This is one of the only studies in the country to document the sustained impacts of a community violence intervention program on city-wide firearm violence over more than 10 years.

According to lead author Alice Bruno, a doctoral student in epidemiology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, “we leveraged data from dozens of comparable cities across the United States to estimate what firearm violence would have looked like in Richmond without the ONS, Peacemaker Fellowship. We found that the Fellowship contributed to long-term reductions in violence, and that the declines only grew as the program operated.” Other UC Berkeley coauthors include Jason Corburn; Mahasin Mujahid, chair of the Division of Epidemiology; Sean Darling-Hammond; and Juan Cabrera.

Sam Vaughn, director of ONS, said, “The statistics back up what we have seen in the streets: fewer shootings, fewer deaths, and a healthier community overall.”

Homicide rates are down across the country; the FBI recently released data showing murder rates are down a record 18.1% nationally. However, Richmond has consistently outperformed national declines for over a decade, suggesting the results are due to that city’s innovative, street-outreach interventions and their mentorship of active firearm offenders, a program called Operation Peacemaker Fellowship, which was instituted in 2010. The Fellowship uses a public health approach to preventing gun violence.

According to James Houston, the program manager of the ONS who oversees the day-to-day implementation of the Peacemaker Fellowship, including managing 14 street-outreach workers who currently serve 123 participants, “the credit goes to the young people making better decisions and the team that gives them support, mentorship, and encouragement every day to make a change.”

According to Shasa Curl, Richmond city manager, Richmond had over 300 police officer full-time equivalent in 2014 and 180 in 2020, but was down to 121 active sworn officers by 2024. Yet during this time, the ONS, through continued city support and grants, was able to expand its staff and increase the number of fellows and participants. Even during the COVID-19 period, the study shows Richmond did not have as significant a spike in firearm violence as most cities did across the Bay Area and nationally.

According to the ONS, the health impacts are lives saved, safer streets, and community members with a renewed positive life outlook.

One former Peacemaker Fellowship participant said, “Before the ONS came to me, I didn’t care if I survived past 19, as long as I had a name in the streets. After my experience with the ONS, with my mentor coming at me every day, I got support for my stress, got a job, paying my bills, and have a kid now. I’m no longer terrorizing my community.”

The paper notes the cascading health benefits for entire communities when gun violence reductions are sustained, such as the case in Richmond. Further research will explore how unique aspects of the ONS might be contributing to declines in gun violence, including that the program is a city government agency, independent from the police department, has had consistent funding, has trained and retained many of the same outreach workers for over a decade (these city staff are well paid with benefits), and delivers individualized supports to each participant based on their needs, such as food and housing assistance, cognitive behavioral therapy, addiction and anger management counseling, and other social services aimed at both reducing gun violence risk and addressing trauma.

This article was originally published on Berkeley Public Health News. Read the original article.

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But, as someone who has lived and worked in large urban centers—New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Istanbul—I know firsthand that urban centers are also sites of human virtue. People in urban contexts, including those living in high-stress, oversurveilled, underresourced communities, draw daily from deep wells of love, compassion, empathy, kindness, and generosity in the service of caring for each other. From holding doors open for one another, to offering seats on buses and trains, to stopping to help with directions, to paying unexpected compliments, city-dwellers create environments that are saturated with powerful but easily missed acts of care. 

My former students and I have been eager to understand how love, generosity, and care manifest and operate in the hyperdiverse, densely populated, loud, fast-paced complexities of urban spaces. Through surveys and interviews, we have sought to understand how adults residing in big cities define love, how they see love being expressed, and their views of the cascading effects of giving and receiving care, generosity, and love. 

We have learned that the decision to express love and care for others in large cities is not simply a moral or emotional decision. We offer two examples of the lens needed to notice the presence of love in cities.

First, we have learned that identities matter in experiences of compassion, love, and care between strangers. Urban dwellers’ identity (for example, race or gender), lived experience, context, familial, cultural, and legal systems’ realities work together to shape decisions about whether to extend acts of love to people you do not know. For example, Kehinde, a 26-year-old African American man living in a large, densely populated city, described his experience of giving and receiving kindness, care, and love in his city as shaped by how he navigates other people seeing him as a Black man.

“I will see folks all the time that may need a hand with their bags or crossing the street or just little things like that. And I take a second, hesitate,” Kehinde says. “I don’t want to scare them. I don’t want to come off as a threat.”

To get through these moments, Kehinde describes engaging in a practice of analysis and shape-shifting. Before he steps in to offer help, he assesses the environment and changes the way he carries himself so that people will perceive him as a possible helper rather than as a threat. He says: “I smile a lot more. My voice might change a bit.” He might shrink his body and keep his head down, to avoid seeming intimidating. After helping someone, he moves along without lingering. Reflecting, he acknowledges not being his full, true self in these interactions. “I have to realize I’ve been socialized—made to believe that this is what I need to do in order to navigate the situation.”

Kehinde’s story highlights the point that identities matter in economies of care. The images and stereotypes that we construct about people come at a cost even in moments of compassion. Stereotypes affect who we perceive as deserving of care, concern, and protection. Stereotypes also inform our expectations about who can be trusted to help. Stereotyping is not unique to urban settings. But because urban settings tend to be especially diverse spaces, they create abundant opportunities to study how identities and the social scripts we hold affect the way that strangers care for each other across lines of difference. What Kehinde and others bring to the fore is the reality that the targets of stereotyping are aware of the ways that they are perceived. They learn that to be seen as helpful rather than as threatening, they need to read situations correctly, make adjustments to their approaches (e.g., keep “appropriate” distance), and exit situations strategically.

Targets of stereotyping must strike a balance between their own deep-seated motivations to behave caringly and their desire to stay safe. For individuals like Kehinde, miscalculations can be costly. If, in the effort to behave lovingly and compassionately, someone is misidentified as a threat, that can lead to a range of consequences from being rebuffed and embarrassed to becoming the target of violence, arrest, or death. The end result is that people consciously or unconsciously learn the rules of engagement around helping strangers.

A second lesson that has emerged from studying love in urban settings is that love lives in the built environment of cities. I highlight this lesson in my Positive Psychology in Urban Settings classes. Cities are often saturated with murals, billboards, and symbols that convey messages of love, solidarity, and belonging. As residents move through neighborhood streets, they may encounter signs prominently posted in shop windows or near the entrances of religious institutions that remind them that “Black Lives Matter,” “Love Is Love,” or “Immigrants Are Welcome Here.” People display rainbow flags and national flags from apartment windows, on cars, and in other spaces, declaring both their own identities and pride for and solidarity with those identities. The architecture of urban spaces may also play a role in expressions of love and care. In many urban neighborhoods, porches, stoops, and front steps serve as places of connection and care. Simple greetings (e.g., “Morning, baby!,” “You doing good?”) voiced by neighbors sitting on their steps serve as ways of spatializing love, care, and connection in urban landscapes. 

I return here to my initial point. Our studies of urban areas are desperately incomplete and will remain incomplete until we more fully examine how various forms of human goodness—including love and care—flourish in urban settings. Likewise, our understandings of love and care will remain underdeveloped until we explore how these experiences emerge in the most densely populated, diverse, complex social structures in which people live. We will truly understand love when we understand how it is titrated through place, context, history, culture, religion, structures of power, identities, and a host of individual and relational factors. Urban centers give us powerful opportunities to know love.

“I said goodbye to everything I knew and loved in Philadelphia and came to the Bay. Not knowing a soul.”

When she arrived, it hit her. “I was like, wow, I’m in a place that like, literally nobody knows me. So if I am dead in a ditch, like nobody will figure it out for a long time.”

This could have been a story of loneliness and disconnection, but it wasn’t, because someone took her under their wings—actually two strangers, her roommates Lauren and Deirdre. “They took me in and welcomed me and brought me into their whole social world, which showed me so much love.”

This isn’t the experience for most people. Darilys Matos Acevedo grew up in Puerto Rico. “In Puerto Rico, a stranger talks to you all the time. If you went down the street and you talked to somebody, if you made eye contact . . . you had to smile at them or you said good morning or good afternoon.”

Then she moved to Boston for graduate school. “I had never even visited the place. I knew nobody here.” And where she got smiles and small talk in Puerto Rico, in Boston she “got glares.” “And I’m like, oh, OK. You don’t do any of that here.” It was painful and created a large void in her life.

As Darilys talked to other Latinos in Boston, she assumed “I’m the only one who feels this way, but I wasn’t. There was like a whole group of people that felt like that.”

Their stories are different, but they reveal the same truth.

Moving doesn’t simply change where we live. It interrupts the invisible web of relationships that makes everyday life feel familiar, that makes us feel like we belong. And the majority of the 13 million American adults who move each year experience this.

At the US Chamber of Connection, our recent study on social connection in America explored the impact of life transitions on social connection. It found that 40% of people navigating a relocation struggle with social connection, and they report 35% more barriers to connection compared to everyone else. Two of the most common barriers are not knowing where to start and not wanting to go out alone.

The impact is lasting, as someone shared with us. “Two years ago, I was going on a vacation, and I could not find ONE neighbor to water my plants while I was away. I had lived in this building on and off for over 15 years. I was mortified. How could it be that I had nobody in my building to help with such a small task?”

The invisible cost of a new address

Moving ranks among the most stressful life events a person can experience, on par with divorce and job loss. But the stress isn’t just logistical; it’s psychological. Moving severs the informal ties and daily routines that quietly anchor our sense of who we are and where we belong. The result is a predictable but rarely named experience: not just loneliness, but identity dislocation. The question isn’t only “who do I know here?” but “who am I here?”

To understand the scale of that loss, consider what a typical adult social network requires to build: roughly 200 hours to develop a close friend, 90 hours for a friend, and five hours of repeated interaction for each of the weak ties (neighbors, familiar faces, community contacts) that make daily life feel anchored. A typical adult carries around 1,300 hours of accumulated relationship time. When you move, you leave all of it behind and start from zero.

This is also, paradoxically, what makes the first year after a move one of the most powerful windows for connection. Disruption breaks old habits and makes people unusually open to forming new ones, a phenomenon researchers call the habit discontinuity effect. People who have just moved are more likely to join things, try things, and reach out than they were six months earlier at home.

What closes that window isn’t lack of desire. Research by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago finds that people systematically underestimate how much strangers want to connect and overestimate how awkward the attempt will be. Both the newcomer and the potential neighbor hold back, each assuming the other isn’t interested. Both tend to be wrong.

And the effects of getting it right last longer than most people expect. Vanessa Elias, the founder of Block Party USA, shared with us the story of a neighbor who brought her family a pie when she moved in as a six year old. She remembers her name, Mrs. Fisher, decades later.

Creative experiments welcoming people across the country

What would happen if welcoming became a civic practice instead of an individual virtue? This year, the US Chamber of Connection recruited over 250 people across 25 states to run creative experiments that aimed to help others feel more welcome in their neighborhoods. They were trained on the science of connection and worked together across the country to support each other. We call them the Welcome Committee.

For many of the volunteers, they signed up because they had an experience like Liz. One shared that “when we arrived to our new town we felt welcomed, surprised, and alive through these touches, and wanted to build more.” Or as another volunteer explained, “people are still welcoming me and I still feel at home here. So it gave me this strong sense of duty to pay that forward. I wanna create spaces where people can land and feel comfortable.”

For others, it came from an experience more akin to Darilys’s. “I would have loved to find this kind of thing when I moved,” shared one early volunteer. “I’ve been in my neighborhood and city since 2019 and have yet to make close friends in the neighborhood or city where I live. It feels scary and uncomfortable to get out there. But I’m realizing the huge impact of not having close friends. I’m ready to make the effort. Because if I’m feeling this way, I can’t be the only one.”

They each began by inviting a neighbor for a conversation. They shared their stories of their neighborhoods growing up. Dreamed about the ideal neighborhood together. Explored the Six Points of Connection, a clear and actionable checklist for individuals and leaders to define and strengthen social bonds. And then they explored how they might together make the neighborhood more connected.

They ran some creative experiments. Lindsay turned their suburban garage door into a community message board. Kaitlin created a traveling tin of homemade baked goods that moves neighbor to neighbor down the street, each recipient required to bake something and pass it on to someone new. Sarah hosted a gathering for other people named Sara(h) in her town. Courtney started flyering the neighborhood to organize a dog gathering in someone’s backyard. Nithya left a flower and a handwritten note for each of the five nearest neighbors inviting them to coffee.

Many of the volunteers nostalgically tried things they remembered from their childhood or had seen in a movie. Kate moved an iron chair and table to her front step and started having her morning coffee there facing the street. Jon made lemonade with his kids and set out donuts for anyone walking by. Chet started introducing himself on his daily dog walks. Anne organized a multi-household yard sale across eight houses. And many of them hosted potlucks and block parties.

They all expressed knowing “how meaningful it can be to walk into a new space and find someone who is genuinely glad you are there.” And they wanted to make people feel that way.

Four ways to support newcomers

As the volunteers conducted their experiments, they began to share their findings. They mirrored much of what we have learned from social scientists over the last 50 years. Four themes emerged that help to inform how we can all do more to help new residents, and any neighbor, feel more welcomed.

1. The first step is the most important. Stop playing “invite chicken.” Many of our volunteers shared a version of the same experience: sitting at home hoping someone would call and invite them to hang out, attend an event, or even just watch Netflix together. They assumed that the people they wanted to call were probably busy or uninterested. Those people were likely sitting at home thinking the same thing. Nobody called. Everyone stayed alone.

Call it invite chicken: a standoff where everyone loses despite everyone wanting the same thing. The barrier isn’t reality; it’s anticipation. Someone just has to go first.

And sometimes, when we do break the game of chicken, we don’t get the response we wanted. When Hazel hosted her first neighborhood coffee gathering, one neighbor texted that he was too nervous to come. She didn’t give up. She texted back encouraging him. He came. At one of Elizabeth’s gatherings in San Diego, a man had been dragged along by his wife, who promised they’d stay just five minutes. He was the last to leave.

We are poor forecasters of our own social experiences. People overweight the discomfort of initiation and underweight the pleasure of connection. The host who sends the follow-up text, the wife who insists on five minutes, isn’t being pushy. They’re correcting for a cognitive error the reluctant person can’t see from the inside.

2. We are more motivated working together. Partner with someone. Erin hosted a neighborhood gathering in New York City and reflected afterward on what she’d do differently. Her top lesson: “I appreciated the help I did get from neighbors and wished I’d had a co-planner to share more of the work with.”

This is consistent with what research finds: People are significantly more likely to initiate and sustain kind and helpful behavior when they’re doing it alongside someone else. A partner doesn’t just make the work easier; they make follow-through more likely, because the social cost of backing out now involves someone else. Several Welcome Committee volunteers named the US Chamber of Connection cohort itself as the thing that got them out the door. Not the training, not the tools, but the fact that others were doing it, too.

3. We gain comfort with repeat exposure. Build a rhythm. Hansen has been hosting a monthly porch gathering (coffee, bagels, same spot) for two years. Recently, he watched neighbors spontaneously make plans to go cycling together and quietly organize to look out for a boy on the street whose father is dying of cancer. Neither of those things was planned. They happened because the same people had been attending his events and they had built comfort with each other. Hansen didn’t suggest they help the boy but had created the environment for it to be possible.

Research finds that repeated contact with the same faces makes us like and trust them more, independent of what’s said. Those repeated encounters build weak ties, which are how people find help in a crisis, how trust spreads beyond close friends, how a community starts to look out for itself. The first gathering gets you in the door. Showing up again is what builds the neighborhood.

4. Spontaneous actions of connection are powerful. Look for opportunities. The best welcoming often isn’t planned. When a neighbor left cookies on Kaitlin’s porch with a note that just said “happy spring,” the gesture was small, spontaneous, and agenda-free. It didn’t just make her smile; it made her want to pass something on. Walking through her neighborhood, Annie spotted a moving van, walked straight over, and introduced herself as a Welcome Committee member. The mover, who didn’t even live there, told her he wished he could move into the community. Another volunteer simply invited people they saw running to join their running group. They were seen and welcomed.

What these moments share is spontaneity and clarity of intent. Research finds that unexpected gestures create a positive disruption that formal invitations don’t. They bypass the social calculation people run when a stranger approaches, and they signal warmth without asking for anything back. Research finds that being noticed is the precondition for feeling like you belong.

And having a clear role removes the ambiguity that makes first moves feel risky. When Annie said “I’m a Welcome Committee member,” her motives were transparent before she said another word. You don’t need a plan. You need to look up.

Connection is a lifestyle—a rewarding one

Giving to others produces more sustained well-being than spending on yourself. The helper’s high is real. Welcoming a newcomer isn’t just a form of service; it’s one of the highest-return social investments you can make.

Liz knows this firsthand. The woman who arrived in the Bay Area not knowing a soul, wondering if anyone would notice if she disappeared, is now the person who creates spaces for others to land. “People here took a chance on me,” she says. “So it gave me this strong sense of duty to pay that forward. I want to create spaces where people can land and feel comfortable.”

All friendships begin the same way: by talking to strangers. Someone just has to go first. Years later, Liz became the person who notices.

When I got confused about where to send my kid to school, I found a ragtag group of parents all over the country who were committed to being a force for integration. When I fell down the hell that is our elder care “system,” I found solace in day programs, support groups, and all other manner of collectivizing. And when I was pregnant and in my late 20s, trying to figure out how to be a grown-up, you better believe I jumped on the chance to live in intergenerational, interfaith cohousing with some intentional community veterans. I lived there for over a decade and it completely transformed how I understand abundance, cooperation, and, yes, the many uses of homegrown kale (true to stereotype).

So, of course, I am over the moon about a new anthology, Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, just out from Beacon Press (who also published my book, Do It Anyway, back in the day). Living, Together features a few of my favorite contemporary thinkers on interdependence, including Rhaina Cohen (author of The Other Significant Others) and, as mentioned, Dani McClain.

Here’s an interview with the anthology’s editor, Samantha Paige Rosen.

Courtney Martin: You begin the book talking about your own pleasurable experience of living with your parents as an adult—something that grew out of crisis, but has become a choice. It seems that in the case of multigenerational households, part of the challenge is rewiring adult relationships and not falling back into early conditioning. How did you do this rewiring when you all lived together as adults?

Samantha Paige Rosen: For me and my parents, I think a handful of different things occurred. First, some of the rewriting began before I moved in with them. I lived with them for nine months when I was 24 after I returned from the East Coast and was considering a career shift. I stayed with them during the summers I was in graduate school for the next couple of years, and I did the same for most of my college summers. All that time, they were seeing the adult I’d become and I was seeing them with emerging young adult eyes. I think this cemented the adult-level friendship between us so that by the time I moved in at 29, after which I ended up staying for six years, we could build off of the rewiring we’d already done.

Another piece is communication. I love talking about my feelings and my perspective, and I want my loved ones to feel comfortable doing the same. So as much as my mother likes to joke that I talk everything to death—and I know I have to pick my moments; not everyone is receptive at every moment—I attribute the way we understand each other as adults to my communication skills and my parents’ openness to that, much of the time.

What that meant was that when there were instances over the six years I lived with my parents where my mom doted on me like she did when I was young, or my dad was a little too opinionated about my whereabouts, I could remind them, Thank you, I love you, and, as an adult, I’ve got this! If they’d make an assumption based on how I acted when I was younger, I’d call them out on it, nicely, and let them know that the thing they’re saying isn’t true of 30-something me. Of course, this goes both ways, and I let my parents know they could call me out, too. I worked hard to make sure I was seeing my parents as the fully realized adults they are and not just my mom and dad.

At the same time, I’ve always said that neither of my younger sisters could have lived with my parents as adults, but I obviously could. I don’t always need to be in charge, and I don’t mind a little doting! My sisters prefer to run the show and feel strongly about their independence. So perhaps there was an element of luck, personality-wise, too.

For readers who live in multigenerational households and have the difficulties around rewiring, I’d say tell and show your loved ones the ways you’ve changed—and often—and ask them to do the same. Communication is everything (and when that doesn’t work, demonstration is). And are there minor aspects of falling back into early conditioning that wouldn’t be so terrible to embrace?

CM: It seems like one of the biggest barriers for so many people to live more creatively and interdependently is cost. Cohousing, for example, is notoriously expensive to create and is still too elite a movement, as a result. What did you learn about the role that finances play in our ability to, as the subtitle says, reimagine community?

SPR: I relate to feeling priced out of communal living. I remember my college friend, Francesca, sending me this article about cohousing when I was at my most overwhelmed and depressed living alone, about six months before I ended up moving in with my parents. I had never heard of cohousing; she saw I needed communal living before I did. I remember feeling enraged, honestly, because she was like, “This is what you need!” and I felt like, Why did you make me aware of something I clearly needed but couldn’t afford?! The subtitle of the article was literally “Where Responsibilities Are Shared And Life Is A Little Less Lonely,” and I was so lonely, overworked, and just kind of crushed by the weight of life.

But a few weeks into living with my parents, I realized I was living communally, just in a different way. And now, I live alone in a townhouse and my parents live across the parking lot. We have dinner at least twice a week, we share groceries, we pet-sit for each other; I take my cat there in a backpack every day to play with their cats. Some people might say I live alone, and in some ways I do, but I can still reap some benefits of communal living in an informal way and that I can afford.

I’m not going to pretend that finances don’t offer access, or at least a wider ability to reimagine community. But only a few of the stories in Living, Together feature forms of intentional community that can have a high price for entry, like cohousing. That’s by design: I wanted readers to feel like they had many different models for getting their needs around communal living, and even community outside the home, met.

In the book, Amanda E. Machado and Rhaina Cohen both share stories of renting homes with friends, and Amanda’s essay, in particular, talks about the cost-sharing element of that approach. Essayist Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom lives in a separate space above their parents’ house, and Dani McClain shares the house she grew up in with her mother and daughter. Gabrielle Korn has a house with an attached studio apartment she rents out, and also offers for free to writers seeking short residencies.

Suanne Carlson shares a glimpse into the nomadic life, which I think more people are going to be forced to do if this housing crisis continues; for Suanne, living out of a vehicle is a choice that allows her to travel, feel at home in nature, and get together with other nomads who see home and community the way she does. Tiffany Harris writes about how she made a career out of how much she liked having roommates by supporting programming for Jewish people in their 20s who want to share living space and traditions with other young Jewish people. Simone Gorrindo writes about having an interdependent relationship with a neighbor when they were both new military wives and were incredibly lonely.

All of these forms of communal living have pluses and minuses. There’s no perfect way to live, and when you’re interdependent with others, there will always be friction. If you want the kind of communal living where you have completely separate space from other people, then, yes, it could be more expensive. (Although not necessarily: tiny house communities? Fourplexes? Accessory dwelling units? Separate apartments on the same floor as loved ones?) But there are so many other ways to live communally if you think outside formal intentional communities and realize you can…make up whatever you want!

[Here are some resources on making cohousing more affordable.]

CM: What was the biggest surprise of working on this anthology?

SPR: Working on the anthology further broadened the way I defined communal living.

I really have come to believe that communal living is any way a person is regularly interdependent with others around their home base, sharing time, resources, and offering a sense of safety.

Maybe it’s several generations of a family living within walking distance to one another, or neighbors who deliberately make time to see each other most days, share groceries or meals, and offer rides to doctors’ appointments. But to me, communal living is less about the roof you have over your head and more about how intentionally interdependent you are with others.

Reading the Q&A with Hank Gamel and Fran Biederman in Living, Together, where Fran, who is 91, talks about all the different ways she and her neighbor support each other got me thinking about this. So did Kristen Arnett and Simone Gorrindo’s essays. Kristen’s friends, her chosen family, all live within a short drive from each other. They celebrate every milestone together and jump at the chance to offer help, like inviting those who don’t have power during hurricane season to the house of whoever does. Simone’s neighbor taught her how to drive and helped Simone furnish her house. For a period of time, they had regular dinners, watched each other’s kids, and Simone even slept at her neighbor’s house on anxious nights while their husbands were deployed.

CM: What is one thing you have changed in your own life because of reading this book? A new tradition with your parents? A new way of using space?

SPR: I’ve become more flexible about the way I think about home, community, and my own future. As I write in my introduction to the book, I bought pretty hard into the American dream as a kid, including the idea of a “forever home.” I think I was seeking a feeling of safety, and the finality of a “forever home” seemed to offer that. But reading my contributors’ stories, seeing their openness to different configurations of housing and home, and the way those changed as their needs did over time, has taken the pressure off of finding that one ideal living scenario. I no longer feel like I’m searching for a place to settle; I just feel more settled within myself.

And it couldn’t have happened at a better time, because home and housing is so tenuous now for so many of us.

It feels freeing to have my attitude be that right now I live in a two-bedroom townhouse across the parking lot from my parents. It meets a lot of my needs, but not all of them. And when I’m missing having people in my immediate space, or there’s another reason this doesn’t work as well anymore, I tell myself that this living scenario can be for me until it isn’t. When my needs change, I can adapt to them. Someday, I hope to live close to a bunch of artists who also raise kids communally, in whatever form of housing that takes. But not today, and that’s fine!

This Q&A is republished from Courtney Martin’s Substack newsletter, Examined Family. Read the original newsletter.

A new Gallup Poll conducted in the United States paints a different picture of the state of kindness. Researchers surveyed over 2,000 American adults asking them to report on their everyday experiences—how often they’d witnessed kindness or received kindness from someone else—as well as how comfortable they were to initiate kindness toward a stranger. By asking individuals about their personal experiences (as opposed to their general impressions based on the current zeitgeist), the researchers found that kindness in the U.S. is more alive and well than we might expect.

“Kindness is swirling all around us, but the perception by ordinary people is that it’s not,” says Stuart Muszynski, president and chief executive officer of the Values-in-Action Foundation and codesigner of the poll. “There’s a kindness perception gap.”

The good news about kindness

Muszynski and his colleagues found that a majority of Americans reported seeing kindness regularly in their everyday lives. Sixty percent said that they’d seen people acting in kind, respectful ways often or very often, while 65% said they’ve been the recipients of kind acts from someone in their community within the last seven days.

Also, 73% said that they viewed other Americans as generally very kind or somewhat kind—a figure that belies our worries to the contrary.

“What shows up in the media every day is a very unkind America,” says Muszynski. “At the grassroots level, people see kindness every day. It’s around us all the time.”

An even higher percentage of those polled, 90%, said they would be very comfortable or somewhat comfortable initiating a kind act toward a stranger—a heartwarming finding. Muszynski points out that this reflects the fact that people who witness kindness are more willing to pay it forward.

“If you see kindness, you do kindness,” says Muszynski. “It’s a natural empathy reaction.”

Experiences of kindness may vary with age

Despite the good news, Muszynski noted some nuances around the findings. For example, younger adults were less likely to witness kindness or be the recipients of kind acts, giving them a less favorable outlook on the state of kindness in our country.

Young adults also felt less comfortable than older adults offering kindness to someone they don’t know. Only 35% of 18 to 29 year olds said they were very comfortable initiating a kind act toward a stranger—significantly less than the 49% of 30 to 49 year olds and the 64% of adults 65 and older that said the same.

“An individual is much more likely to see kindness, report kindness, and do kindness, and then that drops for individuals in the 18- to 29-year-old bracket,” says Muszynski. “That was really, really surprising to us as well as to Gallup.”

Muszynski speculates that this may be due to how distressed younger generations are. He notes that this age group has lived through the 2008 recession, increased political polarization, the COVID-19 pandemic, escalating climate change, and the rise of social media culture. These all could have added to their sense of isolation or feeling the need to look out for themselves first, making it more difficult for kindness to flourish.

“If you’re growing up with an individual as well as collective perception that there’s not kindness around you, you’re not necessarily going to feel comfortable [offering] kindness,” he says.

It could also be that younger adults are generally unhappier than their elders, for developmental reasons. Studies suggest that younger adults experience less positive and more negative emotion than older adults—in part due to older people benefitting from better emotion regulation skills. A poorer mood or outlook could have an impact on their kind behavior, as happier people tend to be kinder.

A recent Pew Research poll found that younger adults report greater mental health challenges than older adults, too, which means they will likely have less energy or emotional bandwidth to reach out to others in need.

Muszynski fears that because young people are more plugged in to the negative messages in social media, it could lead them to expect less kindness in the world. He points to research by Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki that found students had overly pessimistic views of how empathic and friendly other students were, based on false beliefs rather than fact. Once Zaki and his colleagues created a campaign to alert students to the fallacy of that narrative, students were much more open to engaging with one another.

“It’s really about social norms and the influence that social norms have in any kind of ecosystem,” says Muszynski.

How real is the kindness age gap?

Of course, one Gallup survey doesn’t paint the full picture on American kindness. Additional research adds context.

A recent meta-analysis pooling together findings from several studies around the world found that, overall, older adults tended to be kinder than younger adults—like the Gallup Poll. However, the difference between groups depended on the type of kindness offered. Older adults tended to be more open to sharing money or resources than younger adults; when it came to assisting someone or comforting them, the age differences were much smaller or unclear.

“Older adults may be more generous in some ways, but they are not necessarily more prosocial in every kind of situation,” says David Shum, coauthor of the study and a neuropsychologist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Shum and his colleagues also found that a person’s financial situation affected kind behavior. The differences in prosociality based on age were much stronger when an older person had a high level of income than when they didn’t. This suggests that a person’s socioeconomic status could play a role in kindness, too, and that the age difference effect may reflect a difference in means.

“If younger adults have fewer resources, they may appear less prosocial in some situations, even if they still care about others,” says Shum.

Complicating the picture, other research raises questions about whether age and other demographics are actual factors in kindness—and, if so, why.

For example, one study in Germany found that younger adults were actually more prosocial than older adults overall, though the type of kindness mattered, too. As people aged, their willingness to engage in genuine kindness (benevolence) or norm-based kindness (reciprocity or helping to promote fairness) decreased, perhaps because they had fewer resources. The opposite finding from the Gallup poll could be due to the study’s different time, place, and culture, as well as how kindness was measured (experimentally, in addition to self-report).

Muszynski believes economic stress could keep people from being more kind if they are focused more on survival. But economic factors couldn’t completely account for the age differences he found in the Gallup poll. While the poll did find that less educated and poorer people were more uncomfortable helping a stranger than those with more education and income, younger adults within those groups were still less comfortable reaching out to others than older people within those same groups.

We can all learn to be kinder

Regardless of the research on an actual age difference in kindness in the United States, everyone, old and young, could be nudged toward acting kinder. After all, kindness is a universal value, vital to the health of individuals as well as our nation. And it’s often contagious.

Fortunately, small, individual acts of kindness are pretty much the norm, not only in the United States but around the world. As the authors of an international study on kind behavior found, “requests for assistance are very frequent and mostly successful; and when people decline to give help, they normally give a reason.” Though cultural variations impact how this looks, kindness generally begets more kindness—just as Muszynski’s results suggest.

So, how to encourage more kindness to spread? It may be important to remind people that we tend to underestimate the value of our kindness toward others, thinking it won’t matter that much, when it does. Sometimes we have to just overcome our reluctance to step out of our comfort zone in order to initiate kindness toward a stranger and to see how nice it can be. For tips on how to do that in your everyday life, Greater Good offers several research-based kindness practices for any age group.

To Muszynski, part of the solution lies in making ongoing, everyday kindnesses easier to notice. Sometimes, people don’t label everyday actions as kind acts, he says; we don’t recognize that the nurse caring for us is being kind (not just doing their job) or that listening to a grieving friend is an act of kindness. He hopes to encourage more kind acts through a public kindness challenge that he and his team developed.

“I believe that the solution is to change the paradigm, change the dialogue, change the ability for people to see and understand kindness,” says Muszynski.

Wherever and whoever you are, it never hurts to practice kindness in your own life. We all have the opportunity to build a culture of kindness, making for a more perfect and compassionate union.

Three months after a New York Times investigation detailed allegations of sexual violence against United Farm Workers movement cofounder Cesar E. Chavez, many Latinos are still grappling with that question. The revelations have sparked difficult conversations about accountability, memory, and what it means when someone whose legacy is woven into a community’s identity is accused of causing profound harm.

To understand why the allegations have resonated so deeply, it helps to understand Chavez’s place in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s, farmworkers across California endured grueling conditions, including low wages, job insecurity, exposure to pesticides, and few legal protections.

Alongside labor organizer Dolores Huerta, Chavez helped build the United Farm Workers into one of the country’s most influential labor movements, organizing strikes, leading nationwide boycotts, and advocating for better pay and working conditions. Their efforts helped bring national attention to the exploitation of agricultural workers and secured contracts that improved conditions for thousands of laborers.

Over time, Chavez became more than a labor movement leader. For many Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, he came to symbolize perseverance, dignity, and the fight for civil rights. Schools, parks, streets, and public buildings bear his name.

His story has long been taught as an example of nonviolent activism and collective action. His image has become inseparable from the broader history of Latino political empowerment in the United States.

That is why the New York Times investigation landed with such force. Drawing on interviews and historical records, the investigation reported allegations from multiple women who said Chavez sexually assaulted or abused them over several decades. It also examined claims that people within his circle were aware of the alleged misconduct but failed to intervene.

Although Chavez died in 1993 and was never criminally charged or able to respond to the allegations, the reporting challenged a public legacy that had largely portrayed him as a moral leader and champion of justice. For many who grew up revering Chavez, the investigation has forced an agonizing question: How should communities remember a figure whose contributions to social justice are now being weighed against allegations of profound personal harm?

Psychologists suggest that revelations involving admired leaders can trigger a unique form of emotional conflict. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s research on institutional betrayal suggests that when harm is committed by someone closely tied to a person’s identity, community, or sense of belonging, people may experience grief, confusion, anger, and disbelief simultaneously. The challenge is not only processing the wrongdoing itself, but reconciling it with long-held beliefs about a person or institution once trusted. In these moments, the person being questioned is not merely a public figure but someone connected to collective memory, cultural pride, and a community’s understanding of its own history.

That tension raises yet another difficult question: How can communities acknowledge painful truths without abandoning the movements and values that shaped them?

Holding two truths at once

For Pablo Gonzalez, a first-generation Chicano scholar-activist and anthropologist who studies social movements, the allegations against Chavez forced a conversation that could no longer be avoided.

“There’s no way you can’t have this conversation in a Chicano studies class,” Gonzalez said.

When he addressed the topic with students, he found himself overcome with emotion. As someone whose generation benefited from educational opportunities created through the broader farmworker and Chicano movements, he understood both the movement’s significance and the pain of confronting its contradictions.

“I got emotional because it’s something that for us, we have not yet been able to have deep conversations about,” Gonzalez said. “What the broader movement, that includes the Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers struggle, [meant]—of how deeply important it was but also how deeply painful it was in regards to its internal contradictions and conflicts.”

His response reflects a challenge many communities face when confronting harm committed by influential figures. The conversation is often framed as a choice between honoring a movement’s achievements and acknowledging abuse.

Alexandra Barahona de Brito, a scholar of collective memory and reconciliation, explains that societies are often better served by simplified narratives. Furthermore, research on transitional justice suggests communities build a more honest understanding of the past when they acknowledge both the accomplishments and failures of historical figures, rather than reducing them to heroes or villains.

Acknowledging one reality does not require denying the other. Instead, confronting both can create a fuller and more honest understanding of the past.

The cost of hero worship

According to Gonzalez, part of the difficulty lies in how social movements often become centered on individual figures.

Over time, Chavez’s role within the farmworker movement became inseparable from the movement itself. Through public fasts, religious symbolism, and widespread media attention, he became more than an organizer. He became a symbol.

“Over time, you create this persona,” Gonzalez said. “History starts to write about Cesar, and he becomes central to the story.” As Chavez’s image became increasingly intertwined with the farmworker movement, criticism of the leader could feel like criticism of the movement itself.

Psychologists use the term “halo effect” to describe the tendency for positive impressions in one area to shape perceptions of a person’s overall character. In Chavez’s case, admiration for his leadership and the movement’s achievements may have made it more difficult for supporters to reconcile evidence that conflicted with his public image.

That psychological tendency was reinforced by Chavez’s symbolic role within the movement.

He had become its most recognizable public face; questioning Chavez could also feel, for many, like questioning the legitimacy of the farmworker struggle itself. While charismatic leadership can inspire collective action, it can also make criticism of a leader feel like an attack on the cause they represent.

Gonzalez said that dynamic often led difficult conversations about Chavez to be sidelined.

“You don’t talk about, for instance, his anti-undocumented labor stance,” Gonzalez said. “You don’t talk about how he ostracized Filipino labor leaders or other farmworkers that didn’t agree with him.”

Instead, protecting the image of the movement’s most recognizable leader frequently took priority.

The recent allegations challenge communities to reconsider what happens when social movements become attached to a single individual rather than the thousands of people who collectively made change possible.

What survivors make possible

At the center of the current conversation are the women who came forward to share their experiences.

For Gonzalez, their decision to speak publicly represents more than a need to reassess Chavez’s legacy. It offers an opportunity to address forms of harm that have long remained unspoken within Latino communities.

“It takes time for those voices that were silenced and suppressed to come out,” Gonzalez said. “But they’re there. They’re always there.”

Psychiatrist Judith Herman’s research on trauma and recovery suggests that healing often begins when survivors are able to speak about their experiences and have those experiences acknowledged. Naming harm does not weaken communities. Instead, creating conditions where survivors feel safe enough to come forward and be taken seriously can become an important first step toward accountability and repair.

Gonzalez pointed to Dolores Huerta’s willingness to publicly address the allegations as an example of breaking longstanding silence.

“When young girls— . . . girls of color—are looking for heroes and heroines and they look at Dolores Huerta, they’re not only going to see a labor leader and civil rights leader, but also a person who broke the silence,” he said.

“They’re going to see other women, whose names probably won’t be written in history books, break the silence.”

Creating space for difficult conversations

The revelations surrounding Chavez arrive at a moment when conversations about sexual violence are unfolding across many institutions, from universities and workplaces to religious organizations and immigrant detention centers.

For Gonzalez, the importance of this moment extends far beyond one individual.

“Breaking the silence around that is important,” he said. “It could be the place where we see mobilization. Sexual violence in detention centers. Sexual violence against young girls. Everything that, again, our community has not had a meaningful dialogue about.”

That dialogue, he argues, must begin by centering survivors rather than protecting legacies.

“There has to be a dialogue in our community around sexual violence,” Gonzalez said. “There has to be a dialogue around centering victims.”

Restorative justice scholars argue that accountability begins not with protecting reputations but with understanding harm. Rather than asking how a leader’s legacy should be preserved, restorative approaches encourage communities to ask who was harmed, what support survivors need, and what changes are necessary to prevent similar abuses in the future.

Beyond heroes

As communities continue to wrestle with Chavez’s legacy, Gonzalez believes the broader lesson is not simply about one leader but about how we define leadership itself.

“The solution here is not to create more pedestals,” he said.

While some have proposed replacing Chavez’s name with other figures, Gonzalez argues that doing so risks repeating the same pattern. Instead, he believes communities should shift their attention away from singular heroes and toward the countless individuals whose labor, courage, and sacrifices sustain social movements.

“We have to embrace the nameless—not the voiceless, but the nameless—people who make up everyday struggles, because that’s who we are.”

The challenge facing Latino communities today is not deciding whether Chavez was entirely good or entirely bad. It is learning how to tell a fuller story—one that honors collective achievements, acknowledges harm, centers survivors, and resists the temptation to place any individual beyond accountability.

Perhaps that is what collective healing ultimately requires: not the erasure of history, but the courage to face it honestly.

In the aftermath of this ghastly genocide, the country needed to figure out how to move forward. Concerned about renewed violence, the newly formed government created a justice and reconciliation process to ensure that all Rwandans live side by side peacefully. This would be achieved by establishing “Reconciliation Villages.”

One of the villages, Rweru Reconciliation Village, serves as a case study in post-genocide reconstruction. In the village live both survivors and perpetrators of the genocide, there to demonstrate that living side by side is possible. All the residents participate in joint activities, such as farming the land and building homes together, attending communal gatherings, and reconstructing the social fabric.

As we’ll see, forgiveness in Rwanda is not without its challenges. Forgiveness takes time and can be a profound personal journey, shaped by cultural, religious, and spiritual beliefs. But for those who live in Rweru, forgiveness is seen not as condoning past atrocities, but as breaking free from the cycle of violence and hatred. We believe Rwanda shows the world that, even in the face of unspeakable horrors, communities can come together, forgive, and rebuild.

It is one thing to forgive someone who has offended you. It is a different story when faced with the task of making peace between groups that have committed violence against each other. What does forgiveness look like in a situation like this, and can forgiveness initiate societal change? Through our work at the Forgiveness Project at Stanford University, we’ve come to see Rwanda as a model of political forgiveness—a concept that is essential to building a more peaceful world.

What is political forgiveness?

In her book The Human Condition, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt writes, “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would be confined to a single deed.”

The beauty of forgiveness, as noted by Arendt, is that forgiveness interrupts otherwise automatic processes—not only in our private lives but also in the public sphere. Forgiveness is as vital in the public realm as it is to preserve bonds between individuals.

Psychologists describe forgiveness as a conscious choice to set aside feelings of anger and resentment toward an individual who has caused harm, regardless of whether that person deserves it. Although there is some disagreement about whether forgiveness requires developing positive feelings toward the offender, there is agreement that forgiveness is a process of letting go of deeply held anger or resentment.

In recent decades, psychologists have empirically validated several methodologies that promote forgiveness toward self and others, one of which is the Stanford Forgiveness Project. Research on the impact of psychoeducation on forgiveness has shown that it helps people forgive those who they feel have wronged them, forgive themselves, and enable existential forgiveness. These approaches, which we believe have been validated across a wide range of human offenses, offer promise in helping to resolve political and civil violence.     

Our goal is to integrate the secular model of forgiveness developed by the Stanford Forgiveness Project with a tested dialogue method from Colombia, South America, to create a testable process we are labeling “political forgiveness.” We believe the essence of political forgiveness integrates interpersonal and self-forgiveness with structured dialogue to help enable communities to recover from violence and civil unrest.

Political forgiveness can be defined as the process of repairing fractured relationships among individuals, nations, or groups. The goal of political forgiveness is to heal individuals, reconstruct communal relationships, and rebuild trust. Political forgiveness emerges from the enfolding of appropriate grieving of wounds, forgiving of self and others, and creating positive dialogue. Forgiveness by and for individuals and groups is a powerful mechanism for healing harmful actions that cannot be reversed.   

Forgiveness in Rweru

What does political forgiveness look like?

Let’s return to the example of Rwanda and the Rweru Reconciliation Village. Two of its residents are Maria Izagiriza, a survivor, and Philbert Nterzirizaza, a former perpetrator and Izagiriza’s neighbor, who killed some of her family members. Izagiriza’s husband and six of her nine children were murdered during the genocide.

Right after the downing of the plane that killed the president, Izagiriza had been warned that there was trouble ahead. Her neighbor said to Izagiriza that her people were responsible for the leader’s death, and she would pay dearly for what she had done.

The following morning, the militia showed up at her home, killed all her livestock, burned her house down, and beat her husband nearly to death. Fortunately, her children were left unharmed. Izagiriza hid until nightfall when she felt that it was safe enough to return to her compound to get her husband and children. When she finally found them, she described what she witnessed: “Though breathing, my husband was so badly wounded and bleeding from all parts of his body,” she says, pausing to wipe the tears streaming down her tired face. “The children were scared stiff but unharmed.”

With the help of her children, Izagiriza somehow managed to drag her injured husband to a hiding place where she felt they would all be safe. This is when she realized that the person she thought was a friend and who offered to help, instead delivered her husband and children to the killers. Again, she managed to escape, but this time, with her four-month-old baby strapped to her back. No one else made it. “That was the last time I saw my family alive.”

Izagiriza ended up at a barricade where a group of young men stopped and killed people. Among them was her neighbor, 18-year-old Ntezirizaza, who was motivated by his own hate and, with disregard for human life, was responsible for killing some of her family members.

“In 1994, I was a teenager, my body full of youthful vigor and my mind filled with a terrible ideology, fed to me since I was in elementary school. . . . Our mindset at that time was more lethal than the machetes we carried.” Ntezirizaza paused, then, with a low voice and distant gaze, said: “We hacked her husband and eldest son to death and threw the remaining two children in a deep pit, alive. We knew they wouldn’t survive.”

Ntezirizaza, who spent time in prison after the genocide, carries the burden of shame and guilt for what he had done. Like others who committed acts of violence, he wanted to make amends through Rwanda’s reconciliation process. Ntezirizaza was afraid to face Izagiriza. He understood that asking for forgiveness was necessary if both were to move forward. He also recognized that he could not just ask for forgiveness to absolve his guilt; he was asking for forgiveness to help them both move on to restore their community.

Izagiriza understandably struggled with forgiving the man who killed her loved ones. Yet, over time, through the village’s reconciliation program, Izagiriza came to understand what had happened and why Ntezirizaza had been indoctrinated to hate. Her experience of forgiveness brought her peace and speaks to her survival and recovery.

“When one’s heart is burdened, you don’t see anything good at all,” she told Vice Magazine. “But when you forgive from your heart, you see many good things coming your way. And forgiveness is an important thing, as it makes your heart relieved and you gain new ideas of self-development, and life continues as normal.”

For his part, Ntezirizaza came to understand the gravity of his actions and, in so doing, was able to ask for forgiveness. “After getting released from jail, I would feel guilty that I committed crimes against Maria, and I would feel fearful and ashamed of myself. . . . I asked her to forgive me. She forgave me, and I felt relief in my heart.”

Izagiriza and Ntezirizaza are now working together in the village fields, helping to grow food to sustain their community.

Turning experiments into examples

Political forgiveness begins with people from all warring sides agreeing to come together and work with one another. Our method involves meeting separately with two groups who have been in conflict in order to teach the basic skills of forgiveness and discover how the process of forgiveness has inspired people in similar situations. The goal is to come to a common understanding of what forgiveness is and is not.

The process we’re currently testing is based on work done in Colombia, which saw decades of violence between the government, militia groups, and crime syndicates. After many attempts to stop the violence, in 2012 President Juan Manuel Santos was able to begin peace talks in Havana, Cuba. One of the outcomes of the talks was the creation of the “Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Co-existence and Non-repetition” (CEV) focused on victims and their right to the truth.

The CEV promotes the idea of co-existence, which was achieved by creating safe spaces for dialogue between the deeply divided sectors of Colombian society. Rather than treating the “truth” as a series of facts, Father Leonel Narváez developed a process called “logics of truth” to facilitate emotional healing. Inspired by political forgiveness models, this framework acknowledges that there are different layers that make up what we call “truth.”

This process helped de-escalate hostilities by having participants explicitly separate events, which are objective, from the meaning ascribed to them. This dialogue framework helps participants grasp the complex, multifaceted nature of truth. The dialogue process begins with each side discussing what happened as they see it, why it happened, and its significance. Then they discuss how to move forward from what happened, including the painful consequences and intense feelings. Finally, the dialogue broadens to discuss how the group can work toward societal reconciliation to help prevent violence from erupting again.

We are now testing this model with Palestinians and Israelis based in the United States who are struggling to make peace with each other. In our work as researchers and practitioners, we understand that forgiveness is both a decision and an ongoing process. We have each worked with suffering people whose suffering only abates when they can forgive. We try to never lose sight of the fact that forgiveness is a choice, something that can be taught and practiced.

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• Why Telling Our Own Story Is So Powerful for Black Americans: Andrea Collier reflects on the role of storytelling in black American history—and in her own life.
• Why Storytelling Skills Matter for African-American Kids: For black students, storytelling skills directly predict their early reading skills.
• Can Loving Yourself and Others Protect Your Health?: Research suggests that seeing our spiritual connections to others could protect us from disease and promote public health.

Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, Virginia, 1905. Source: Wikipedia

• How to Change the Story about Students of Color: Dena Simmons explores how educators can inadvertently harm students of color—and what we can do to bring out their best.
• Why Marginalized Students Need Hope to Succeed: Researcher Dante Dixson is developing programs to help disadvantaged students envision a brighter future for themselves.
• Can We Teach Racial Justice by Talking About Virtues?: It’s harder to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools these days, but there might be other ways to frame the conversation.
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We also have resource pages devoted to anti-racist tools and to the scientific case for diversity.

One group drops seafaring formalities and coalesces around collective survival. They tend to each other, work together, and split what they have. Each person’s subsistence is tied to the other’s.

The other crew maintain their maritime hierarchy, compete for power and status, hoard resources—and ultimately turn on each other.

Everyone from the first crew survives. Most from the second group die from various ailments and unfortunate incidents, including cannibalism. 

That’s a scenario based on real historical examples that is sketched by John Cacioppo, Harry Reis, and Alex Zautra in their 2011 paper entitled “Social Resilience.” In this article, the authors explain their approach to developing a training program for U.S. Army personnel meant to help them function better in teams.

The premise? Human survival depends on being able to turn toward each other under difficult circumstances and join forces to identify, avoid, or address challenges and catastrophes. Our ability to coordinate effort in response to shared threats is an evolutionary mandate for ultrasocial creatures like humans. Born helpless and lacking physically dominant features like giant apex predator teeth, the authors write, “Our remarkable accomplishments as a species are attributable to our collective action, not our individual might.”

Stephanie Brown of the Stony Brook Neuroscience Institute attributes this collaborative sensibility to “fitness interdependence”: my survival depends on yours, theirs, and, to some degree, ultimately, everyone’s. Because the harm from some threats to survival and reproduction is distributed to everyone (like crop dusting to cull agricultural pests), our human nervous system is sensitive to others’ vulnerability, and so driven to protect the group from shared threat.

The biological and psychological processes underlying these features include being able to synchronize our bodies and behaviors (e.g., empathy), feeling innately compelled to share joy and relieve each other’s pain (e.g., social capitalizing, compassion), and celebrating heroic virtues like helping one another and working to make the world a better place. Serving each other’s welfare through caregiving, protection from harm, and relief of suffering, it turns out, is fundamentally rewarding and healthy. Many studies have reported activation in the brain’s reward pathways that signal pleasure after behaving generously—the “warm glow.” People who spend more hours volunteering experience less disease and live longer, for example. Like any other ability, prosocial and altruistic tendencies are also shaped over the course of life by culture and context, both of which can increase or suppress how prominently they show up within any given person, society, or period of time.

According to Cacioppo, Reis, and Zautra, each person attending to their own needs and being able to cope with and protect themself does not ensure group success, and can actually lessen the probability of individual success over the long run. It’s wrong to assume that each individual’s resilience will naturally ladder up to group-wide resilience.

Instead, they call for social resilience, which means acknowledging and documenting stress and harm coming from higher-order, even existential threats, beyond the sum of how each person might feel about their own lives. Further, it means investigating and tracking sources and contributing factors that are often systemic (policy, neighborhood design), invisible (culture, historical precedence), or vast (climate, natural disasters). Once we understand causes, we can work together to help the group recover and ensure future well-being. 

Other scholars have also used the term social resilience since this 2011 paper, though disciplines tend not to define it in the same way.

In public health, for example, social resilience often refers to aspects of a person’s environment and resources like whom they live with, what their level of income is, or whether they have access to health care and education. There are well-established links between these factors and an individual’s resilience—that is, their capacity to recover from or learn and grow from stress and adversity in healthy ways. Many people have dedicated their lives to improving equitable access to these resources for the betterment of humanity.

Articles also use the terms “community resilience”—measured by survey questions like “People in my community help each other during crises”—and “national resilience,” which refers to a group’s ability to handle crises. A 2013 paper by Markus Keck and Patrick Sakdapolrak offers this high-level definition: “Social resilience is the ability of social entities, that is, individuals, organizations or communities, to resist, adapt to, and recover quickly from disasters.”

Studies suggest that social resilience is not unique to humans. The prosocial underpinnings of social resilience were alluded to by none other than Charles Darwin, who concluded that “those communities [of animals and other creatures], which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

For example, insects are the most populous species on earth, and the most populous insects are ants. Ants rapidly adjust and adapt to demands and threats to the colony in seamlessly coordinated ways: They’ll make a raft from their bodies for all to survive a flood. While humans, too, can detect, monitor, and band together to fix the existential crises we face, that’s a path we need to consciously choose and pursue.

Evolutionary psychologist David Sloan-Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University and founder and president of ProSocial World, thinks so, too. His work highlights the importance of interpersonal trust, a key facet of social resilience, for working together toward shared goals. Further, he describes how evolution has favored biological features that enable group-wide, collaborative, even amicable adaptation to environmental challenges:

Only when we could trust our social partners to work toward shared goals could we rely upon them to share meaningful information. Our ability to function as team players is reflected in anatomical features such as the whites of the human eye, which turn it into an organ of communication, and in basic cognitive skills such as the ability to point things out to others and to laugh in a group context, in addition to more advanced cognitive and cultural abilities.

More attention has been paid to investigating and strengthening resilience for individuals than for organizations or communities. Of course, individual resilience matters, and is certainly worth cultivating. For people who are more resilient, symptoms of stress don’t last as long, and upsetting personal experiences morph into fodder for meaningful learning and growth.

There are biological (e.g., greater heart rate variability), life context (e.g., safer neighborhoods), and behavioral (e.g., self-compassion, optimism) factors that influence a person’s individual resilience, and social life also plays a formative role. For example, people with loving, supportive caregivers early in life tend to get through hardship more easily, and people who have close relationships with friends and family tend to handle losses and setbacks more gracefully.

With some know-how and regular practice, most people can improve their own resilience. We can learn strategies for restoring calm and coping with difficulty, engage with uplifting activities, or adopt outlooks like gratefulness or optimism that buffer against despair. We can enrich and strengthen our interpersonal ties by offering and asking for compassion, and being more curious and humble.

But some sources of stress—like widespread ideological polarization, rampant social inequality, global pandemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and warfare—aren’t just about you or me. They’re inescapably about all of us. While it can be convenient or momentarily comforting to avoid or dismiss, harm to people in one place imposes stress on everyone, like stories of violent crime spreading through social media.

Resilience to these broader shared threats requires more than what it takes to be individually resilient one person at a time. It requires us to clearly see the hazy collective weight that we all, regardless of privilege or power and to different degrees in any given moment, bear from shared sources of harm. It involves channeling our pooled stress toward teaming up—coming together to confront, document, address, and solution-find for the benefit of us all. It also involves documenting and accounting for the true costs of ignoring or escalating the sources to shared harm, such as extractive or exploitative practices or profiteering at the expense of collective well-being.

But how do we humans cultivate social resilience? In their paper, Cacioppo, Reis, and Zautra offer a list of nine personal resources for social resilience that can be strengthened with practice. I think their suggestions can be distilled into three actionable steps each person can take to contribute to social resilience.

1. Tune into, trust, and connect with people

Exercise your empathy muscles by paying more attention to other people’s expressions, noticing how this feels in your own body, and trying to understand what the others are feeling and why. Try to assume goodwill and look for common ground and shared humanity with others. You might even make a list of qualities, characteristics, or experiences you share with others, or reflect on times when you supported someone, or someone supported you. Marvel at all the ways that people seamlessly coordinate effort to make everyday life both interesting and full of opportunity. Make time for open-minded and honest conversations about meaningful issues, topics, and life experiences with people. Join group or community activities centered around creative expression, play, or activism that addresses unmet needs.

2. See the struggle, and do the best you can to help

When you encounter harm, try to discover ways that it may also harm you. Notice how that feels deep down. Ask how it reduces prosperity and the common good (such as loss of potential and progress, or costliness of repair). While honoring the self-protective urge to avoid or escape, aim instead to direct your inner tension toward approaching and doing whatever you can to remedy the situation. Try to offer help, even if it feels inconvenient, costly, untimely, or unpromising. Be more curious and humble about the context of harm and how you can be most helpful. Ask yourself: “Can I leave this shared circumstance, system, or space better than I found it?” Let the meaningful belonging gained from actively contributing to your community strengthen your heroic impulse to fix the world’s vexing challenges together with other people.

3. Constructively problem-solve and reconcile

Hone your cooperative mentality. In whatever settings you find yourself, try to work together with people to learn what each other’s pain points and threats are, and openly discuss where they might be coming from. Inquire and analyze how existing structures, policies, systems, and settings affect day-to-day experiences among the people you encounter, and crowdsource ideas for improvement. Exercise skills like labeling feelings clearly and authentically, and offering an effective apology to learn, grow, and deepen interpersonal connections even after disagreement or conflict. Ask for help, knowing that most people feel uplifted and honored by the opportunity to do something that matters. Uplift group morale and creativity by encouraging shared positive emotional experiences like moral elevation and amusement, and celebrating team successes. Leverage the varied perspectives and strengths from a diverse group to discover truly collaborative, innovative, and effective-long term solutions to shared challenges.

There are also contextual opportunities for scaffolding social resilience within a neighborhood or city, like designing free and inclusive spaces for people to gather in recreational, celebratory, and awe-inspiring ways (e.g., parks, community events). Safe, inviting opportunities for storytelling and public dialogue around key issues and concerns also improve social resilience. Increasing social resilience, in turn, can shape civic institutions in ways that benefit everyone. According to the “Well-being and State Effectiveness” chapter of the 2023 World Happiness Report, countries that routinely channel resources toward common interests (e.g., improving social well-being) score significantly higher on a composite measure of national prosperity that includes per capital income, collective capacity, and more peaceableness.

Social resilience, like individual resilience, takes practice. As a bipedal species, we are equipped with the innate urges to roll, scoot, crawl, then walk, but if we want to walk bravely into older adulthood, we cannot just passively expect it. We cannot just sit comfortably all day. Regular physical activity is crucial to lifelong health and longevity. The same goes for social resilience: Getting better at seeing the shared burden that broader, more pervasive problems impose and prioritizing coming together to support one another and find solutions take regular practice, which may not always feel easy or convenient.

Rejuvenating and investing in social resilience means explicitly studying and documenting the shared harm of widespread, existential threats and joining forces to solve them—to preempt avoidable destruction, and to help each other recover from painful disasters. Would systematically measuring, educating, and optimizing for social resilience promise a better, smarter, less wasteful future? Leaning into how we naturally synchronize emotionally, perceptually, and behaviorally—and using our inborn “forest in the trees” capacity to see the world through a more global, long-term, course-of-human-survival lens—social resilience could amplify our potential to mobilize together to address threats and find fixes that can, while minimizing harm, protect and uplift us all.

The city ended the year with 12 homicides—a stark drop from 2012 when it recorded 67, a per capita rate 18 times the national average at the time.

I’m a professor of criminal justice who wrote a book on police reform efforts in Camden over the last 15 years. The stunning turnaround in violent crime has led Camden and its newly formed Camden County Police Department, which was established in 2013 and replaced the Camden City Police Department, to be hailed as a model of reform. In 2015, then-President Obama visited the city to highlight the progress made.

Positive national and international attention on police reform in Camden continued in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. This attention stemmed from the Minneapolis city council’s unanimous decision to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Department and start anew—much as Camden had done seven years earlier.

Yet one topic that I believe such discussions and commentary often overlook is the role that community and activist groups, as well as local media, played in better policing by the Camden County Police Department.

County takeover of city police department

Under-policing came to define the final years of the Camden City Police Department, or CPD. Police presence in the community was largely absent.

In contrast, the Camden County Police Department, or CCPD, began its new mandate with an aggressive, broken-windows style of policing that included targeting low levels of disorder and quality-of-life offenses, like loitering.

Residents were concerned about this new aggressive stance. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, researchers, and local media used New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act to collect measures of the CCPD’s activity.

This data pointed to a troubling rise in officer-initiated vehicle and pedestrian stops, tickets for low-level violations, use of force, and citizen complaints of excessive force through 2014 and 2015.

CCPD officers in 2014 made 60,352 total stops, including 16,742 of people on foot. The per capita rate of pedestrian stops exceeded the rates in both New York City and Philadelphia during those cities’ peak stop-and-frisk years in 2011 and 2009, respectively, before stop-and-frisk tactics spurred court-ordered reforms.

Beyond the stops, CCPD officers issued more than 6,000 citations from May 1, 2013, when the new department launched, through the end of the year. They issued over 19,000 citations in 2014. During its first year or so, the CCPD’s total number of cases in municipal court increased by nearly 30% relative to the year prior.

Similarly, the number of tickets issued for minor infractions—such as riding a bicycle without a bell or a light, and disorderly conduct—rose steeply. For example, the number of citations for having tinted car windows more than tripled, while citations for not having proper car lights or reflectors more than quadrupled.

Backlash to broken-windows policing

Citizen complaints against CCPD alleging excessive use of force increased from 35 in 2013 to 65 in 2014.

Organizations like the Camden County chapter of the NAACP and the ACLU-NJ drummed up attention to these figures by issuing announcements and press briefings. On the same day in May 2015 that President Obama heralded the CCPD, the ACLU-NJ issued a scathing rebuke to the President’s message. It read, in part: “Before we hold Camden up as a model of community policing, we must address the troubling indicators that point to Camden’s use of practices that appear to take a page from a broken windows approach to policing.”

Mobilized residents and groups, including clergy members, made it clear that they did not appreciate this level and type of aggressive policing. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Star-Ledger/NJ Advance Media amplified the coverage of Camden’s heavy-handed tactics.

What followed was a complete change in behavior among the CCPD from an activity, training, and policy perspective. The numbers and rates of police stops declined. CCPD officers began issuing more warnings compared to tickets, to the point that “warnings over summonses” became an unofficial slogan of the department.

The top brass at CCPD sought out and implemented two types of de-escalation training, starting in the spring of 2015, for all officers. The CCPD also started to explore a complete overhaul of the agency’s use of force policy. It eventually adopted a more restrictive policy that emphasized de-escalation and the sanctity of life, while prohibiting tactics like chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. The CCPD’s innovative policy even inspired the New Jersey Attorney General to revamp its statewide policy years later.

As a result, complaints of use of force, in general, and of excessive force dropped from 43 in 2015 to 28 in 2016, and declined to 16 in 2017 and just three in 2018. Such complaints have usually been in the single digits each year since.

The CCPD deserves credit for course-correcting. But I believe it’s important to remember where that impetus came from: community and activist groups, as well as local media attention.

Many fewer murders, but persistent challenges

Camden has undoubtedly made progress. The city’s homicide rate in 2025 was four times the national average—a marked change from 18 times the national average in 2012. Homicides across the country have also declined in recent years.

Yet problems persist. Camden is still a perennial contender for the most violent city in New Jersey. Despite a $1.6 billion economic package from the state to the city during the 2010s, which overwhelmingly took the form of tax subsidies to encourage businesses to either stay in or relocate to Camden, almost every census tract is among the most socially and economically disadvantaged in the state. Most companies that receive tax breaks do not employ a meaningful number of Camden residents.

The city is racially segregated from the rest of Camden County and the broader South Jersey region.

In my opinion, Camden, like most other cities, relies too much on the police, giving them a monopoly on public safety. I believe both the city and the CCPD should take a cue from places like Newark, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, to find innovative ways to collaborate and engage more with community groups, business associations, and other non-police entities. Together they can co-produce public safety and take a more holistic approach to reducing crime, violence, and disorder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Feiler, who has written about life transitions and the “nonlinear life,” argues in today’s world, with ever-shifting timelines, we have an even greater need to mark important moments. 

Feiler views rituals as essential. “Whatever the enemy is, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is loneliness and isolation, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is political division, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is AI, ritual gatherings are the answer,” he told me over Zoom.

“The essence of what people are saying is, ‘I want to take back my humanity,’” says Feiler. Rituals, he argues, can help us do that.

Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: When did you realize rituals were so important?

Bruce Feiler: I belong to the tribe of group keepers. I’m the one who leads the family dinner game, organizes the backyard Olympics, leads the family meeting, and gathers the family stories. I think every family, every group, every team, every neighborhood has people who tend to the group.

I wrote books on how to hold your family together and how to make connections across different cultural backgrounds. And what happened was my wife Linda and I went from an empty nest to a full nest in 32 minutes, 21 years ago, when we became the parents of identical twin daughters. And then, 18 years later, we went from a full nest to an empty nest in 32 minutes when we dropped our children off at opposite ends of the same college campus. I walked into our home here in Brooklyn and I felt homesick in my own home. My first reaction was, don’t use this word. That’s what five year olds feel when they go to a sleepover, or teenagers feel when they go to sleep-away camp. Then I thought: I have spent the last 10 years thinking about how we navigate life transitions. I should be ready for this moment. But this was different. And I thought: Oh, what I need is a ritual.

HR: Humans have been conducting rituals for centuries. Why have they endured?

BF: We have 300,000 years of evidence that the earliest thing that humans did was gather to mark moments of pain and confusion. People were burying their dead before we were anatomical humans. For thousands of centuries and every place we’ve ever looked, we have evidence that in times of change, people turn to the group.

When someone comes into the group, like after a wedding or the birth of a baby. When someone leaves the group, like after a coming of age or a death. When someone moves or changes work, the group holds an occasion to mark this moment. That’s until this century, when we’ve abandoned them.

HR: Tell me more about that—what’s new about our present moment?

BF: Birth rituals are declining. Coming-of-age rituals have plummeted. In 1960, 90% of American adults got married. Now it’s under 50%. In 1975, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65%. Only one in three Americans are buried or have a ceremony of any kind to honor their life after passing. And so, we are in a kind of challenging moment for group togetherness.

Yet all around the world, people are creating new ways of gathering. They’re pushing back against digital saturation, loneliness, and division. I went to 16 countries on six continents and joined rituals, and found that everyday people are saying: We’re just not going to surrender to our phones and AI. We’re going to push back and hold humanity together.

HR: It seems the core of the ritual is togetherness. Why is that so urgent right now?

BF: We are a generation into the epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The enemies are in our pockets, and they are coming at us at all times. The core enemy is that the newest algorithms that we live our lives by are designed to divide us and to spread hate.

Ritual gatherings are the oldest human algorithm. It is the glue that holds society together. It is the first thing that we did, which was to gather together to bury our dead 300,000 years ago, before we were anatomical humans. In a world in which everything is pulling us further and further apart, the only thing strong enough to hold us together is a ritual gathering.

HR: Can you share an example of a ritual you can create today? What does it take to work?

BF: I was invited to do a ritual at TED in Vancouver, TED 2026. You need three things to make a ritual work: a beginning, a middle, and an end.

What you need at the beginning is an opening “wow.” Rituals have a sense of specialness, of sacred space. They have boundaries. So you invite people into a circle, a garden, a grove, a place on the beach. You’re saying: Come into this special place. Outside we were that, and inside we are this.

At TED, we had a flameless candle because we were in an institute that didn’t allow flames. Everybody took a flameless candle and answered a simple question: What’s bringing you joy today?

There’s this phrase from the Catholic baptism liturgy that I loved; as you know, I went to a group baptism in the Vatican. So, you want to welcome people with joy. Take a flower, take a candle, sing a song—something that makes people feel welcomed and safe, and now we’re going to go into the ritual. Then you define the tension and you set the intention. We’re here to comfort someone who’s having a double mastectomy. We’re here to send people off to college. We’re here to say goodbye to a colleague. We’re here to mark this retirement. We’re here to say goodbye to a loved one who just died. We’re not going to lecture, we’re not going to try to fix it, we’re just going to mark the moment.

For the middle, you need a peace plan. The purpose of the ritual is to kind of resolve a problem. I say that a ritual is—and this is unromantic—a compromise rehearsal.

When my own dad died at 87, there was tension in my family. My mother did not want to throw dirt onto the coffin because she thought it was barbaric. She wanted long-stem yellow roses. My sister said the dirt was her favorite part and thought long-stem yellow roses were too Hallmark. I had to middle-child my way through a compromise. So, we got three dozen yellow roses and we didn’t get dirt. But my dad loved to walk on the beach, so we got little bags of sand. And that’s how the ritual kind of created the conflict and resolved it because it was about something deeper.

So what you want in the middle of your ritual is something that makes everybody feel welcome and calms any divisions.

At TED, I divided everybody into groups of twos, and I gave each person a piece of bitter chocolate, and they were asked to share what’s challenging in their lives right now with their partner. Then I gave everybody a cube of sweet chocolate, and they were asked to define what would be a sweet outcome for their tension. People shared this outcome with their partner. Afterwards, people took their candles and brought them up to the front of the room where we had bowls of water and they stuck the candle in the water and offered a wish for what they hoped their neighbor’s outcome would be. It’s a small way of saying: OK, we’re all going through difficulty. Let’s do it together.

And when the candles touch the water, they turned on—they were water-activated—and the whole room lit up.

Rituals end with a moment of hope. What is the best version of the group that we can be? We’re going to think back when we danced at the wedding. We’re going to think back when we held hands and wept at the funeral. We’re going to think back at how we honored our friend who was about to go have her breast removed because of cancer.

So at TED, we took pebbles. People used Sharpies to write out their hope for themselves. Then they took the rock and they put it upside down on a table in the middle of the circle of 50 people. We went person by person, grabbed someone else’s stone, read it out loud, and then carried that home. What we created in that moment was a kind of web of hope where people are trying to make their own hopes come true and the hopes of someone else.

HR: What are some tools for making a ritual that everyone can get on board with?

BF: It could be a family, an office, a team, a neighborhood. School is a perfect example.  If I were to ask you to imagine some of the most fulfilling experiences you had at school, odds are that you would summon the kindergarteners sitting around in a circle in a ritual that welcomes somebody into the classroom, a sports team that sits around in a circle before they go into a competition, a group of theater kids sitting around in a circle before they go on stage.

In a class of kindergarteners, they’re coming in from varied worlds. They’ve probably had a difficult time getting there. You know the two most difficult moments in every family can be the hour before everyone goes to bed and the hour after everyone wakes up. Those are the moments of great chaos. Everybody coming into the classroom has come from their own moment of chaos. So what happens when we sit around in a circle is that we create a boundary. We say: Outside we were that, inside we are this. We sit together and we re-welcome one another—we enter this space together.

And so those little rituals do what all rituals do: They calm us, they synchronize our heartbeats, they put us in alignment with the people around us. We have all this knowledge now of mirror neurons and other things, and we know we’re responding to the group. When people first started having ritual gatherings 300,000 years ago, they didn’t have this access to the brain and to biometrics, but they understood it intuitively.

Whatever the situation that you are in, where there are people from different backgrounds, you need some sort of transition element that establishes the group as the mechanism to calm the divisions, make people feel present, and then help them feel aligned.

HR: How are people creating new rituals today?

BF: All around the world, people from boomers to Gen Z are creating this “ritual renaissance.” They are saying: I crave being around other people. I was raised with a script of top-down, institutionally mandated, prescripted, meaning-free life rituals on a pre-approved schedule—that I never approved.

What’s happening is that, from the bottom up, people are creating bespoke, personalized rituals.

A millennial ritual designer was talking to her friend and said, “I’m having a double mastectomy and I’m scared.” There’s no pre-approved ritual for that. So this designer invited people over to her living room. They came together, told stories, and brought comfy clothing because of the recovery. What this woman said was: “The purpose of the ritual is to turn fear into hope.”

What I’m trying to do is invite people to take back their own community and stand up and say, “I can do this right now with my family, with my neighbors, with my colleagues, with my team, with my book group or yoga club,” or whatever it is. Reassert the primacy of humanity in a world where humanity feels under threat every hour.

What he was missing was harder to name. It was not a lack of activity or ambition. It was a lack of connection.

So he started something small. A philosophy group. No curriculum, no credentials required. Just people gathering to discuss a single idea at a time. One word, one question, and whoever showed up.

What began in apartments quickly outgrew them.

Within a year, the New York Philosophy Society was drawing well over a hundred people on a typical night, sometimes many more. Conversations unfolded in small circles across bars, restaurants, and event spaces, rotating every thirty minutes so that strangers could engage deeply and then meet someone new. The group now relies on a team of volunteers to host and facilitate, and has become one of the more surprising social phenomena among young New Yorkers looking for something more meaningful than a typical night out.

But what makes it compelling is not just the scale. It is the tone.

People show up not to perform or network, but to think together. To ask questions about truth, love, purpose, and meaning. To be taken seriously by people they just met.

“It was only after I started doing it,” Ren says, “seeing not only my own life changing, but also the people around me… that I realized the importance of connection.”

What began as a way to fill a gap in his own life became something much larger. A place where people who felt disconnected could experience something rare. Not just being around others, but being known by them. Ren’s story is not unusual.

Points of connection

Across the country, people are creating their own versions of Ren’s gathering. A weekly yoga gathering that grew from 20 people to hundreds showing up in a park. A fitness group where the real friendships form afterward over brunch. A community dinner where strangers end the night sharing stories they didn’t expect to tell.

Participation is not limited to one stage of life. While people in their 30s and early 40s participate at the highest rates, engagement is meaningful across all age groups, including those over 60. The desire for connection, and the ability to build it through shared activity, does not age out.

For many of us, connection used to be built into daily life. School, work, and family created regular opportunities to be around the same people again and again. Over time, relationships formed almost without thinking about it.

That structure has weakened. People move more often. Work is more transactional or remote. Fewer shared activities organize our time. As a result, connection is no longer ambient. It requires intention.

What is emerging in response is not just more socializing, but something more specific. People are building what we call communities of play, groups organized around shared activity.

That is one of the Six Points of Connection, a simple framework created by us at the U.S. Chamber of Connection to capture what people need to build a fully connected life. The six include having someone nearby you can rely on, consistent one-to-one relationships, a sense of belonging to a shared identity, a third place, a role in contributing to others, and being part of a group that gathers around a shared activity.

Among these, community of play often acts as the entry point.

Impact of connection

To understand its impact, we studied more than 2,000 adults across the United States, comparing those who regularly participate in activity-based communities with those who do not. We then interviewed 20 community builders and surveyed nearly 100 leaders like Ren to understand how these groups actually function.

We identified some distinct groupings, and the differences between them are significant.

People who participate in these communities are 28 percentage points more likely to report strong social support and 33 points more likely to report high life satisfaction. They are also more likely to trust others, to form relationships across differences, and to feel a sense of agency in their lives.

And yet only about 30 percent of people regularly participate in any kind of shared activity community.

Most people are not opting out because they do not want connection. They are running into friction. In our data, people who are not part of these communities are far more likely to say they feel uncomfortable showing up, unsure how to start, or worried they will not fit in. Cost and time play a role, but the biggest barriers are social and psychological.

This gap points to something important. The issue is not that we do not know how to build connections. It’s that most people are not engaging in the kinds of structures that make it possible.

One reason activity-based communities are so effective is that they lower the stakes of showing up. You do not have to arrive ready to connect. You arrive ready to do something.

Some are built around fitness or food. Others are built around ideas. Some are intentionally a little strange.

“I’ve always been interested in bringing people together to do kind of little weird things,” one builder says.

From there, connection can emerge more naturally.

This reflects a deeper insight from the science of play and social behavior. Researchers like Stuart Brown have argued that play is a primary way humans build trust and social bonds. It creates a state of openness and shared attention that makes people more receptive to one another. When people move, create, or learn together, they begin to synchronize, both emotionally and behaviorally.

Other researchers have found that shared activities accelerate what might otherwise take much longer to develop. Instead of relying on conversation alone, people build connection through experience. They have something to reference, something to return to, and something that brings them back again.

One community-builder describes it simply: The activity gets people in the door, but the real connection happens afterward, when people stay and talk.

That pattern shows up again and again: The activity is not the point—it’s the invitation. And for many people, that’s the easiest place to begin.

Changing relationships

The impact of these communities is not limited to individual well-being. They also shape how people relate to others.

In our study of community-builders, a large majority reported that their groups regularly bring together people across differences in age, race, socioeconomic background, and political identity. This kind of interaction is increasingly rare in everyday American life.

Sociologists often distinguish between bonding and bridging social capital. Bonding brings together people who are similar. Bridging connects people across lines of difference. Both matter, but bridging is especially important for building trust and resilience in a society.

What is notable about activity-based communities is that they often do both at the same time.

People come because of a shared interest, which creates an immediate sense of familiarity. But because the groups are open and fluid, they also create opportunities to encounter people who are different.

One participant described arriving at an event feeling isolated and unsure, only to realize that others felt the same way. There was a whole group of people who felt like that. They felt less alone immediately.

Another described how, over the course of an evening, conversations moved beyond small talk into something more meaningful. People began sharing stories about their lives, their families, and their struggles, often with people they had just met.

These are the moments when connection shifts from surface interaction to something more durable.

While much of the research focuses on the benefits for participants, our interviews highlighted something else. The act of creating community has its own impact.

Many of the builders we spoke with did not set out to become leaders. They were trying to solve something in their own lives. They wanted more connection, more meaning, or simply a place where they could belong.

In creating that space for others, they often found a deeper sense of purpose themselves.

One builder described finding a handwritten note after an event. Someone had written about how much the community meant to them and how lonely they had felt before finding it.

Experiences like this can be transformative. They shift how people see their role in the world. Instead of waiting for connection to appear, they begin to see themselves as someone who can create it.

Worth the effort

At the same time, this work is not effortless. Many builders invest significant time and energy, often without financial support. Some described the tension between wanting to participate as a member and feeling responsible for holding the space for others.

“I have a tendency to self-sacrifice,” one builder said. “I think at times I wish people knew what I’m putting into it.”

This tension points to something important. These communities are doing meaningful work, but they are largely unsupported.

For individuals, the lesson from this research is not that everyone needs to start a community. It is that connection is more accessible than it often feels.

The most effective entry point is a shared activity. Something simple, repeatable, and easy to join. A walk in the same place each week. A standing dinner. A regular gathering around a shared interest.

The goal is not to create instant closeness. It is to create a setting where familiarity can grow over time.

Psychologists have long emphasized the role of repeated exposure in forming relationships. Seeing the same people again and again, even in low-stakes settings, increases the likelihood of connection.

Activity based communities create that repetition in a natural way.

There is a tendency to look for large scale solutions to the problem of disconnection. New programs, new technologies, new policies.

Those may have a role to play. But what is already happening across the country suggests a more immediate path.

People are creating small, consistent spaces where others can gather. They are building connection through shared experience, not abstract intention.

Platforms like Heylo now support more than 20,000 of these communities, and the number continues to grow. Taken together, they represent a quiet but significant shift in how connection is formed.

Ren’s philosophy group is one example. It did not start as a solution to a national problem. It started as a response to a personal one.

That may be the most important insight.

If you want more connection in your life, the first step may not be to search for it. It may be to create a place where it can happen, and to invite others in.

This dynamic becomes especially visible during periods of heightened immigration enforcement. Parents weigh whether it is safe to take their child to the doctor. Teenagers in a mixed-status family reconsider applying for college. Families avoid public spaces. Over time, these decisions accumulate, reshaping how families care for one another and imagine their futures.

For many immigrant families, separation—whether by force or by choice—is not a single moment. It becomes a psychological rupture that reshapes how they experience safety, belonging and identity.

For many, separation starts with the act of immigration itself, often forced by desperate circumstances. Diana Ortiz Giron, director of programming and education at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is the youngest of three siblings raised by a single mother who had to make a difficult choice: In 1996, she left her children with their aunt and grandmother and moved across the border, from Tijuana to Azusa, a city in Southern California, in search of economic opportunities.

“I remember very little from my time in Mexico, but what I do remember is people telling me that I would hold onto my mom’s leg when she would leave back to the States,” she says.

If families are reunited in the United States, even legal immigrants today face intensified fears of family separation, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains more and more lawful residents with no criminal records.

Researchers note the phenomenon is not new. For decades, U.S. immigration policy has created conditions in which physical, emotional, or anticipatory separation is a recurring part of life for many Latino families—and increasingly, all immigrants today. The current enforcement landscape builds on that history, amplifying pressures that continue to shape health, decision-making, and family relationships.

Studies show that experiences with immigration enforcement, from racial profiling to knowing someone who has been deported, are linked to delays in healthcare—such as postponing doctor visits, avoiding hospitals, or forgoing preventive care—and increased psychological distress. Each additional encounter increases the likelihood that individuals will postpone care or report worse health outcomes.

Gustavo Carlo, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies Latino youth and family relationships, says the effects of enforcement-related separation can be especially damaging for children and adolescents.

“This form of forced separation is powerful and potentially destructive to health and well-being,” Carlo said. “It’s not only involuntary, but it often violates basic human rights. When it happens at a large scale, it intensifies fear, anxiety, and stress in ways that can disrupt the lives of children, families, and entire communities.”

Together, these findings suggest that today’s enforcement tactics do more than create isolated fear; they shape how people navigate everyday decisions about their health and well-being. According to advocates, today’s immigration policies reflect broader choices about who is protected in American society—consequences that reach far beyond migrant communities. But those communities are not helpless in the face of these forces. Families, advocates, and local organizations are working to buffer their impact and reimagine systems of support.

A long history of separation

Family separation in the United States dates back to the 18th century.

From the forced separation of enslaved families to exclusionary immigration laws that limited entry and family reunification, these practices have disrupted family networks across generations. Early federal policies, including the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, restricted migration and, in many cases, prevented families from remaining together or reuniting. 

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, immigration enforcement became more formalized through expanded detention systems and increased coordination between federal and local authorities. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 reorganized immigration enforcement under a national security framework. Programs such as Secure Communities and 287(g) agreements enabled local law enforcement to work more closely with federal immigration agencies.

These changes broadened the scope of enforcement into routine settings. Encounters such as traffic stops or other local law enforcement interactions could lead to detention or deportation, increasing the risk of family separation beyond border crossings.

The Trump administration marked a significant increase in the scale and visibility of these practices. The 2018 Zero Tolerance Policy mandated criminal prosecution for unauthorized border crossings, resulting in the separation of thousands of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border. At the same time, expanded interior enforcement, workplace raids, and efforts to rescind programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) contributed to increased uncertainty for mixed-status families.

In recent years, tens of thousands of spouses and children have been separated due to immigration enforcement actions. Many more families live with the possibility of separation, and some make difficult decisions about whether to remain together or apart in response to enforcement risks. Family separation continues to be a recurring outcome of immigration policy in the United States.

Anxiety and anticipatory grief

Today, Ortiz Giron is a newly naturalized U.S. citizen who was once undocumented and later became a DACA recipient. She says she constantly worries about what might happen if her husband, a brown Latino man, were to encounter ICE.

These fears shape even ordinary moments. “We have conversations about what would happen if we were detained,” she says. “The baby’s in the car seat, I’m in the back, he’s driving—and if they ask him to get out, we’ve already said: don’t intervene. Let them take you. I’ll find a lawyer. I’ll find resources to get you out.”

Psychologists and family researchers increasingly ask: What happens when family separation is to be expected?

To investigate, researchers distinguish between three interconnected experiences. Forced separation occurs when a parent is detained or deported. Separation by constrained choice happens when families preemptively separate in response to danger or instability. Fear of separation, often overlooked, describes the chronic anxiety of living under the constant threat that family unity could be shattered at any time.

These experiences do not occur in isolation; they accumulate and are increasingly shaping the psychological lives and cultural experiences of Latinos in the United States.

Ortiz Giron’s childhood experience reflects separation by constrained choice—one shaped by survival and economic necessity. While difficult, she says separations caused by deportation feel more like an unexpected death.

“You don’t expect it. You’re not prepared for it,” she says. “There’s grief and a loss of that connection to that family member, and there is deep pain throughout the whole process. I cannot imagine the fear that parents carry, knowing this could happen and that they could be separated from their children.”

Living with constant uncertainty

Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young is an immigrant health scholar who studies how immigration policy shapes family well-being. Her research shows that uncertainty itself can become a powerful force, influencing how people assess risk and make decisions about care.

“One of the big challenges that communities are facing at this time is having the ability to plan and make plans for their own future,” she explains. That uncertainty reaches into daily life, influencing whether parents seek medical care for their children or whether young people pursue higher education.

Young emphasizes that this instability does not begin with high-profile enforcement actions. It’s built into the policy landscape.

“The baseline in this country…is one of exclusion,” she says. Federal and state policies often limit access to basic services such as healthcare, particularly for undocumented immigrants. Even before recent increases in enforcement, many families were already navigating a system where access to care, education, and work opportunities was uncertain.

That broader context matters. It means families are not just reacting to isolated events, but adapting to an environment where risk is constant.

Researchers have begun to describe this as more than a “chilling effect.” Rather than simply avoiding institutions out of fear, many immigrants experience repeated, direct contact with enforcement systems, from workplace raids to traffic stops or the detention of a family member. In some cases, a single deportation reverberates across an entire social network, affecting how neighbors, relatives, and friends assess risk.

Those encounters accumulate over time, shaping how people move through the world and how they make decisions about safety and health.

The psychological toll of separation on children

One longitudinal study followed more than 300 recently immigrated Latino adolescents in Los Angeles and Miami over the course of a year, surveying them at multiple points about their experiences of discrimination, depressive symptoms, and social behavior.

The researchers found that experiences of discrimination and chronic stress were linked to increases in depressive symptoms over the course of the year, which in turn were associated with lower engagement in helping and cooperative behaviors. Indeed, decades of research show that family separation is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and trauma, with effects that can persist into adulthood and shape educational attainment, social relationships, and long-term well-being.

In some communities, enforcement actions extend into spaces meant to provide stability, like schools and the courts. This disrupts school attendance, undermines feelings of safety, and disfigures the broader social fabric of schools and neighborhoods.

One reason family separation is so damaging is that it often creates what psychologists call ambiguous loss, a concept developed by family therapist Pauline Boss. She describes it as a uniquely stressful form of loss because it lacks clarity and closure, making it difficult for families to grieve or adapt.

Research on immigrant families has applied this framework to experiences of deportation and prolonged separation. Studies by Luis H. Zayas find that children in mixed-status households often experience persistent fear, anxiety, and disruptions to family roles when a parent is detained or deported.

As he explains in one paper, “The constant dread of the possible arrest, detention, and deportation of their parents sets the context that places citizen-children at risk for negative psychological effects and disruption of their developmental trajectories… [and] the actual arrest, detention, and deportation of parents serve only to complete the trauma.” This situation is shaped as much by uncertainty as by separation itself. In this context, a parent who has been deported may still be in contact, yet their absence remains unresolved and ongoing.

Ambiguous loss prevents closure. Families remain suspended between hope and grief, unsure whether reunification will ever occur. Over time, this unresolved stress can fracture family dynamics and isolate households from broader community support.

Exclusionary environments can intensify this isolation. Fear of immigration enforcement leads families to withdraw from social networks built through institutions such as schools and religious places of worship resulting in deepening loneliness and reinforcing vulnerability.

Familismo and the weight of separation

These effects extend beyond individual well-being. Gustavo Carlo points to the concept of familismo, which reflects the central role of family in many Latino children’s lives.

“Family is the training ground for children’s development,” he said. “It provides not just support, but shapes their sense of self and their sense of obligation to one another.”

These values can foster resilience, encouraging individuals to support one another even in the face of adversity. At the same time, they can heighten the emotional toll of separation, as disruptions to family unity strain entire support systems. This tension between resilience and strain defines many families’ experiences.

Carlo also emphasizes that these challenges do not define outcomes for all families.

“In spite of trauma and tremendous barriers, some individuals are able to overcome these risks,” he said. “There’s always the possibility not only to cope, but to contribute in positive ways, to support family members, strengthen communities, and advocate for future generations.”

In many immigrant communities facing the constant threat of deportation, separation is not an abstract possibility. It is a shared reality, an ongoing condition that shapes how families think about safety, belonging, and the future.

Supporting families and imagining humane enforcement

Despite the challenges of separation, Latino families and community organizations are finding ways to reduce harm and build resilience.

Legal aid, know‑your‑rights workshops, and case management help families stay together and access healthcare, education, and housing, while peer groups, faith communities, and culturally grounded mental health services provide emotional support and reduce isolation.

Inside the home, families are also developing strategies to navigate the possibility of separation. A recent study by Mahsa Rafieifar and Hui Huang examines how undocumented parents talk with their children about legal status and the risk of family separation. The researchers found that these conversations are often carefully planned and emotionally complex, with parents weighing how much to disclose and how to protect their children from fear.

Some parents frame these discussions through stories of migration, explaining why they came to the United States and emphasizing hope and opportunity. Others make deliberate efforts to avoid being perceived as “lawbreakers” by reassuring their children that their actions are rooted in care for the family’s future. In many cases, conversations about legal status are intertwined with discussions about long-term goals, helping children make sense of uncertainty within a broader narrative of sacrifice and aspiration.

Some of the most difficult conversations center on contingency planning, particularly the possibility that a child may need to live with another caregiver. The study finds that while some parents identify trusted guardians and prepare their children for that possibility, others avoid the topic altogether, reflecting the emotional weight and uncertainty surrounding these decisions.

These strategies highlight the quiet, often invisible work families do to maintain stability under conditions of chronic risk. They also underscore the limits of what families can manage on their own.

At the community level, organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS advocate for policies that prioritize family unity, reduce deportations, and invest in community services rather than detention. Advocates and service providers increasingly emphasize that reducing harm requires not only individual coping strategies, but systemic change.

How communities can buffer the effects

What would it take to ease the toll of family separation for families and the communities where it has become part of everyday life?

Researchers and practitioners point to a growing body of evidence showing that community-based support and policy changes can meaningfully buffer the effects of immigration enforcement on children and families.

Studies in public health and social work have found that access to stable legal representation, community health services, and school-based support systems can reduce psychological distress and improve long-term outcomes for children in mixed-status families. Programs that provide universal legal representation, for example, are associated with higher case success rates and greater family stability, allowing parents to remain with their children and maintain access to work, housing, and care.

Mental health researchers also emphasize the importance of culturally responsive, family-centered care. Interventions that include peer support, trauma-informed therapy, and community-based counseling have been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression among children experiencing immigration-related stress. These approaches work in part because they rebuild trust and social connection, two factors that are often eroded in enforcement-heavy environments.

At the policy level, scholars argue that shifting away from detention-based systems is key. Community-based alternatives to detention, such as case-management programs, have been found to support high rates of compliance with immigration proceedings while allowing families to remain together. Limiting prolonged confinement and reducing the use of enforcement in sensitive spaces like schools and hospitals can also help restore a sense of safety in the institutions families rely on most.

Advocates, including organizations like Freedom for Immigrants and UnidosUS, argue that humane enforcement must center family unity and child well-being. That includes investments not only in legal systems but also in education, healthcare, and economic opportunity, factors that shape whether families can remain stable in the face of uncertainty.

Research suggests that the harms of separation are not inevitable. They are shaped and can be reduced by the systems surrounding families. With the right support in place, communities can buffer the effects of enforcement, protect children’s development, and create conditions in which families are able not only to endure but to thrive.

These policies could help make life better for all Americans. Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young emphasizes that immigration policy does not just affect immigrants.

“Even before 2025, in multiple studies I found that in states with many anti-immigrant policies, the health of U.S.-born citizens—regardless of whether they are white, Black, Latino, or Asian—is worse,” she says. “We need to understand that immigration policy is not just about immigrants; it reflects choices about how we treat people in society. Choosing to be anti-immigrant has implications for the well-being of everyone.”

In spite of these frustrations, I’ve come to accept that we have to collaborate if we want to build the greater good for the greatest number of people. Decades of facilitating group projects across the arts and media taught me that healthy conflict is a necessary part of collaboration. It’s only been in recent years, however, that I’ve learned it’s possible to intentionally develop my body’s capacity to engage in conflict without abandoning myself or my relationships. Apparently, I can build this skill systematically, not haphazardly over time through trial and error.

That’s why I wanted to talk with Jazmin Pichardo and Beth Douthirt-Cohen. They’re frequent collaborators at the University of Maryland, where they both help people strengthen their capacity to engage across differences of power and identity. Their goal, Pichardo says, is “shifting our culture so that we can talk, work, and be better humans together.”

Jazmin Pichardo is faculty of practice and director of intergroup dialogue collaborations and partnerships at the University of Maryland College of Education’s Intergroup Dialogue Training Hub. Beth Douthirt-Cohen is the director of strategic initiatives for undergraduate studies as well as political faculty at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, where they support processes of truth and reconciliation that were initiated in the wake of a murder that was committed on campus in 2017. (Beth is also an alum of our Bridging Differences in Higher Education Learning Fellowship and their work is featured in our Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook.)

In this lightly edited conversation, Pichardo and Douthirt-Cohen take me step-by-step through their process of teaching folks concrete, embodied ways to face painful conversations and stay connected.

Kelly Rafferty: Over the course of a semester or a series of workshops, what is the primary skill you’re trying to help your students or participants develop? What are you training people to do?

Beth Douthirt-Cohen: Jazmin has a powerful way of saying it: “How do I choose relationship?”

“Choosing relationship” is not necessarily choosing you as my best friend. How do we choose to stay in relationship with each other and why would we make that choice? What is the groundwork we need to do in order to choose relationship when we come to a point where I’m like, No, it would be easier for me to peace out. Maybe that’s me leaving the room. Maybe it’s me leaving my body. Maybe it’s me pretending like I’m listening.

Jazmin Pichardo: It’s about facing the conflict rather than running away, freezing, feeling still, or even getting defensive and argumentative. Am I facing this situation with a desire to be right and shut this person down and prove them wrong? Or am I facing this situation with the intent to actually want to learn and understand their perspective, even if I don’t agree? Am I facing this conflict so that we can sit in it together and figure out where we have some shared understanding or some common ground?

BDC: Facing the conflict gives you more choice. You’re not just at reaction. Like, Can I have more choice in the way that I want to respond? And how do I build that capacity? It’s in micro-moments that we build that capacity. Our bodies are already practicing something. Can we try something new? There are more options for us than just seeing discomfort as danger.

KR: Very few people show up in the world, ready on day one to engage in deep, honest conversations about legacies of racist harm, or present-day experiences of ableism or gender-based violence. Your work is proof that we can learn how to do these things. How does capacity-building start? Are there specific things the group discusses or practices long before you ask anyone to jump into a challenging dialogue?

BDC: We name what is coming. Inevitably disagreement will happen, and inevitably there will be points where our bodies are feeling defensive, we’re uncertain, unsure. How do we prepare for that? How do we see those sensations as data, as information? How do you build the somatic awareness to be able to do that? Notice what happens in your body when you feel defensive, when you feel challenged, when you feel uncomfortable. What story do you tell yourself when that’s happening?

We also get clear on what the values are that will keep you in the room at that point. What matters to you? Is there an ancestor you want to call on or a value you want to call on that orients you in those moments?

JP: Yes, together we find a shared connection—a shared investment. We have some shared values, and that’s important enough that we’re going to work on not throwing each other away.

We also spend a lot of time being really clear with participants and our students about wanting to build a container. The classroom or the workshop space is a space where we can practice living into some different ways of being with one another. We know that out in the world, we can be conflict-avoidant and we can be judgmental and run with the stories we tell ourselves about other people.

With participants and students, we are deliberate and intentional in saying, “Let’s try to suspend that in this space and use it as a practice ground for different ways of being with one another.”

KR: When you’re teaching students how to develop self-awareness around their reactions to conflict, what are some of the things you ask them to pay attention to?

JP: Early on, I will often ask students and participants, “Who are you in conflict?” If we’re opening up the conversation by saying conflict is normal, and the work that we want to be able to do together is figure out how we navigate conflict together before we can even have that conversation, then there is a need for a level of self-awareness and reflection around who I am in conflict. What are the stories I tell myself about my relationship to conflict? Before we even have the conversation—whatever is the focus of our course or topic—we’re giving participants time to really think about how they get activated. What are their stress responses? Do you fight, flight, freeze, fawn?

We start with, what do you know about your responses? And then what do you need to feel grounded and secure enough to face conflict instead?

BDC: And how do I build the somatic awareness and skills to do that? It depends on the level of the stress response, but maybe I have a sense that I’m a “toward” person. In conflict, I’m more likely to be like, “No, Jazmin, I do agree with you.” That’s a “towards” shape. That’s very adaptive. That has kept you safe and alive and kept your ancestors safe and alive. And can I have more choices? Maybe I can say, “Actually, I really disagree with you here.” I’ll notice that when I say that, my body is going to freak out because it might not feel safe. But how do I stay in it and believe in the possibility of Jazmin staying in it with me, for example?

As much as we try to normalize strong feelings, students will still come out of a very difficult conversation and they’ll be like, “Why did I have such a strong reaction? I know that people say these dumb things.” As much as we can, we normalize. That’s your body protecting you, trying to keep you safe. And your brain-body doesn’t distinguish between a lion coming over the hill and this threat. They’re just both threats in the body. As much as we can increase that awareness, it tends to reduce shame.

KR: I know you encourage students to pause and breathe when they’re feeling activated in a conversation. What other practices, tools, or techniques do you teach them to help them respond instead of react?

JP: Early on, we start talking about emotions. Emotions are information. In the traditional academic classroom, you get taught that there is head and logic, and you separate that from your emotions or bodily reactions. In dialogue, we bring both in. We teach that head and heart, that thinking and understanding together actually support deeper learning and greater self-awareness. We model that for the students.

We provide them with emotion wheels. Sometimes they really struggle with naming emotions. They’ll say, “I feel like sometimes we need to rethink things.” And I’ll say, “That sounds like an ‘I think’ statement, not an ‘I feel’ statement.” We support students to identify the emotion, and if they’re not in a place where they can identify that emotion, we come back to sensations. Where are you feeling a sensation—a kind of tension—in your body around this topic? When a peer shared this comment, where did you feel the reaction in your body internally?

BDC: We’ll also say things like, “Feel your feet on the ground. Notice your breath.” One of the things that’s most important to me is the fact that we’re modeling it. We will lower our voices. We will get more in our bodies. We will name what’s going on for us. It’s almost like facilitator-as-tool or model. I’ll sometimes say, “I really feel my heart beating fast right now. That tells me my body’s feeling stuff, things are happening.”

Sometimes people think somatic work is supposed to calm people down, and that’s actually not our purpose. We also try to be really clear about that. It’s never about calming people down. You can be centered and grounded and full of rage and still in dialogue, still facing. The goal here is not harmony. Harmony might come, but that is not the purpose of this.

Whatever you’re feeling, you can be centered and grounded and have choice. Our goal is that you have more capacity, more choice in these moments so that you can turn towards or face the possibility of relationship in the midst of profound differences.

KR: In what you’re describing, I see the dance of patience and courage that the psychologist and neuroscientist Sarah Schnitker and her colleagues articulate in their work. They understand patience and courage to be complimentary virtues. Too much patience can be apathy, which is also the deficiency of courage. Conversely, too little patience is recklessness, which is also excessive courage. In a recent conversation Sarah said, “We find, empirically over time, that if someone has both of these virtues . . . they’re able to do what is needed to act in service of love and justice because patience allows them to take that space [to make a conscious choice] and courage allows them to act even when it’s really difficult.”

I’m curious if you’ve noticed this dynamic at play in your classrooms and workshops. Have you witnessed students drawing on their patience and their courage in complimentary ways during dialogues?

JP: I think a lot about our students who, in a moment where I’m noticing emotional elevation, take the deep breath and say, “Actually, I’m not OK with that. Actually, that feels really harmful.” Not in a way that is intended to be judgmental, but in a way that is intended to bring our awareness to the impact that our words can have.

Dialogue is a process that allows you to speak your truth while also being able to stay in relationship with folks during tension. Those are moments where I see our students leaning into some courage, holding that patience and that grace for others, particularly when they’re calling people in while not losing sight of the dignity they inherently hold and that they want us to be able to hold for them, as well.

BDC: Yes. The only thing that I’ll add is patience for self. I’m thinking about our dialogues that are more about race, and I’m thinking about myself, in particular, working with white students or white faculty and staff. I see people practice patience for self, for not already having arrived, for not being perfect, for not knowing what to say.

I also see participants—not just white participants—say, “I am feeling something and I need us to slow down,” which feels so brave. With the power dynamics of higher education classrooms, that rarely happens. It feels powerful to me because it says to me that they’re honoring where they are. Because we co-regulate, and we’re all doing it together, they’re honoring other people in the room by extension. Patience for self and patience with each other feels incredibly important. This is really brave work, to have conversations where you’re not pretending to get along.

KR: You bring a great deal of intention and skill to how you prepare students for dialogue and how you support them all the way through the conversation. What happens when it’s time to end? What do our bodies and relationships need at the end of a session or a semester?

JP: From the get-go, we are really clear with participants, whether they be students, faculty, or staff in a workshop or training. Expect and accept a lack of closure. That can be really unsettling and hard, in particular when we’re talking about identity and power differences and inequities. We close out by acknowledging that this can feel unfinished. We ask, “What parts of this feel unfinished for you in this moment? What do you want to take away from this space? What’s something that you want to leave here?”

Closure in this work isn’t always a neat bow. But we can acknowledge the ongoing work that we all have to do. We can acknowledge that some kind of progress was made in the time that we had together. I think adrienne maree brown says, “People are gonna have the conversation that they need to have in that space.”

BDC: Yes. Closing each dialogue session and closure at the end of a class is important, partially because there is a rhythm to all of this. We’re honoring our humanity. In this culture, you just run from one thing to another. You switch jobs. You finish a class and you’re on to the next one. Part of honoring the humanity of self and other is doing some kind of closing ritual practice. We have a few activities that we typically use. One of our colleagues, Dr. Carlton Green, does something that feels so humanizing to me. We stand in a circle and express gratitude. Gratitude as a somatic practice can shift mood and shift possibility—not to paint over difference, not for harmony, but actually to be in relationship and in connection with each other. We ground it always in the humanity of ourselves and each other.

For a firsthand experience of some of these techniques, listen to Beth Douthirt-Cohen guide us through a centering practice in a recent GGSC skill-sharing session.

For Christians, forgiveness and love are the two cardinal virtues. Even back then, however, that prescient administrator could see where the country was heading: toward increasing political polarization and more frequent mental health problems. He wanted to engage the methods of Christian practical theology to heal minds and relationships, and he wanted to start by joining his faith’s conception of forgiveness—prayer, restraint, looking to mature models, seeking God’s help—with the burgeoning science of forgiveness. He reached out to me as both scientist and Christian because I had published and spoken in both secular and religious venues about forgiveness.

We shaped a two-week forgiveness campaign. We worked with staff and students to design many activities that they thought would increase awareness of forgiveness—newspaper articles and ads, debates, chapel speakers, banners adorning a popular walkway, an endorsement from the university president, and more.

During the weeks of the campaign, I also trained about 50 group leaders to run secular and Christian-oriented REACH Forgiveness groups, which are psycho-educational interventions that have been found in over 30 studies worldwide to be able to help people forgive, flourish, enhance their well-being, and reduce depression and anxiety. The acronym REACH stands for five steps:

R = Recall the hurt;
E = Empathize with the offender;
A = Altruistic undeserved gift of forgiveness;
C = Commit to the forgiveness experienced; and
H = Hold on to forgiveness when doubts arise.

The aim: to help participants to make a decision to eschew payback and to treat the offender more humanely. Other activities surround these core steps, such as identifying the most difficult event a participant has successfully forgiven, defining emotional and decisional forgiveness, identifying the benefits of forgiveness to the forgiver, and working through other hurts and offenses to generalize gains.

Some students were randomized to either complete a six-hour REACH Forgiveness group or serve as the control group who were exposed only to the campaign (without the REACH group). Unsurprisingly, we found that the REACH Forgiveness groups—my principal focus at the time—were more effective than the campaign alone.

After we published the results, I was contacted by leaders at Asbury University, a Christian university in Kentucky. They wanted to conduct a similar campaign, and they also wanted to test the effects of writing forgiveness essays against the REACH Forgiveness groups. Again, we found that the groups were more effective than both a writing exercise and the campaign that everyone on campus experienced.

However, I also found that just being exposed to a campus-wide forgiveness campaign had helped the two communities become more forgiving. So, I applied to the Fetzer Institute for a grant to assess forgiveness campaigns at nine Christian universities. I compiled a list of potential forgiveness-promoting activities, and I encouraged each school to select half of their activities from the standard list and use their creativity for the other half.

At the same time, I was working with faith leaders in churches to design campaigns around forgiveness. I consulted with a large church in the Philadelphia area and a medium-sized church in Adelaide, Australia. I directed a campaign at the church that I attend in Richmond, Virginia, giving me a hands-on slant on running deeper dives. Those projects were done simply as service in congregations who were interested in them, and not for publication. By 2018, I did an after-action review of the campaigns at both faith-based universities and congregations. We assessed forgiveness of a target offense, dispositional forgivingness, well-being, hope, and reduced depression and anxiety. 

What emerged from this work are some insights into how to build forgiveness in faith-based communities—and which can be applied to secular ones, as well.

The elements of deep dives

I came to refer to the combination of a public-facing campaign, REACH groups (and later workbooks), and scientific assessment as “deep dives.” At that point, all completed deep dives were in faith-based communities that already valued forgiveness. I had learned things pertinent to those communities that I hoped to use in the future in secular communities.

First, we learned that it was essential to have leadership at the highest level of university president and provost or senior pastor and other assistant pastors engaged in active advocacy and support, not just a token endorsement.

Second, deep dives needed to focus on clear messages. We used three:

• Forgiveness has benefits to the forgiver;
• There are two types of forgiveness that are not always experienced in tandem—a decision to treat the offender more humanely and an emotional change; and
• There are local resources available to help.

Third, in faith-based communities, we had emphasized awareness-raising over actually practicing forgiveness. Awareness-raising is important, but we found that many students and religious attenders did not have skills to forgive, suggesting a fourth element was needed: to help people go beyond awareness-raising and to actively practice forgiveness in various contexts.

We also discovered that church-based campaigns were different from university-based counterparts in age distribution and living environment. Activities had to be tailored to more diverse living situations in congregations than in universities. Also, universities had an educational mindset and on-campus living compared to a community church with a geographically distributed congregation and educationally diverse mindsets. In congregations, people might only come together once a week and perhaps a second time in a small group. With a university, though, interactions were more frequent and more diverse. Sporting events, encounters in dormitories or other living units (like fraternity or sorority houses), classes, and extracurricular activities provided many opportunities to interact in educational and non-educational ways each week.

Secular applications

Another grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) helped extend this work to secular venues in Indonesia, South Africa, and Colombia. We have (so far) published the results of our effort in Colombia.

There, we conducted a four-week community-wide forgiveness deep-dive involving students, faculty, and staff at the Universidad del Sinú in Monteria, Colombia, a private secular university. We started by assessing 3,000 of 9,000 students at the beginning and end of the deep dive, looking for changes in forgiveness, mental health, and flourishing. We also evaluated their engagement with, and the effectiveness of, the 16 types of activity, such as getting at least nine out of 10 answers correct on a forgiveness-knowledge test, completing a REACH Forgiveness workbook, attending a forgiveness webinar, watching and discussing forgiveness-themed movies, listening to forgiveness podcasts from world-renowned experts, sitting under a “forgiveness tree” to reflect on forgiving an offender, and writing about one’s experience and posting it at a “forgiveness wall.”

In examining the results, we addressed three main research questions.

The first: “Did the deep dive successfully foster increased forgiveness, mental health, and flourishing?” It did. In fact, averaged across all of the students, the effects were half as large as participating in an intensive forgiveness intervention. That is astounding for a public health intervention in which, like many public health initiatives, not every student got engaged.

The second research question was, “Did the number of types of activities affect the amount of forgiveness, mental health, and flourishing that people experienced?” Again, the answer was yes, and we found engagement matters. For three or fewer activities, people experienced essentially no gains. But from four to 16 types of activities, each additional activity they completed yielded more forgiveness and flourishing—and less depression and anxiety.

The third research question was, “Which types of activities were most effective at promoting forgiveness, mental health, and flourishing, and most popular in attracting users?” We found that if an activity took more than about four hours, students rarely used it—but those who did benefited. If it took less than an hour, many students used it but it had little or no effect. Those that were both often-used and effective took between one and four hours. (So, as you plan your own deep dive, you should opt for interesting activities. Like the baby bear in The Three Bears, they are not too brief, don’t take too long, but are just right!)

Practical lessons

Putting all of our experience together, we have learned several practical lessons. These can help you design an effective and efficient forgiveness deep dive for your organization:

1. Identify a limited community for intervention—ideally one that wants to become more forgiving.

2. Leaders are crucial. Engage lay leaders who can galvanize people to act and have large personal networks. Encourage administrators to actively advocate participation, not merely give token endorsement. Recruit enough leaders that work gets distributed and you don’t end up doing all of it.

3. Establish three types of goals: awareness-raising, education (i.e., how to define forgiveness, know the benefits, and know where to get free interventions), and skill-development in forgiving and maximizing mental health.

4. Tailor activities to your community. Make sure the activities are ones that your people want to engage in! In addition, include proven effective activities that require people to spend time actively trying to forgive particular hurts. Choose activities that require time, but not too much time; effort, but not too much; variety, but not too much.

5. Seek to convince people that they can forgive more if they work at it. Few activities (up to three) over the course of the deep dive won’t benefit them much; four to 13 have increasingly larger effects.

6. To prevent dropout or missed sessions, use existing groups to which people already have a loyalty and set a time limit for the deep dive at no more than seven weeks for faith communities and one month for universities. For ad hoc forgiveness-related groups, limit time commitments per meeting and number of meetings, and make sure people know they are time-limited.

7. Deep dives for churches should be timed for events like Lent, Advent, or the approach of Yom Kippur. University deep dives should try to avoid midterms or finals.

We all live in many communities. We know too well that in each one, people harbor grudges that can make things unpleasant for others within the community when the grudges leak out. Public health and mental health campaigns almost never eradicate the target maladies.

But it’s fun to ask ourselves what-if questions. What if one local forgiveness campaign could stop half of the unpleasantness that leaks out this year? What if the person inspired to forgive more were someone holding a grudge against me? What if it affected my romantic partner or children? What if I could become a more forgiving person? What if this became a widely used community intervention? Could this actually make the world a better place?

From the late 1990s through 2014, violent crime in Northeast Park Hill declined from its peak in the early ’90s but remained persistently higher than city averages. In 2016, Northeast Park Hill recorded 1,086 youth arrests per 100,000 young people. The arrest rate for the combination of the other 76 Denver neighborhoods was 513.

With a population of approximately 9,600, 19% of families in the neighborhood lived below the federal poverty line, 39% of residents identified as Black, and 27% identified as Hispanic.

Yet Northeast Park Hill is also a community defined by collective action. In 2013, residents started organizing in response to a series of violent events. They laid the foundation for an emerging movement committed to rebuilding community safety.

Building on these community strengths, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence partnered with local leaders to implement Communities That Care in 2016. The program is a science-based prevention process designed to help communities use data, evidence, and collective action to reduce youth violence.

As a sociologist and director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, my work examines the root causes of youth violence. I study how community-led, data-driven prevention efforts can reduce risk and build supports that help young people stay safe and connected. Working alongside leaders and residents in Northeast Park Hill, I’ve seen firsthand what’s possible and what their remarkable success can teach all of us.

A welcome change

After just five years, the youth arrest rate in Northeast Park Hill fell to 276 per 100,000—a 75% reduction.

This drop in youth arrests reflects a decades-long nationwide trend. Across the country as a whole, juvenile arrests peaked in 1996 and then began a steady decline.

But not all neighborhoods benefited equally. To measure the impact of local prevention work in Northeast Park Hill, we compared its arrest rate to a carefully constructed “look-alike” community made up of similar Denver neighborhoods that did not receive the intervention. We found Northeast Park Hill saw a sharper and earlier decline than its comparison community—pointing to an impact beyond national trends and tied to the local interventions.

Impacts of youth violence

Youth violence is a major cause of harm.

This is especially true for urban communities that have endured decades of chronic disinvestment. That includes neglected infrastructure, deteriorating housing, and long-standing environmental and health inequities. Such environments often lack the opportunities, resources, and support that are essential for healthy youth development.

Young people in these neighborhoods are more likely to face increased exposure to violence and daily challenges associated with navigating violent communities, such as witnessing shootings near their homes and schools. They also face ongoing experiences of marginalization and discrimination. Many young people move through daily life in a constant state of vigilance. Some youth withdraw, carry weapons for protection, or turn to substances to cope with chronic anxiety.

Building a prevention infrastructure

As part of Communities That Care, the community formed a prevention coalition of approximately 25 members, known as Park Hill Strong, to guide the work.

Three Black leaders, Troy Grimes, Jonathan McMillan, and Dane Washington Sr., who grew up in the neighborhood and experienced the violence of the 1990s firsthand, chaired the coalition.

Following the Communities That Care model, they began by creating a community profile. They used local data, including youth and parent surveys, and neighborhood indicators, such as access to safe parks, after-school programs, and healthy foods. The data helped the coalition identify the biggest sources of risk and what protective supports were available in the community.

That data pointed to several factors that increase the likelihood of youth violence. Many youth felt disconnected from their community and had limited supervision or inconsistent support at home. The data also highlighted early and persistent problem behaviors among youth, including aggression and defiance, which can place young people on a pathway toward later violence.

The data also revealed protective supports to build on. It showed that opportunities for young people to participate in positive activities were limited. Community recognition of youths’ healthy and constructive contributions was also low—highlighting important areas for improvement.

Once the profile was complete, the coalition developed a community action plan describing the community prevention strategies the coalition would use to address their prioritized risk and protective factors.

Community-level prevention strategies

The coalition selected three community-level prevention strategies.

First, a youth-led media campaign called the Power of One (PO1) addressed the risk factor of low neighborhood attachment. The campaign challenged the idea that young people themselves are the cause of violence, instead highlighting how decades of redlining, concentrated poverty, and limited access to quality schools and jobs have shaped the conditions they are navigating. The campaign also highlighted positive stories about young people and their communities. The Power of One has reached more than 3,000 youth and adults through social media and hosted six community block parties.

Second, the coalition selected Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies, known as PATHS. This evidence-based program aims to reduce early and persistent problem behaviors. It was implemented in all three of the elementary schools in Northeast Park Hill. PATHS helps students learn social and emotional skills, including managing strong emotions by recognizing when they are feeling angry and using calming strategies before reacting. Strengthening these competencies is associated with lower rates of aggression.

Third, pediatric health care providers identified youth at risk for carrying out future serious violence through the violence, injury protection, and risk screening tool. Youth identified as high or medium risk after completing a 14-item screening tool that assesses violence and victimization history and other risk factors are referred to appropriate services. A total of 222 youth ages 10 to 14 were screened between 2016 and 2021.

Funding is in jeopardy

For more than two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has funded the National Academic Centers of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention, which includes programs like ours. But recent CDC funding cuts threaten the continuation of this work.

Since 2000, these efforts have contributed to reductions in violence in communities across the nation, including Chicago; Denver; Flint, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia; and Youngstown, Ohio.

In Flint, community groups mowed and removed trash from vacant lots between 2009 and 2013. The surrounding areas saw 40% fewer assaults and violent crimes between the months of May and September compared to areas surrounding unmaintained lots.

Likewise, in Youngstown, during the summer months from 2016 to 2018, violent crime fell at twice the rate on streets surrounding vacant lots transformed into gardens and play spaces by community residents than on streets where professional mowers did the greening.

Funding for programs like these is critical for neighborhoods where resources are already scarce and the burden of violence has been concentrated for generations. Without continued investment, communities risk losing hard-won gains and the capacity to create safe and supportive environments for young people.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A new survey from the Society of Human Resources Managers (SHRM)–which represents over 300,000 people working in the human resources field worldwide–finds that incivility in the workplace continues to be a major challenge, particularly as generational and political differences come to the forefront for employees.

The top contributor to workplace incivility in the SHRM index? The answer might surprise you: political differences. In fact, 41 percent of workers said they experienced or witnessed incivility related to politics.

“The workplace is kind of a hub for what’s happening out in civil society,” says Sara Rahim, who serves as a social impact strategist and program manager at SHRM. “So if we’re seeing greater polarization just in the state of America right now, naturally that’s going to translate into the workplace. She also cites generational differences as a point of tension.

Heidi Brooks, a senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Yale University, who has spent years working on how organizations can improve employee culture, argues that promoting civility is often overlooked as an organizational goal.

“We pay a lot of attention to productivity,” she says, “but we often overlook accountability for creating a workplace where people can thrive.”

Could America’s colleges and universities train the next generation of workers to be a little more civil with each other? With such a large number of Americans now pursuing higher education, these institutions can play a major role in preparing students to navigate differences in the workplace.

Indeed, that’s the goal of the Bridging Differences in Higher Education Playbook, released last year by the Greater Good Science Center. The playbook features science-backed strategies that administrators, academics, and students can use to build their skills for bridging differences.

One way to navigate personal differences is to explain how you came to a belief or worldview and explore how others did the same–rather than simply debating them. By questioning your assumptions about other people, you can help create a less threatening environment. Here’s an overview of key practices that can be cultivated in school and imported to the workplace.

Focus on personal stories

Mark Urista is a communications professor at Linn-Benton Community College in Oregon. The campus sits between two politically polarized counties. The famously liberal Portland, Oregon, is around 70 miles away. Benton County has voted for the Democratic candidate for president every year going back to 1988. On the other side is Linn County, which Urista describes as “very blue collar, very conservative,” adding that the last time it voted for a Democrat for president was in 1976.

“So if you think about some of the major tensions right now in this country I kind of feel privileged to be at a college that serves as a laboratory for how to bridge them,” Urista says.

He teaches speech communications classes at the college, largely focused on public speaking and argumentation. In order to help students broach thorny topics, he encourages them from the beginning of the course to humanize themselves.

“The very first day, I get students to start engaging in self-disclosure so they can reveal a little bit about themselves, make themselves vulnerable, understand who their classmates are,” he explains.

The students are then assigned to give a speech advocating for the class to take action on an issue they care personally about. The rest of the class is expected to offer constructive feedback and let the speaker know whether they were persuaded or not.

As one example of how this program worked in action, Urista says that in the spring a female student decided to deliver a speech about how men are struggling in society.

“I love my friends. Back in high school, I had a close group I laughed with, vented to, made the kind of memories that last forever,” she said in that speech. “But when we all moved to college, something shifted. The girls in the group stayed in touch, but the guys, slowly, just… disappeared. Not out of malice or drama. They just stopped reaching out, stopped responding, and stopped showing up.”

She went on to call attention to the epidemic of loneliness among men. She asked her classmates to “be vulnerable,” to “check in on their friends, plan a hangout, start an awkward conversation,” do any small thing they can to help reduce the loneliness among American men.

“I’m sure you can imagine, this created quite the controversy,” Urista says. “You get a lot of students saying, ‘Well, males, they’re part of the historically privileged group, you know? Why should we be making an effort to support them when we see all these other groups that are struggling, right?’”

As the class civilly debated the issue, eventually some men in the class spoke up and said they appreciated the student for giving her speech.

“Sharing that comment openly in the classroom helped shape a climate that allowed us to have a more productive discourse,” Urista says.

Urista’s work is backed by social psychology research around the world that has found benefits to opening up to one another.

For instance, in Europe, the Roma people have long been marginalized, with many Europeans holding contemptuous attitudes toward them. But using an exercise called 36 Questions–where you ask a conversation partner a series of questions to get to know more about them as individuals–Hungarian students who held negative attitudes towards Roma people became more positive towards them after just an hour of conversation with a Roma student.

Similar exercises elsewhere have produced similar outcomes.

One 2015 study found that when college students were assigned to strike up friendships with gay and lesbian people, they grew closer to those people, showing greater closeness and improved attitudes towards gay and lesbian people more broadly.

A separate study from 2008 found that cross-group friendships helped reduce cortisol levels–that’s the hormone tied to stress–between whites and Latinos.

Understand values

Another way to promote civility in the workplace is to encourage employees and employers alike to understand the values of others. After all, cultural and social differences mean that we don’t all even necessarily agree on what constitutes incivility–one person’s habit may be another’s faux pax.

When we discuss our differences, we often focus on positions or beliefs without thinking about the underlying values we ourselves and other people hold. This makes it more difficult to understand where other people are coming from and relating to their experiences and beliefs.

This is a practice that Justin Turpan honed as a student at Tulane University. Working with the bridging-differences organization BridgeUSA, he helped organize events where students discussed contentious social and political topics. Focusing on understanding the other person’s values helped make these conversations more meaningful and less combative.

During one discussion on gun control, for instance, a supporter of gun rights and a backer of gun control were able to both acknowledge that they valued the same thing: safe and secure communities. Acknowledging these values helped them have more constructive conversations.

To make this practice work, it’s important to avoid our conversations devolving simply into debates.

“Debate was not designed to create a group that works well together,” explains Heidi Brooks. “It was designed to help us be more rigorous with thought and to be able to have the issues on the table.”

She imagines her classrooms as miniature societies.

“They’re micro-socities designed for learning,” she says. “And so these micro societies need some practices…listening and curiosity. And that’s not the same thing as judgement, and as critique and analysis.”

But understanding someone else’s values can also help you be more persuasive when you are making an argument. One study published in 2015 found that when arguments were framed in ways that appealed to someone else’s values, they were more convincing. For instance, framing an argument for gay marriage in terms of values that conservatives hold dear–like loyalty or patriotism–was more persuasive than making those arguments rooted in liberal-leaning values like fairness.

Find shared identities

We often find ourselves at loggerheads with our colleagues on campus or in the workplace because we view ourselves as coming from distinct groups. We think to ourselves, that other person is nothing like me.

But when we look closer, we can often find that we share more in common than we think.

GGSC Senior Fellow Allison Briscoe-Smith put this skill into practice by starting a series of interfaith events at the Wright Institute, where students and other civic leaders across the spectrum of faith and spiritual beliefs convened to discuss their distinct practices and where their traditions overlapped.

The series of events helped people across campus connect across religious differences when they saw themselves not just as followers of different religions but collectively as people of faith.

One 2001 study found that building a common identity can go a long way in healing even racial differences.

Researchers had interviewers post up outside of a college football game to ask participants to answer questions about their food preferences. They found that Black interviewers netted interviews more often when they wore paraphernalia associated with the same university as the interviewee. This helps demonstrate how the shared identity of supporting the same university helped bridge the racial divide.

What we can all do

The SHRM Index isn’t all bad news. In a section where employees were asked about how their managers are addressing workplace incivility, 51% said that their manager “actively helps to guide employees through acts of incivility” and 54% said that their manager “actively encourages employees to address incivility through talking and having conversations,” just as Urista does with his class.

The survey finds that employees who described their work team as civil were much more likely to report positive team cohesion. For instance, 86% of workers who said that they belonged to a civil team said their “team members celebrate one another’s successes,” as opposed to just 47% of those who belong to uncivil teams.

But challenges remain, especially as Generation Z–whose school life and work life was intimately shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning–enters the workplace and encounters the norms that older workers have.

Rahim says that it’s important for people to ask themselves how they can contribute to building a culture of civility: “How am I showing up in the workplace? How am I building psychological safety for my team? How am I creating a space in which feedback is welcome?”

Brooks agrees.

“We all have a responsibility to bring some positive energy… into work spaces,” she says. “It’s part of what it means to be a citizen.”

Beverly Daniel Tatum is president emeritus of Spelman College and author of the enormously influential book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. In her new book, Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times, she offers real-life examples of education leaders who successfully faced these challenges and in the process transformed their institutions.

Drawing from her years as a college psychology professor, trustee, and president, Dr. Tatum brings a breadth of experience to her analysis of the current state of higher education—covering everything from defending free speech campus protests during the War on Gaza to reallocating Spelman’s resources in 2012 to create a broad wellness initiative that swapped varsity sports for campus-wide fitness.

We talked about her new book and how leaders can help chart a path through today’s turmoil. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: In 1997, you published Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together at the Cafeteria. More than a quarter decade later, where are we with the public conversations around race?

Beverly Tatum: Since 1997, our population has gotten a lot more diverse—a lot of immigrants from places like India and China—and the Hispanic population is growing fast. Today, the population in the United States is maybe 50% white, a little bit less, and children of color are the majority in the school-age population.

In 2001, we had the 9/11 attack. There were the wars that came after that and in 2008 the economy tanked. All of the anxieties associated with a challenged economy and a nation in conflict with other nations made it a hard time to have a conversation about race.

Fast-forward to the election of Barack Obama. Many people saw that as really a culmination of the civil rights movement. But the pushback against the Obama election was quite dramatic— the Tea Party movement and the racialization of him and his wife and the family, all of that. And of course he was followed by Donald Trump. Trump’s rhetoric, from his announcement of his candidacy, evoked racialized images. The conversation has gotten a lot harder. And it has been symbolic of the nation’s polarization.

HR: Amid these changes in leadership and wars, we faced the murder of George Floyd, too.

BT: Yes–on the one hand, after Donald Trump’s first election, there was a rapid decline in talk about race. Even in his first term, Donald Trump was saying at the federal level, “You can’t talk about race; shouldn’t talk about privilege.” There was a list of words that weren’t supposed to be used in Trump’s first term. But when the George Floyd murder happened, it was so horrible and dramatic—on everybody’s phones, right, in their social media—and there was a great awakening of racial awareness, racial consciousness.

HR: Trump has attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on campus. What are the effects we can see?

BT: In his first early days in office, Trump issued an anti-DEI executive order. One of the really unfortunate things has been the overreaction of colleges and universities to comply. Nobody wants to be a target. And so people have been scraping their websites and changing the names of their programs—or eliminating programs. Maybe there was an office for diversity, equity and inclusion, and that office has just been eliminated. In some cases it’s been renamed or reorganized. But there are lots of places where they just said, “You know what, we’re just gonna eliminate this.”

That’s really unfortunate. Even if you are a staff person working in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and you’ve now been reassigned to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies Office, and you’re still trying to work with students who are experiencing marginalization on your campus, they may not know how to find you. Programs like the Black Student Union that might have been supported by the division of student affairs, maybe they have a small budget for programming. And now those funds have been completely cut off and the students have to do them on their own—which is an added burden for those students, yet important to their sense of belonging.

So there’s a way in which the structural changes and the fear of being targeted—forced to pay a big fine, or even threatened with loss of accreditation—those things have, particularly at public institutions, really put a damper on the student experience.

HR: What about at the classroom level?

BT: One major thing that has changed is the fear for faculty members. Now you’re not supposed to talk about certain things—free speech and academic freedom are under attack. If you’re working in, say, Georgia, there’s a law that says you’re not supposed to talk about “divisive” concepts. What is a divisive concept? If I’m talking about American history, I am challenging conceptions of the Confederacy and what it meant. Is that a divisive concept? Can a student report me as having broken the law? There are cases like that where faculty members are being removed from classrooms because a student was upset about something they said and felt it was “against the law.” This is a really crazy time for classrooms. I don’t know if I would be able to teach today my “psychology of race” class in some states.

HR: Why is there so much resistance to D.E.I, and what can colleges do to promote these values?

BT: There’s a need for courageous leadership. We need to reframe the conversation. On the face of it, some people are unhappy with those letters, D.E.I. With “diversity,” some people feel left out. If you’re white and male and heterosexual, where do you fit in when someone’s talking about diversity? But of course, diversity includes everyone. I fault the users, us, for how the language has evolved. Some people use “diversity” as a substitute for more racialized terms, like when someone says, “There was a diverse job candidate”—what do they really mean? There was a Black candidate, maybe. Well, just say so.

Inclusion is so important. When you see a photo, you look for yourself. But what happens when you can’t find yourself in it? You say, “What’s wrong with me?” This is the experience of marginalized people on campus.

We need to ask: Who’s missing from our picture? Institutional leaders can foster inclusive communities by their own example (what they talk about, the language and examples they use), through their hiring decisions, and through the use of budgetary resources within their control.

For example, if increasing STEM participation among students of color is a goal, investing in professional development for faculty to learn from experts in inclusive pedagogy could be worthwhile. Launching a speaker series and inviting prominent STEM scholars of diverse backgrounds to campus is another tangible action. Lending support to faculty who are successful mentors of underrepresented students through campus recognition and the allocation of resources signal that those activities are valued. Strengthening connections between alumni and current students through campus programming can also give visibility to underrepresented groups.

HR: How should colleges handle the extreme polarization, which may take form in campus protests against the war on Gaza, for instance?

BT: Dialogue helps. We must create a community, a climate where the expectation of respectful dialogue is our way of being. With the Gaza protests, some campuses were more successful at this—I’m thinking about an example of two students, on Jewish and one Palestinian American, who formed Atidna [a reference to “our future” in Hebrew]. They really wanted to create a space where Palestinian-supporting students and Jewish-identified students could come together and have conversations. They did so without much help from the university, but it’s a model that universities can use.

Presidents can offer support. They can sponsor all kinds of things; they can show up to the talks. Cultivating leadership is not just about the exercise of your own leadership but helping people on your senior team, students, and faculty. To show faculty that it’s possible to disagree with the president. To model it, to give other people space. Students have a right to express their concerns, and we’re not just going to panic when that happens.

HR: In 2012, you reallocated Spelman College’s NCAA budget into a wellness initiative to campus. How did that go, and what lessons did you come away with?

BT: Intercollegiate athletics was not a big part of the Spelman experience, which was one reason it seemed like, “Why are we spending money on this?” Students weren’t coming to game; there weren’t many students playing. But it was not without controversy. Student athletes were not happy with me. Many people didn’t understand that there are no NCAA scholarships.

The main thing was framing it; that led to the success. We talked about not what was going away, but what would come instead. With the same resources, we could create a program to benefit all students. It was a population that really needed to move more, to be more active, to counteract the health trends that were plaguing Black women. We also offered yoga and meditation and sound healing. The big lesson was how to communicate.

HR: Artificial intelligence has entered college campuses. What do you think about this?

BT: It’s amazing how fast this has unfolded. In the spring of ‘23, the conversation the faculty were having was focused around cheating behavior. Fast forward to today, it’s about how we teach students to use AI responsibly. It’s important for us to all get up to speed. We must invest in faculty development so they can do the work with AI that is helpful to students.

A bigger question is what does artificial intelligence mean for work? How do we, as a society, accommodate people whose work has been taken over by machines? It speaks to the importance of colleges as the place where that question is explored, and the exploration of what it means to be human in an AI-dominated world. What are the things that humans most need to know? What are the enduring conversations, critical thinking, problem solving? Where are the empathy and compassion?

The skill of dialog is so important because you develop empathy, you develop mutual understanding. And it seems to me those are the capacities that at least to date AI doesn’t have. I can’t think of a better place to be than a college or university at such a difficult and potentially challenging time.