The Human Library® is a thought leader when it comes to HR Learning & Development and Inclusive Communication training. We work with companies, institutions and organisations who are committed to incorporating social understanding and cultural awareness as a part of their business model in relation to their workforce, partnerships, clients and customers.

The Human Library is a global, innovative, and hands-on learning platform. Our concept has been thoroughly tested and developed since 2000, hosting events on a weekly basis in local communities and very successfully in small to large corporate settings.

Our corporate and workplace services have a strong learned empathy focus and include single-day, conference, and festival events, management and staff training, and longer-term leadership development and corporate cultural change programs.

The Human Library is a new experiential approach to empathy and understanding training, tailored to your organisation’s needs. Our learning platforms offer a new way of approaching the breadth and depth of humanity through immersion in a direct conversation with people experiencing stigma, discrimination or misunderstanding because of their differences or experiences.

Depending on the size and needs of your company, we can bring our human books to you and host a reading-hall event and/or the training of an internal human bookshelf within your company. Building an internal workplace book depot enables our HL partners to run a program over longer periods of time, allowing for a wider spread and a more in-depth implementation. A book depot can be operated only in partnership with and under license from the Human Library Organization. This process helps to remove the barriers to an in-depth understanding of personal realities amongst peers.

With our curated corporate events and programs, the Human Library creates a safer braver space for open conversations with the goal of examining presumptions and conclusions, often drawn all too quickly about those different to oneself. Your coworker, next job applicant, customer or client, or someone sat next to you on your daily commute, might be seen as belonging to one of those groups.

Hundreds of events are hosted annually, and since 2016, we have begun to work more closely with corporate partners to develop a model that is efficient, adaptable and with excellent scalability. This allows us to render our services to companies like eBay, Haleon, IKEA, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Masco, Novo Nordisk, Smurfit Kappa, and Balfour Beatty.

It was a very enlightening experience for me. This was a great platform to be vulnerable and ask questions without fear. – Reader review, eBay

• Ensure that your approach to wellbeing, belonging, and inclusion in the workplace has the intersectionality that is conducive to building a safe, understanding environment for all members of staff.
• Gain a competitive advantage
  • New, and especially young workers of today choose to work for companies that have a strong CSR and/or social profile
  • Creativity and development thrive in a diverse environment
• When you bring the Human Library’s principles into your hiring practices, you will be able to look beyond the diagnosis, appearance and stigma and see the person and competencies behind that
• Strengthen your corporate culture – a better undeingrstanding of each other and your customers
• Play an active role in the UN Sustainable Development Goals

We understand the demand in the professional sector for learning methods that enable individuals and organisations to competently engage with and benefit from the variety of talent and experience in your workplace.

We know that working to create an open, inclusive, and accessible, work environment is a high priority for many corporations, associations, and authorities… and we know we can help.

Our corporate services are tailored to fit companies and organisations that are looking to work long-term with the Human Library learning platform as part of their Leadership Development work.

At the end of the day, regardless of one’s abilities/disabilities, beliefs, philosophy and so on, we’re all human – just people with feelings and hearing new perspectives today is both compelling and evidence of this. – Reader review, eBay

We offer two different options for corporate partnerships.

1. The Human Library Diversity Partners focusing on communications training and HR clients with an internal or external scope.
2. The Friends of the Human Library program is directed at companies looking for CSR projects with a big reach and high impact.

Often our partners are companies who are looking for new approaches to understanding the range of different experiences and thinking in their market or in their workplace.

Internal and external scope

To accommodate requests, we have developed a model for an internal focus and a model focusing on external scope and content.

This means we can either bring our human book collection to the workplace or conference and publish. Or we can train your staff and prepare them for internal publication. If you have a broad range of employees, then this can help them find common ground.

When you become a learning partner with the Human Library you are able to work with and implement the Human Library concept and methodology into your inclusion and communication work. This includes building on-board book collections based on staff and hosting dialogue and conversation events with either own-content or content rendered by a local Human Library Book Depot.