100 People Listening: A Shared Decade is a unique citywide commission. 100 strangers from across Philadelphia’s racial, economic, social, and political landscape have committed themselves to listen to one another in ten structured conversations over the course of a decade.
These listeners are guided in this work by four listening advocates, each of whom are experts in different approaches to empathetic listening. The 100 listeners are documenting their extraordinary and everyday experiences in specially designed notebooks that will be accessioned by the Philadelphia Free Library in 2031. These testimonies, ten years in the making, document the journeys each of these leaders in listening have taken at this unprecedented time in our country.
A citywide public awareness campaign devoted to the civic value of empathetic listening complements the annual conversations.
