Posted by Sydney Dratel, Empathy Initiatives Imagine a virtual classroom full of kindergarteners staring at a Madagascar hissing cockroach. You might imagine grimaces and comments such as "Scary", "Gross!" or "Freaky". However, by the end of such a session with the 6-legged critter, not a single one of the 154 students who participated expressed a negative or even neutral emotion about this bug. They even said they would be happy to see the cockroach and would help it if it was in danger! Why? Because staff focused on building empathy for the cockroach by working with the students to name her 'Sophia'. This project was just one of Woodland Park Zoo’s pilot round grants to build organizational capacity to foster empathy in partner zoos and aquariums. Did you know that Woodland Park Zoo has a team in our Learning & Innovation department dedicated to developing and carrying out a range of Empathy Initiatives? Empathy is a powerful emotion that dr...