. He worked for 14 years in several digital agencies, during which he acquired a technical expertise that allows him to master both the coaching of technical teams and the support of business teams in all phases of a project. He has driven growth and innovation for a wide variety of companies through their digital and organizational transformation, and aligned their strategies with the company’s business goals.

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 continue to consult with key stakeholders about the Global Learning Lab as it evolves 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 Global Learning Lab will provide a unique, first-of-its-kind solution to combine hands-on civic action projects with social-emotional and civic skills learning by connecting students globally. 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 social-emotional and civic skills among students. Our Global Learning Lab will provide a unique, first-of-its-kind solution to combine hands-on civic action projects with social-emotional and civic skills learning by connecting students globally. The digital platform  expands our reach and ensures we continue to impact students and educators in underserved communities. It builds 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 has anchored our mission achievement in a short amount of time as a driving force across all of our programs. This tool serves 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 several 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 2023 alone, in North America, we aim to introduce the story exchange to 36K students in 240+ additional schools in North America to connect them globally and help develop their perspective and understanding. Through this, more than 210K stories will be exchanged and 2K educators will become N4 facilitators.

Our recently launched Impact Measurement Framework will significantly improve our ability to measure progress on individual, school, and community-level impacts. While many of our metrics have been focused on output measures — such as the number of students reached, educators trained, and stories exchanged — our ultimate aim is to grow and innovate our programs to significantly increase the positive impact on individual participants, and those they go on to impact. As such, in 2022, we partnered with experts at Measurement Resources Company to develop performance standards to increase our efficiency and maximize our impact. 

The Framework consists of a set of validated, research-informed performance measures aligned with N4’s logic model, and will answer critical questions related to both the quantity (effort) and quality (effect) of our work and investments in a timely manner. We have developed survey tools based on the Framework that are now being administered on our digital platform. The research driven through the Framework will allow us to test how our programs develop life skills based on N4 principles as shown below.

Within our Framework, we will track individual-level impact, including: indicators of self-understanding (encompassing meaningfulness of one’s life/story, sense of connectedness, and emotional intelligence); development of deep listening skills; and increased appreciation for diversity and willingness to seek out diversity. We will measure how these translate into action by tracking increased prosocial behavior and civic engagement among participants, using the following indicators: increased numbers of stakeholder civic engagement hours; increased rates of civic engagement among stakeholders; increased scores on measures of prosocial actions among stakeholders; and increased rates of stakeholder attendance to civic engagement initiatives organized by N4 and its partners.

Our hope is that by expanding N4’s body of research from our current evidence base (researchers with the University of Chicago and Yale University) and scope (in-person story exchange programs), we will uncover findings that can be disseminated in the field for further exploration and for use by partners.

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 and engage civically. 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 allows 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 is powered by a combination of existing advanced digital technologies to drive a high-quality user experience and engagement. We integrated and customized five SaaS (software as a solution) platforms. The digital platform combines 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).

In the face of racial injustice and growing economic disparity, we became more confident of the need to deliver on our mission and help heal our divided world by shaping today’s young adults into compassionate, civically engaged leaders. We are incredibly proud that our story exchanges continue to have a measurable, positive impact in instilling the value of diversity and equity within individual participants. According to story exchange participant surveys, 83% of participants appreciate diversity after having participated in a story exchange

In addition to our programming, we are committed to advancing equity by creating an open, diverse, inclusive, and equitable internal environment. 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 continued to 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 helped all staff complete Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion training, and at the leadership level, we underwent strategy development and goal setting sessions. We have also hired a Director of Employee Experience and Engagement who will oversee our DEI work internally and externally.

Narrative 4 is a nonprofit mission-driven organization that provides significant value to high school-aged students and educators through our programs, which combine the power of education, art, and action. 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.

We are humbled and honored to share, confidentially, that the Foundation has recently committed to a Leadership Gift of $25 million. With this monumental investment, we are set to launch a comprehensive, five-year growth and innovation campaign in Fall 2023 in celebration of our upcoming 10-year anniversary. We have an ambitious, yet achievable campaign goal of $50M in 5 years with a dual focus on:

• GROWTH: Scaling the Story Exchange: $30M will be used to introduce the N4 story exchange to 500K NEW students in 1,100+ schools in North America over the next 5 years. This means that 3M+ stories will be exchanged and 19K+ educators will become N4 facilitators.

• INNOVATION: Piloting and Innovating Our Programs: $20M will be used to evolve our comprehensive programming to strengthen and sustain the story exchange methodology and to help transform empathy into community action. 

We consider the Bezos Family Foundation’s gift to be a challenge grant, and are looking for key, mission-driven partners and philanthropists in the empathy and education sectors to join us in this crucial growth and innovation campaign ahead of the official, public campaign launch. We also have received campaign commitments from The Elizabeth Foundation and The Moriah Fund.