“Spark your empathy!” – a series of talks to eradicate discrimination

Even though we at the Ombudsman’s Office have been working with discrimination issues for a long time, we see that the relevance of the topic does not disappear. People are more likely to pay attention, speak up and try to deal with situations where someone is discriminated against because they are in some way slightly different from the “majority”. We don’t like it. We know and are convinced that all people are equal in their rights. Discrimination is not allowed. Human dignity and rights apply equally to everyone.

“Spark your empathy!” – we present an unprecedented, multifaceted, educational, acceptance-stimulating series of ten talks. It will include stories of people’s experiences about how they live in a world that tends to ignore people, a world that tends to mock or fear the different, a world that lacks understanding and acceptance. They speak to encourage others to speak up, they speak to show that we are all a little different, but we are equal, they speak so that you can also speak up and stand up for those who sometimes cannot defend themselves.

To brighten up the conversations and give them a modern flavour, we asked the artificial intelligence ChatGPT to share the most popular stereotypes about different signs of discrimination. Later, we derived questions from these stereotypes for our guests to answer. Conversations are interesting, they help us feel, see, hear, and think about the negative attitude, which is deeply rooted in the society and often even absurd. The moderator of these conversations is a socially active, purposeful, sincere future lawyer Patricija Anna Vavilova. Two other people join her for each topic, sometimes these are two similar experiences, sometimes – very different. What is especially important – conversations are not about other people, conversations are with people. Together, we will spark each other’s empathy for such types of discrimination as mental disorders, nationality, age, language, hearing impairment, sexual orientation, visual impairment, gender, religion, and social status.

Videos of these series are availabe on the Youtube channel of the Ombudsman’s Office.

All videos are in Latvian with a possibility to choose Latvian or English subtitles.