University System of New Hampshire

The University of New Hampshire Durham will expand its open and interactive online empathy training module to include its target audience of library and museum leaders and workers across the nation. The module will highlight the experiences of marginalized populations who visit libraries and museums, provide tools for workers to minimize compassion fatigue, and provide strategies, exercises, and opportunities for social and institutional empathy to address social inequities in the wake of a global pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored structural and social inequities and has placed many ethnic and racial minority populations, who hold essential jobs and are unable to practice safe social distancing, at the front lines of infection risk. Libraries and museums, as centers of community, education, and exploration, must be equipped to respond empathetically and mindfully to their diverse communities as they begin to reopen their buildings while maintaining physical and virtual services amid the pandemic.