Hour of Empathy

In 2022, “Hour of Empathy” started in Cascais, in a first phase covering around 600 students of 5th and 6th grade , as part of the Cascais City Council’s mental health promotion program. The following year, thanks to the support of the Lisbon City Council’s Bip Zip Program, Associação Ser Mudança and AASPS extended the Empathy Hour to Lisbon, covering students from the 1st to the 6th grades. In the two years of the pilot project, the intervention reached more than 1,300 children and young people, around a hundred teachers and many parents, who gained emotional skills and trained a “superpower” capable of changing the world: Empathy. Every week throughout the school year, through the participatory techniques of dramatic expression, students train empathy, a type of intelligence that connects us to others, making us more creative, more resilient, healthier, happier and more socially integrated. Students with empathy develop active listening, self-knowledge, self-love, compassion, ethics and become seeds of transformation in school, family and social environments. For scientific validation and impact assessment, the project has the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon (ISAMB) and ISCTE (CRIA) as partners.

If you think this project could make a change in your school, please contact us: geral@sermudanca.pt.