Despite living in an increasingly connected world, loneliness and social isolation are prevalent issues today. While social robots have been explored as tools to enhance social connection through companionship, their potential as asynchronous social platforms for mediating empathetic exchanges between humans has received less attention. In this work, we introduce a one-on-one social support companion that facilitates the exchange of emotionally relevant stories and employs narrative therapy techniques to enhance feelings of connection and belonging. We investigate how the robot’s delivery impacts connection and empathy – specifically how the robot serving as a social proxy facilitating human stories, passing stories from other human narrators to the user, versus adopting stories as its own impacts interaction outcomes. To this end, we conduct a real-world deployment of 40 robot stations in users’ homes and find that participants have significantly higher compassionate love towards humanity and empathize more with stories told by a robot that serves as a social proxy as opposed to adopting stories as its own. Our work contributes to the development of social robot systems that serve as social platforms to enhance human-human empathy and connection.