Creative Mornings Louisville: How to design change with empathy

On September 25, Anchal's Co-Founder & CEO, Colleen Clines, spoke at the Louisville chapter of Creative Mornings  on the month's theme of empathy. If you haven’t heard of Creative Mornings , it is a breakfast lecture series for the for creative community that was started by Tina Roth-Eisenburg of Swiss-Miss.

Below you can watch the full video of Colleen's talk, but we wanted to share just a few of the major highlights here on the blog.

Colleen began the morning by sharing her passion for designing change and inviting us to learn about her journey of infusing empathy into her creative practice and eventually the Anchal Project; a journey Colleen described as a bumpy wooden roller coaster. It was important for Colleen to begin at a place of honesty and not just point out a list of achievements. Rather she wanted to acknowledge the difficulties and failures along her journey. In her words, "it is easy to come up with ideas, but important to take action on them."

Through all the bumps, twists and flips of her wooden roller coaster, Colleen remained true to knowing she had a great idea and thus was persistent. The success is shown in the impact made in the lives of the women Anchal works with. Colleen believes, "in order to have impact, we must activate empathy." With this belief, the Anchal Team continues to embed empathy into their daily work and mission.

In closing, Colleen challenged her audience to embed empathy into their every day practice to design the change the world needs! We leave you with the same challenge as well as Colleen's 5 tips on how to design change with empathy:

1. Keep your process human centered
2. Take action
3. Don't be afraid to fail
4. Be persistent
5. Be empathetic in your every day consumption

We hope you enjoy the talk and feel free to leave a comment for any further questions. Also, a big thank you to Creative Mornings and Ben Terry for inviting Colleen to speak at this month's event. Check out more photos from the event and visit the website to learn more about Creative Mornings.