Inspiring: Healing Our Relationships News Articles
We believe in the creative, redemptive, and collaborative potential of humanity. Below are key excerpts of inspiring news articles on healing social division and polarization. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.
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Crosswalks don’t work. According to various studies, only between five and fifteen percent of drivers slow down at pedestrian crossings. The vast majority of drivers simply don’t pay attention to them. America’s deadly streetscape is the subject of The Street Project, a new PBS documentary about citizen-led efforts to make streets safer. When filmmaker Jennifer Boyd started making it, she assumed distracted driving must be behind the alarming rise in pedestrian deaths. But as she soon learned, digital screens are less of a culprit than most people realize. “Less than one percent of pedestrian deaths involved portable electronic devices,” she found. Instead, she discovered that two of the biggest factors are speeding and bigger cars. If speeding and visibility are the problem and crosswalks can’t stop it, color might. The Asphalt Art Initiative, a program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, provides grants to create art to modify dangerous streets. One of these projects is in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where artists and residents transformed a high-traffic commercial thoroughfare with a block-long asphalt mural, while students marked safe walking paths in the area with stencils and wheat paste. Overall, according to the Initiative, “the data showed a 50 percent drop in crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists and a 37 percent drop in crashes leading to injuries. Intersections with asphalt art saw a 17 percent reduction in total accidents.”
Note: Don't miss the great pictures and video of public art available at the link above. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
Amid a crush of heavy news from around the world, who couldn't use some sage advice right now? Call a new hotline, and you'll get just that — encouraging words from a resilient group of kindergartners. Kids' voices will prompt you with a menu of options: If you're feeling mad, frustrated or nervous, press 1. If you need words of encouragement and life advice, press 2. If you need a pep talk from kindergartners, press 3. If you need to hear kids laughing with delight, press 4. For encouragement in Spanish, press 5. Pressing 3 leads to a chorus of kids sounding off a series of uplifting mantras: "Be grateful for yourself," offers one student. "If you're feeling up high and unbalanced, think of groundhogs," another chimes in. Peptoc, as the free hotline is called, is a project from the students of West Side Elementary, a small school in the town of Healdsburg, Calif. It was put together with the help of teachers Jessica Martin and Asherah Weiss. Martin, who teaches the arts program at the school, says she was inspired by her students' positive attitudes, despite all they've been through — the pandemic, wildfires in the region and just the everyday challenges of being a kid. "I thought, you know, with this world being as it is, we all really needed to hear from them — their extraordinary advice and their continual joy," she said. Martin says she hopes the hotline will give callers a little respite from whatever it is they're going through, which — judging from the thousands of calls the hotline gets each day — is quite a lot. So the next time you need a little boost, dial Peptoc at 707-998-8410.
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In a remote part of Maine shrouded by trees, 14- and 15-year-olds from the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the U.S, many of whom have long considered one another "the enemy," spend three weeks side-by-side united by one goal: to open their minds and their ears. At the Seeds of Peace camp, the teens eat, interact and engage in dialogue with people from countries some of them are banned from visiting. Seeds of Peace campers are identified by only their first names because, for some, the release of their full identity could put them in danger. Broken up into groups of about 15, campers aren't only asked to share their own narrative. It's also time spent listening and engaging in conversations with people whose opinions are often contrasting and even offensive. They're also placed together for a physical group challenge. Habeeba [a 22-year-old Egyptian] found herself paired with the Israeli, who in dialogue group was so vocal and resolute, she couldn't establish one piece of common ground. Blindfolded, she had a single choice: to depend on someone she couldn't trust or risk falling. As he guided her through each step of the course, she felt a shift in herself, finding an ability to care about a person she never imagined was possible. "He is just as human as me. He's also 14 or 15. I am him and he is me," she realized. "Up on the high ropes, I didn't care that he was Israeli; I cared that we wouldn't fall." What Seeds of Peace does have are the tools needed for these teenagers to break out of a world that wants to force people into one ideological box. "I connected it to the culture that seems to be growing in the United States in universities today of needing a safe space and being triggered very easily," Adaya [22-year-old Israeli] said. "If you're not able to engage someone that you disagree with, how are you going to grow? You have to challenge yourself from different directions in order to know that your opinion stands."
Note: War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.
Is it natural for humans to make war? Is organised violence between rival political groups an inevitable outcome of the human condition? New research suggests not. A study of tribal societies that live by hunting and foraging has found that war is an alien concept and not, as some academics have suggested, an innate feature of so-called primitive people. Douglas Fry and Patrik Sderberg of Abo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, studied 148 violently lethal incidents documented by anthropologists working among 21 mobile bands of hunter-gatherer societies, which some scholars have suggested as a template for studying how humans lived for more than 99.9 per cent of human history, before the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. They found that only a tiny minority of violent deaths come close to being defined as acts of war. Most the violence was perpetrated by one individual against another and usually involved personal grudges involving women or stealing. Only a tiny minority of cases involved more organised killing between rival bands of people, which could fall into the definition of war-like behaviour. Most of these involved only one of the 21 groups included in the study. In short they found that some of the most primitive peoples on Earth were actually quite peaceful compared to modern, developed nations. These findings imply that warfare was probably not very common before the advent of agriculture, when most if not all humans lived as nomadic foragers, Kirk Endicott, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College told the journal Science, where the study is published.
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Michigan is a battleground state, in every sense of the word. Here, purple doesn't mean moderate; it means the 50-50, Red/Blue split is a chasm. On a recent Saturday in Traverse City, Mich., people gathered – half of them Red, the other half Blue – brought together by Braver Angels, a not-for-profit attempting to narrow the divide. "I'm here out of concern for our country, and our democracy," said one attendee, Jane. Started in 2016, Braver Angels now holds sessions nationwide. It was shaped by Bill Doherty, who teaches relationships at the University of Minnesota. He's also a marriage counselor. Correspondent Martha Teichner asked Doherty, "Is it a proper analogy: Reds and Blues in America, and couples on the brink of divorce?" "There is an analogy to couples on the brink," Doherty replied. "A big difference is that divorce is not possible in America." In Traverse City, participants arrived uneasy at first, defensive. Task #1 at a Red/Blue workshop: stereotypes. Reds and Blues, seated in separate rooms, are asked to list what "they" call "you." Facilitators then ask each side if there's is a kernel of truth in those stereotypes. Tim said, "The passion for the pro-life cause sometimes seems not to hear women." And so it goes, for three hours, peeling back the onion of opinion, looking for common ground. No trying to change anybody's mind. Divided they were, but they showed up, because they wanted to know each other not by label, but by name. Braver Angels has held more than 2,000 workshops and is growing.
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As a kid growing up in 1960s Chicago, Daryl Davis was shocked when his parents explained that White children were throwing rocks at him during a Cub Scouts parade because he was Black. This ... left a burning question in Davis’ mind: “How can you hate me if you do not know me?” A blues pianist, whose energetic style led him to perform with the likes of Chuck Berry, B.B. King, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Davis would commit his life to seeking out answers to that question, often with his music and his Christian faith as equalizers. But a performance ... in 1983 would leave its mark. He had been approached, after a set, by a member of the audience who told him he had never seen a Black man who could play like Jerry Lee Lewis. That began a conversation that would reveal a surprising truth: The man making the comment was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. This revelation sparked the beginning of a 30-year journey that for Davis involved sitting down with members of the Klan and other White supremacists, attending their rallies and cross burnings—all in a search for answers. By tackling prejudices head-on, Davis believes he succeeded in persuading more than 200 KKK members and other white supremacists to disavow their allegiances. Many became friends, including Scott Shepherd, a former Grand Dragon of the KKK in Tennessee. The two regularly travel together to help shine a light on white supremacy and address the spread of racism through dialogue and education.
Note: Davis' work reforming white supremacists is the subject of an inspiring documentary. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
Science is revealing that ... giving thanks might be more powerful than we ever imagined. Research shows that expressing gratitude doesn’t just make us feel good momentarily — it actually reshapes our brains in ways that enhance our well-being. When you take a moment to count your blessings, your brain releases dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that create feelings of pleasure and contentment. But what’s really fascinating is that this isn’t just a temporary boost — these moments of thankfulness create a positive feedback loop, training your brain to look for more reasons to be grateful. Brain imaging studies have captured this process in action. When people express gratitude, they activate the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center for decision-making and emotional regulation. This triggers a cascade of beneficial effects, including sharper attention and increased motivation. Think of it like building a muscle — the more you exercise gratitude, the stronger these neural pathways become, making it progressively easier to access positive emotions. Perhaps even more remarkable is gratitude’s effect on stress. When you focus on appreciation, your brain actually dials down the production of cortisol, your body's primary stress hormone. Research conducted at Indiana University found that practicing gratitude can actually change the structure of your brain, particularly in areas linked to empathy and emotional processing. Even simply pausing throughout the day — my favorite practice — to notice and appreciate positive moments can help reshape your neural circuitry.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division and healing our bodies.
When Marco de Kat starts planning his meals, he doesn’t need to travel far for fresh food. Right outside his house is an 800 square metre plot with all sorts of produce – apples, pears, peppers, basil, beets and cauliflower, to name a few. Oosterwold, where de Kat has lived since 2017, is a 4,300 hectare (10,625 acre) urban experiment located east of Amsterdam, in a suburb of the city of Almere, where de Kat works as a municipal councillor. The area, which has about 5,000 residents and a growing waiting list, is completely self-sufficient. Residents can build houses however they like, and must collaborate with others to figure out things such as street names, waste management, roads, and even schools. But the local government has included one extremely unusual requirement: about half of each plot must be devoted to urban agriculture. Some, like de Kat, have turned their gardens into an Eden of sorts to provide for their own household unit. Other residents just plant a few apple trees or outsource by owning plots of land on site that are tended to by professional farmers. Others, such as Jalil Bekkour, have been able to capitalise on it. “I never had experience gardening my own food or anything like that,” he said. But he taught himself how to garden, and three years ago he opened his own restaurant, Atelier Feddan, where 80% of the food is directly from Oosterwold. His newfound excitement for gardening and agriculture is palpable.
Note: Learn about the community-powered movement that's transforming yards into microfarms in Los Angeles. Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and healing the Earth.
Public understanding of paedophiles has not improved over the past 30 years, according to the founder of the pioneering charity Circles, which offers support to some of society’s most reviled offenders. While the Rev Harry Nigh says child protection must always be paramount, he stresses the importance of breaking the isolation and shame that often leads people who commit child sexual abuse to reoffend, arguing that “anything that drives people underground even further endangers the community itself”. The Circles programme provides a local network of volunteers who support and hold accountable their “core member”, a child sexual offender who wants to reintegrate into the community after serving their sentence. The core model of grassroots community support – and accountability – has remained the same for the past three decades: “It’s not just about risk management, it has to be about affirmation,” Nigh said. “Just to reinforce the humanity of the person is really important. “That’s a very powerful thing for a person to be able to find a new narrative of his life that can lead him forward. But it’s not all hugs and kisses. There can be some very hard conversations in the Circle and confrontations. But the studies show that men with a Circle are 70 to 80% less likely to reoffend than a control group. The underlying principles of restorative justice are what’s guiding this work, that harm cannot be remedied completely by locking people up.”
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on sexual abuse scandals, repairing our criminal justice system, and healing social division.
In the city of Nanchang, in an alleyway near a cancer hospital, two senior citizens run a “community cancer kitchen” to support those caring for their loved ones. Wan Zuocheng and Hong Gengxiang have been doing this charity work for two decades. “No matter what life throws at you, you must eat good food,” Mr. Wan told South China Morning Post. For just 3 RMB, the equivalent of around $0.32, anyone can use the kitchen spaces they’ve set up in the alleyway to cook meals. Sometimes it’s for the patients so they can eat something familiar rather than hospital food, while sometimes it’s for the people who care for the patients. “There was a couple who came to us with their child,” Wan said, talking about the day in 2003 they decided to start their charity kitchen. “They said he didn’t want treatment, he just wanted a meal cooked by his mom. So we let them use our kitchen.” As time passed they added more utensils, appliances, stoves, and ovens to their stall. This came with gradually increasing use of water, electricity, and coal, but as the costs rose, so too did the community, supporting the couple and their efforts to provide the invaluable service they relied on. Donations began to outpace expenditures, and now nearly 10,000 people come to cook in the cancer kitchen. It’s been thoroughly observed in medicine that the odds of beating cancer can be improved with positivity, and what could be more positive than a loved one bringing you a home-cooked meal?
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Akeela Shaikh is a natural carer. But the care jobs she loved so much started to tax her physically. She tried antidepressants, then counselling although neither worked for her. But then a nurse gave Shaikh a different kind of medicine: "She gave me a card that read 'social prescribing'." The card led to a phone call with Joanne Gavin, at the time a link worker with Bolton Community and Voluntary Services. Instead of asking "what's the matter with you", link workers ask patients "what matters to you" and find suitable community activities that fit their answer. It was clear what mattered to Shaikh was really another chance to take care of someone. Gavin intuited this. And when she asked Shaikh what she thought might help her feel better, she honoured her answer: "a job". Gavin prescribed the perfect gig for Shaikh: a shift at the office of Lagan's Foundation, a non-profit providing caregiving to children with complex needs. After Gavin intervened, Shaikh says she started feeling more like herself. "It was a way for Akeela to still be involved with the care inside, without the heavy lifting." The power of social prescribing – helping patients to improve their health and wellbeing by connecting them to community resources and activities – is increasingly backed by scientific studies. Prescriptions can cover everything from art classes and cycling groups to food and heating bills. One particularly surprising 2019 study of nearly 7,000 older Americans found that life purpose was significantly inversely linked with all-cause mortality. In other words, having a high sense of life-purpose could help you live longer than those who lack one. "My approach is to listen to someone's story and look at not just what's going on now but what they were like before they started to feel depressed or anxious," says Gavin.
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A practice called social prescribing is being explored in the United States, after being adopted in more than 20 other countries. Social prescriptions generally aim to improve health and well-being by connecting people with nonclinical activities that address underlying problems, such as isolation, social stress and lack of nutritious food, which have been shown to play a crucial role in influencing who stays well and for how long. For Ms. Washington, who is among thousands of patients who have received social prescriptions from the nonprofit Open Source Wellness, the experience was transformative. She found a less stressful job, began eating more healthfully and ... was able to stop taking blood pressure medication. At the Cleveland Clinic, doctors are prescribing nature walks, volunteering and ballroom dancing. In Newark, an insurance provider has teamed up with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center to offer patients glassblowing workshops, concerts and museum exhibitions. A nonprofit in Utah is connecting mental health patients with community gardens and helping them participate in other activities that bring them a sense of meaning. Universities have started referring students to arts and cultural activities like comedy shows and concerts. Research on social prescribing suggests that it can improve mental health and quality of life and that it might reduce doctor visits and hospital admissions.
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The issue of abortion has neatly cleaved the Polish political class, yet researchers find that Poles themselves feel much more empathy around it than their elected leaders. And the idea that people hold compassion around many divisive issues presents an opportunity to bridge a societal divide, says Zofia Wodarczyk, a researcher at the social science think tank More in Common, which published a study. “We basically only talk [in politics] about abortion – are you for, or are you against, but there’s so much in between that’s gray,” she says. And when she and her colleagues interviewed voters of all stripes, they saw the gray. Even among the most staunchly conservative, religious group – about 6% of those surveyed – about a third of men and women surveyed would support someone close to them getting an abortion. The vast majority of Polish men and women of all persuasions oppose punishing women who choose abortion. Anna Wójcik, a legal scholar ... says people are ready to move past what she calls “civil war conditions,” after eight years in which the conservative majority questioned loyalty to country for simply expressing divergent views. “I feel that Polish people are tired of this polarizing political scene and division,” says Ms. Wójcik. “Basically people want to move forward, to be able to discuss topics in democracy that we have conflicting views on, like energy transition and education and stuff like that.”
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On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, what began as a fringe experiment has quickly become central to the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness. To Justin Tyler Jr., it is home. Mr. Tyler, 41, lives in Community First! Village, which aims to be a model of permanent affordable housing for people who are chronically homeless. In the fall of 2022, he joined nearly 400 residents of the village, moving into one of its typical digs: a 200-square-foot, one-room tiny house furnished with a kitchenette, a bed and a recliner. Eclectic tiny homes are clustered around shared outdoor kitchens, and neat rows of recreational vehicles and manufactured homes line looping cul-de-sacs. There are chicken coops, two vegetable gardens, a convenience store ... art and jewelry studios, a medical clinic and a chapel. In the next few years, Community First is poised to grow to nearly 2,000 homes across three locations, which would make it by far the nation’s largest project of this kind, big enough to permanently house about half of Austin’s chronically homeless population. Many residents have jobs in the village, created to offer residents flexible opportunities to earn some income. Last year, they earned a combined $1.5 million working as gardeners, landscapers, custodians, artists, jewelry makers and more. Ute Dittemer, 66, faced a daily struggle for survival during a decade on the streets before moving into Community First five years ago with her husband. Now she supports herself by painting and molding figures out of clay at the village art house. A few years ago, a clay chess set she made sold for $10,000 at an auction. She used the money to buy her first car.
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Ray, a man in his 50s, used to live in an emergency homeless shelter in Vancouver, Canada. Then he participated in a study that changed his life. The newly published, peer reviewed PNAS study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash. Over the next year, the study followed up with the recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was happening in their lives. The recipients of the cash transfers did not increase spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, but did increase spending on food, clothes, and rent. What’s more, they moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up. “Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations for Social Change, [said]. What’s more ... giving out the cash transfers in the Vancouver area actually saved the broader society money. Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the shelter system $8,277 per person over the year, for a total savings of $413,850. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the transfers pay for themselves.
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Why do we care about rhythm? It connects us to the world. It plays a role in listening, in language, in understanding speech in noisy places, in walking, and even in our feelings toward one another. Rhythm is much more than a component of music. We experience the rhythmic changes of the seasons. Some of us have menstrual cycles. We have circadian rhythms – daily cycles of mental and physical peaks and troughs. Tides, 17-year cicadas, lunar phases, perigees, and apogees are other naturally occurring rhythms. Human-made rhythms include the built world – street grids, traffic lights, crop fields, mowed designs in baseball diamond outfields, the backsplash behind the kitchen counter, spatial patterns in geometric visual artforms. Rhythms in the brain have been called out as a basis for consciousness itself. Even in very young children, being (literally) "in sync" with another person engenders positive feelings toward them. Music in general, and rhythm in particular, does an uncommonly good job fostering a sense of community. Indeed, music being played at negotiation sessions helps to smooth the conversations and leads to breakthroughs and compromises. Musicians Without Borders is used to form relationships in troubled regions around the world, to bring hope, comfort, and healing to diverse populations. The Resonance Project and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, which are forming bonds between Israeli and Palestinian children, are other examples of using musical rhythm to overcome differences.
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Memorial Day used to be Israel’s most sacred secular holiday because it honored those who died in wars or terrorist attacks. I attended one memorial service in Tel Aviv that rose above these tensions and penetrated to the heart of the issues troubling the country: a meeting of Israeli and Palestinian families who had lost relatives to the conflict and gathered together to share their grief. What was most astonishing about the event was to see the Palestinians fall into the arms of their Israeli hosts and hold on tightly. Why astonishing? Because these days, Palestinians and Israelis almost never come into contact, except at Israeli military checkpoints on the West Bank, or when violent Israeli settlers attack their fields — or when Palestinian workers come to Israel to work in construction or in agriculture. It was moving in the extreme to see Palestinians and Israelis who had experienced heartbreak at the hands of the other side embrace each other tightly and talk about family. It was also moving to watch thousands of Israelis file into the fenced-off area of the ceremony and fill endless rows of plastic chairs (the organizers say that 300,000 watched online). They listened in total silence as Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims told their personal stories on the stage. Yuval Sapir, whose sister Tamar was murdered in Tel Aviv in 1994 by a Palestinian suicide bomber ... choked out these words: “It is easy and natural to hate ... I chose to try to break the chain of revenge and hatred.”
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A 215-metre-long banquet table, lined with 648 chairs and laden with a home cooked produce, was set up along the Rue de l'Aude and those in attendance were urged to openly utter the most subversive of words: bonjour. For some, that greeting led to the first meaningful exchange between neighbours. "I'd never seen anything like it before," says Benjamin Zhong who runs a cafe in the area. "It felt like the street belonged to me, to all of us." The revolutionaries pledged their allegiance that September day in 2017 to the self-styled R©publique des Hyper Voisins, or Republic of Super Neighbours, a stretch of the 14th arrondissement on the Left Bank, encompassing roughly 50 streets and 15,000 residents. In the five years since, the republic – a "laboratory for social experimentation" – has attempted to address the shortcomings of modern city living, which can be transactional, fast-paced, and lonely. The experiment encourages people ... to interact daily through mutual aid schemes, voluntary skills-sharing and organised meet ups. A recent event at the Place des Droits de l'Enfant allowed neighbours to celebrate reclaiming the public space. A lifeless road junction ... no longer performed its role as an "urban square" – a place for life, interaction and meetings. But after residents were consulted about what they thought the square should become, it was cleaned, pedestrianised, planted and had street clutter removed with a grant of nearly 200,000 euros from the City of Paris.
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A violent week of fistfights at a Louisiana high school led to the arrests of at least 22 students last month. So a group of concerned fathers decided enough was enough. They formed a volunteer group, Dads on Duty, and began roaming the halls of Southwood High School in Shreveport to calm students, spread positivity and keep the peace. So far it's working. The group of about 40 fathers, wearing Dads on Duty T-shirts, patrol the campus every weekday on different shifts, working as community leaders and liaisons. Since they started the initiative, there's been no fighting at the school. "I immediately knew that [this violence] ... isn't the community that we're raising our babies in," said Michael LaFitte, [one] of the dads. The dads showed up at the school at 7:40 a.m., balancing their work schedules to patrol the campus in the morning, during lunch and after school. Shreveport has seen an uptick in violence and crime in recent months [as a consequence of] socioeconomic issues made worse by the lingering pandemic. The city's mayor, Adrian Perkins, credits the fathers with helping to combat violence involving local youth. He turned up at the school for a Dads on Duty shift when the fathers first started, and said he was impressed by their commitment. Dads on Duty has been working closely with the Caddo Parish School Board and local law enforcement, LaFitte said. The dads say their focus is not criminal justice - they let sheriff's deputies handle that - but an additional layer of parenting. "We are armed with love," LaFitte said.
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Psychological science suggests that it is both possible and imperative for members of our society to find common ground. “Some of this divide is a matter of perception,” says Tania Israel, PhD, professor of counseling psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Most people are not on the extremes of any of these issues, but most of what we hear is from people who are more on the extremes.” (More in Common, 2018; More in Common, 2019) People have a natural tendency to conceptualize everyone on the other side of the political spectrum as if they were the same as the leaders and spokespeople of that side. “[Leaders] can be very effective at creating and strengthening ‘mutual radicalization,’” says Fathali Moghaddam, PhD, using a term he coined to describe the growth of two opposing sides toward more and more extreme stances. One way to mitigate the divisiveness is to physically bring people together in safe, highly structured dialogue groups. We must also let go of our tendencies to want to bring someone to our own side of the political divide. “People are married to the notion that they can change minds—this almost always isn’t true,” says [psychotherapist Jeanne] Safer. In our personal relationships, Tania Israel [at the University of California, Santa Barbara] stresses to keep in mind our own sometimes-faulty perceptions of the other side. “Don’t make assumptions about someone based on their vote. Instead, I encourage people to be curious about what their vote meant to them. That’s an opportunity to open up a conversation to learn more about people that are important to us.”
Note: Our latest 7-min video explores the importance of healing the polarization that's poisoning our conversations and sabotaging democracy. For more, read our recent article on healing the culture wars and explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.
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