EMPATHY LABS
EMPATHY LABS
SOZO's multi-year national initiative to cultivate empathy and long term civic and cultural renewal
The first iteration of SOZO Empathy Labs is slated for 2027 activations in Oakland, Richmond, and Oklahoma.
SOZO Empathy Labs are culture-driven partnerships aligning artistic inquiry, artificial intelligence, and philanthropic resources in the name of public healing. SOZO believes that cultural centers are not only places for entertainment but spaces producing inspiration, which must be strategically harnessed and deployed as infrastructural material for civic good. Rooted in that belief, Empathy Labs reposition local cultural centers from places of witness to places of compassionate process.
Over the course of two years, SOZO collaborates with local cultural centers to address a specific fissure within local social ecosystems, creating spaces that function not only as conduits for empathy, but tactical centers addressing the toxicity of tribalism and apathy. Anchored by a creative triad consisting of a lab site artistic director, a lead local artist, and a SOZO Artist, the cultural center partners with local service agencies and the communities of need they serve, functioning as a creative hub for those on the edge of social stability. Throughout this process, which is designed and stewarded by SOZO Chief of Impact Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the collaborative partners center the development of a tailored programming matrix activating:
Artistic facilitation
Mental and emotional health services
Philanthropic and economic intelligence
Social service expertise
Simultaneously, each SOZO Empathy Lab yields a performance work of scale centering the voices of the local participants.
Measuring the success of each Lab is an evolving technology and metric system called the Apathy to Empathy Index (AEI). AEI is an AI powered tool that measures how successfully cultural centers are impacting community compassion and social cohesion, and creates a baseline for cultural centers to assess the ‘scalability’ of their inspiration quotient. The creation and implantation of this index is a radical and first step in the repositioning of art as civic material, and the reshaping of the public imagination as inspiration infrastructure towards the construction of an equitable future.
“Is it possible to harness public inspiration as a source of civic energy to power an empathic social future?”
ABOUT MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH
Marc Bamuthi Joseph is a TED Global Fellow, an Emerson Collective Dial Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In the Spring of 2022, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An internationally renowned cultural strategist, Bamuthi is the co-creator of the paradigm-shifting allyship training HEALING FORWARD™. He has lectured in 25 different countries and his TED talk “You Have The Rite” has been viewed more than five million times.
Bamuthi has most recently completed commissions for Yale University, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, The Minnesota Orchestra, The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the Washington National Opera. His new opera "Watch Night" with music by Tamar-kali and direction by Bill T. Jones premiered at PAC NYC in 2023, and his collaboration with NYC Ballet Associate Artistic Director Wendy Whelan "Carnival of the Animals" premiered at Meany Center, Seattle in 2024 and is currently touring. His most recent orchestral work “Good News Mass” with music by Carlos Simon will premiere with the LA Philharmonic in April 2025. His latest collaboration with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Forgiveness, had an album release in 2025 with Albany Symphony. Select works by Bamuthi are available for purchase and rental on SozoMart.com.
An emergent on screen talent, he is among the featured performers in HBO’s screen adaptation of “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehesi Coates. He is currently the Chief of Impact at SOZO. A proud alumnus of Morehouse College, Bamuthi received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts in the Spring of 2022 and was the recipient of a second Honorary Doctorate from Middlebury College in the Spring of 2023.
Photo Credit Bethanie Hines