So nice to see you all. I'll screen share so we can get ourselves started. It's a fairly big topic to talk through in the amount of time that we have that will go a little quickly, and I'll do my best. Is everyone able to see the screen right now? Perfect. All right, so in terms of shaping the next generation and providing them with the skills to employ empathy when they're able, some of what we'll talk about is about schools, but more holistically, it's an enormous thing. If we're shaping schools, then we need, of course, to be shaping society, because we're trying to shape how kiddos are engaging with the world around them. It's inherently going to be a little complicated, because it's a holistic discussion. We'll break it up into two pieces. The first is structural support. So what does it mean for empathy to be part of the infrastructure of schools, and then the second is student support. The frame being that empathy is a human right. We should all be able to activate empathy, and in order to do that, we'll need to make some shifts. If we're talking about empathy as infrastructure. We need first, for the people who are responsible for teaching empathy to be able to experience that empathy. Teachers aren't able, of course, to be able to be empathetic leaders, empathetic guides. If empathy isn't a part of their daily experiences, if schools are underfunded, under supported, unsafe places to be and adults aren't explicitly supported, we can't expect teachers to be able to hold those empathetic spaces. It's just not a possible thing. We need to be supporting each educator as they move through their lives. Right now, the current social emotional landscape in terms of programs in the United States, there are other countries that do this much more solidly. Australia is a really clear example of this. There are northern European countries that are doing this really nicely, where social emotional work is just embedded into students programming in a way that feels really holistic. Our current social emotional landscape is much tighter and there's much less space that's currently allowed in institutions for social emotional work. So right now, often social emotional programs are targeted so they're in singular spaces within schools like now you have some social, emotional time, and it's bracketed as an individual thing, and it excludes adults. So usually it's the program for kiddos. It's great that it's for kiddos. So Dr Darling's points were wonderful. This is what we need, and we need more of it. So ideally, what we have is holistic programming that extends throughout an institution and is part of students' constant experience, not just standalone programming, and it's programming that's inclusive of adults, not just teachers, but also staff members, administrators, parents, caretakers. Everyone needs to be able to experience what it's like to really be seen, heard, supported, in order to be able to model that for kiddos. If programs continue to be siloed in individual places, in schools, students experiences with empathy. Programs really just rely on whatever number of minutes that day or week or month or often just even a year, if that's all they get is feels really tenuous that one program has to be dramatically powerful for a kid to be able to internalize and then manifest what they've learned in every other moment of their lives. Much more effective is if it's just part of their experience constantly, if we help to make it like water for them as little fishies. So if we are going beyond individual protocols, individual protocols like empathy circle are beautiful and necessary. They're profound things that we need in our world. And it's not just positive affirmation that's going to form students brains and our own brains. So for example, I'm on the third point down right now, positively experiencing an empathy circle is really important, but also being able to access empathy and negative experiences is important too, because the negative experiences are going to wire their brains much more quickly than the positive experience as well. That's how we survive as a species. For students, social connection, especially social connection during individuation, when they're starting to establish a separate sense of self, a sense of self as distinct from their families of origin, is enormous. So to make it so those social interactions happen in ways that are ideal or repair can happen in ways that are ideal. Students have to be supported. Kids have to be well supported. And we'll come back to some of this in a little bit. I just want to note, there is often conversation. About teacher quality, and it feels like it's important in my role as an ambassador to educators to combat that a little bit the pipeline in terms of talent for teachers, specifically in public schools, remains really consistent. There was a slight drop off during the pandemic, as there was with many things. So fewer people applying to be teachers, fewer teachers who are available for hire, and those numbers have since come back. Teacher Quality is really multi dimensional, multi factorial. It's a complicated thing, so I don't mean to be too reductive with this, but just if we're looking at tangible measurements of quality of employable educators, if anything, if we are looking at data since the 2000 10s, including the pandemic era, and so bringing us back now to sort of the current era of how things are in 2025 research finds that new teachers academic caliber is improving. If we're looking at sat and AC T scores, people intending to be educators and who are becoming educators, skipping down to the final point. Now the one point that counters this a little bit is just that it can be hard sometimes during licensure, for teachers to pass on the first try licensing tests. And so ideally, we have teachers who are able to pass on the first try, maybe preparing a little more. But all in all, teacher caliber is strong. Structures for teachers, though, tend to be a little bit weak. Teachers are trying to be teachers in spite of the fact that there are many factors against them. And I think this is important for us to keep in mind all the time. If you are becoming a teacher, you are in it for the income, not in it for the sorry, opposite. You are not in it for the income. You are in it for the outcome. These are people who are doing the most important work, in my opinion, that they can possibly do against enormous risks, so risks of school shootings, which are enormous, identity harassment, particularly for people whose identities are marginalized, which creates professional and personal risk, political profession, political pressure, so that that material and classes that has always been standard is becoming increasingly politicized. Low pay, cost of living, gaps, making it hard to buy housing in places where people often teach, staffing shortages, which puts enormous amount of pressure and enormous hours on teachers plates, burnout, lost autonomy, mental health, strain, enormous pressures for teachers. Still, teachers and great teachers are doing the work. People who are facilitators are people who are coming in with really strong hearts, who are caring about kiddos, and I'm spending some of our very precious time on this point because of the fact that it can be really easy in political conversations which education is, and education, in many ways, is inherently political, to forget about the role of who teachers are. Beyond just being teachers themselves, they are people who care very deeply about kids and are willing to risk a lot. I'm making that point because one of the only ways to make the empathy movement work in schools holistically is to advocate politically on teachers behaves on behalf of schools themselves. And so it feels worth spending a little time to think about how it is that teachers are actually living in their lives, afraid, often of being shot in their classrooms as a first point of most importance, afraid that their identities might be outed and that they and their families might be at risk, their livelihoods might be at risk, which is a secondary point, etc, so that we can know that these are people who are often literally putting their lives on the lines to help kids, and what that means is that we can put some political capital, sometimes donation dollars, on the line to be able to help them do the work of creating empathy in schools. Every teacher has energetic responsibility in their classroom space, and what that means is that the teacher is the center of the energy. All of the energy starts with the teacher, and all of the energy lands with the teacher. If the teacher is having an off day, the kiddos are having an off day. It is often just that simple. What that means is that if a teacher is coming into a classroom space without the supports they need to be able to access their fullest self, their most empathetic and available self, then the kids aren't going to have that modeled for them, and the kids won't experience the feeling of being met in a really deep way. We want the kids to know what it is like to have grown ups who are really holding them the way they deserve to be held. And the way to make that happen is to support the grown ups who are responsible for doing that work. I'll argue always that empathy is a human right, and so we're moving to the second section of things, not just empathy as infrastructure, but empathy is something that kiddos really deserve to feel all the time. Kids need to have us as emotional regulators. We know this is true when they are tiny little people and they are toddlers. It is still very true when they are big people, and they are in college, and it's true for us, not even as kids. We need to have our emotions met and held by other people who are emotionally capable of doing exactly that, and the only way to do that is to make that feeling available for the people who are responsible doing the holding if we want to equip the next generation. And with the ability to experience empathy, to live empathetically, to employ empathy in their lives, we have to protect their peace and model empathy for them. So the path is doing those two things, protect the peace that they have and model the empathy as adults. A big part of this is making sure that kids are not on screens, ideally at all,