About the Nonprofit
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Bags Against Bullies will bring empathy education into classrooms and combat bullying at its core. Empathy Rocks is eight 45 minute lessons, one per month, that teach children about empathy through recent events in the United States. Students learn about what happened, and how empathy helped heal and solve problems afterward. At the end of each lesson they complete an art project, and after the final lesson a service learning project. With bullying on the rise in U.S. schools and increasingly diverse classrooms and communities, the need for empathy has never been more important. Each year, more than 3.2 million students are bullied, while an estimated 160,000 students miss school for fear of being bullied.
Bullying hurts everyone. It hurts the educational environment by affecting every child's ability to learn, it can cause lifelong anxiety and depression for victims, while others experience thoughts of suicide or self-harm.
· 1 in 10 kids drop out of school due to bullying
· Over 70% of kids say bullying is a problem
· 81% of bullying goes unreported
· In over 77% of aggressive incidents, bystanders did not intervene
After one year of the program:
· 100% of teachers reported an increase in kids acting empathetically without prompting
· 100% of teachers said students had more respect for people who are different from them
· 96% of teachers say they saw an improvement in classroom climate
· 87% of teachers reported a decrease in bullying
· 96% of students said they felt they learned something of value and will consider more other people’s feelings
Because most bullying goes unreported, and so few kids intervene when witnessed, we have to empower children to help one another bring an end to bullying. If you have empathy for someone, and care about how they feel, it makes it extremely difficult to intentionally hurt them. Empathy is part of emotional education and teaching children to think of the way others feel helps them to develop empathy. The more kids learn kindness now, the more kind adults there will be in the future.
