Seattle Aquarium is hiring 3, full time Empathy Fellows to join the community engagement (CE) team.  Empathy Fellows will have opportunities to learn about local marine life and conservation efforts, develop personal and professional goals, and become effective educators, facilitators, and advocates for marine conservation, empathy, and their communities. Fellows will culturally and linguistically reflect the community in which they will be working.

Throughout the course of a year as part of the grant-funded Expanding Empathy for our Marine Environment program, the Empathy Fellows will research, implement and present on individual Empathy Community Action Projects (ECAP) in order to apply all that they have learned to a real-world marine conservation related issue that impacts themselves and their community.

Empathy fellows will also support the marine education outreach programming the Community Engagement team provides to our Connections partners in the role of outreach educators, delivering empathy-based marine conservation programming within historically marginalized communities in the Salish Sea region. The empathy fellowship will begin in 2020 and follow a one-year cohort model with up to 3 fellows per year, with each fellow providing empathy programming within their communities.

The Empathy Fellowship is designed to create a pipeline into careers in aquariums, zoos and the conservation field for communities of color and other marginalized communities, who bear the brunt of environmental harm, and historically have not reaped the benefits of the solutions proposed. The empathy fellowship will offer job experience in the marine conservation field, with a focus on the role that empathy can play in both marine conservation and addressing the disproportional impact of environmental degradation on communities of color and other marginalized communities.

Following completion of the program, the Seattle Aquarium will offer wraparound services for alumni. These wraparound services include (but not limited to): support for attending empathy-related conferences, mentoring the next cohort of fellows, networking opportunities, and professional development planning. Participation in alumni wraparound services is encouraged but is not a requirement to participate in the fellowship itself. There are funds in the empathy project grant available to support participation in the alumni wraparound services beyond the one-year period of the fellowship.

Outcomes for Empathy Fellows:

• Fellows will increase their capacity as effective educators, facilitators and advocates for marine conservation
• Fellows will feel equipped and empowered to pursue careers or further learning in marine conservation, 
• Fellows use empathy for people and animals as a tool for environmental justice and marine conservation in their communities.