Newsletter #259 — July 30, 2024
Before we started talking about Search USA, I asked Nealin to give our audience a brief introduction to Search for Common Ground, as some may not be familiar with it. Nealin explained that Search is the world's oldest, largest, fully dedicated peacebuilding organization. It works, usually, in countries that are recovering from civil war or other violent conflict and has an intent to end violent conflict around the world. While Nealin didn't work for Search when she was doing international peacebuilding, she often encountered Search staff who, she said
walked through the darkness and held onto the light...[They had a] a very gritty and very informed kind of approach that said the outcomes of adversarial approaches to conflict leave too much on the table. And we see another way forward, a kind of win-win that involves transformation. And it doesn't look like each person gets the thing that they start with. It actually looks like engagement with relationships and through those relationships coming to different conclusions and outcomes than you might have imagined to begin with. So I was really compelled by the work. And when I started to feel more and more red flags in the United States, I returned to the United States and actually begged Search to start a program in the United States.
Though it took a couple of years to put what is now called Search USA together, Search had worked in the U.S. before. Its founder, John Marks, originally intended to do 50% of their work in the U.S. and 50% internationally. The way the programming developed, however, Search ended up doing much more work internationally,. but it had maintained a small U.S. program. With Nealin's urging, current CEO Shamil Idriss decided, Nealin said, "to make the largest investment in the United States since the founding of the organization." Now Search USA has sixteen people on staff and they have programs and staff across the country. Their biggest programs are in Louisiana, Texas, and Pennsylvania.
When hiring staff, Nealin explained, they tried to get representation across as many divides as possible: age, economics, ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality — so they could bring many different perspectives to their work. But they didn't limit themselves to people who called themselves "peacebuilders," because that is a term that is well known in the international sphere, but not so much here in the U.S.
If you are a homegrown peacebuilder in the United States, you might call yourself a bridge builder. You might call yourself a community builder. You might call yourself a social justice activist. You might call yourself a democracy defender. You might call yourself a teacher. There are a lot of words that you might use. You probably won't use the word "peacebuilder." ... A lot of what my broader fieldwork has looked like has been around trying to knit together groups that have distinct histories and language and cultures and see their work as distinct from each other and create ways for those groups to understand their work as all weaving together for a mutually beneficial purpose.
And that mutually beneficial purpose also has multiple names, but one of them [that we think] about is "resilience." How do we go through hard times and emerge on the other side of those either stronger or more connected, more capable of withstanding a future crisis and more capable of building towards a positive future that is not reactive, but is a more proactive build?
I asked Nealin to give me some concrete examples of what they are doing. She started by talking about their program in Texas where they are working with the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, and particularly with a Southern Baptist evangelical pastor named Bob Roberts. Roberts realized that he and other pastors he knew were being faced with conflict problems in their congregations that they were never trained to deal with. He had met peacebuilders from Search when he was working abroad, so he sought them out or help in the United States' context.
Together, they began focusing on the notion of "belonging" in the context of the evangelical Christian community. In some ways, she said, this community (or set of communities) is very robust, very rich, with lots of community bonds. But at different times, it has felt isolated, either politically or culturally, from other parts of the United States. Oftentimes the divisions that we see more broadly across the U.S. are reflected internally in particular congregations. " People who have been friends for a long time," she said, are starting to break apart -- "the fabric is starting to fray." With Bob Roberts, they are working on creating a handbook for pastors to help them deal with that in a way that is true to the evangelical Christian tradition and that emerges from within the context and language and needs of pastors in that space?
The second thing they are trying to do is to help pastors deal with community members who have been more vulnerable to more extreme language — language or messages that say that you can only solve your problems with "the other" through violence or through more aggressive strategies. Rather than using cookie cutter tools on radicalization and deradicalization, they are trying to create a new tool that better fits in this community. That is where they first identified the importance of "belonging."
Nealin then talked about their work in Louisiana, where they are partnering with a group called the Plessy and Ferguson Initiative.
It is the descendants of the defendant and the judge in the Plessy and Ferguson case, which was an extension of separate and unequal for another 50 years in 1892 until Brown versus Board of Education. So the descendants of the judge who decided to continue the separate and unequal policy, and the defendant who was desperately trying to get that to change. Generations down, Phoebe Ferguson, and Keith Plessy meet each other in New Orleans and decided that they want to write a new chapter for their families and for the country, that instead of being Plessy versus Ferguson, is Plessy and Ferguson. It's a pretty incredible story and a pretty incredible partnership
We are working with them on a program called Reconstructing Reconstruction, which works on racial healing through memory and building out new markers, but doing that with a process that is broad, encompassing, and brings in the community to try to, in many ways, recreate the inspiring story of them and their families in writing what the next chapter of our country is. It uses memory as a way to, not only try to memorialize unifying and important parts of our history, but also tries to use that as a catalyst for further action.
Nealin also described another program they have in both Texas and Pennsylvania where they are bringing together state leaders from as broad a set of demographics as they can — people, she said, "whose constituencies might not want to be in a room with each other." But all the people who they are convening understand how important it is to decrease tensions and therefore the risk of political violence, particularly around elections, but at other times as well. This, she explained is a standing program, not a one-time event.
With trust, you can't really build it cyclically and then disappear. So we are bringing together state leaders on a longer time frame to try to build that trust across differences and intentionally also across divides for multiple purposes. For instance, the prevention of political violence, the opportunity for de-escalation, should escalation occur, and creating a natural DNA or kernel for healing, depending on the directions that feel most salient over the next years.
I noted that one of the things that I think Search excels at is scaling up their peacebuilding work to work at the scale of whole societies. For example, they were the initiator of a set of soap operas that teach peace and conflict resolution concepts to a whole country — "The Team," a soap opera about a football (i.e. soccer in the U.S.) team — is now playing in different iterations in 17 countries.
Nealin explained that Search follows a process of "iteration and learning."
One of the things that you would and should see in early days of a Search program is a huge investment in learning. So just because something works in another country, does not mean that it's going to work in the United States. Or it may work in different ways. So trying to figure out what does faith engagement look like? What does it look like to engage around issues of race? What does it look like to invest around elections? What does it look like to work on policy? What does media work look like? All of those pieces of the work that we do. But one of the very first hires we made, after program staff, was a person working on monitoring, evaluation, and learning. And that was not an accident. That was because that's just a really, really important part of figuring out the early days of Search programming.
They are going to start a broader media campaign in the fall. "It is going to use the best learnings from media programming globally, but also our experience over the last couple of years here." The media landscape that exists here is much more complex than some of the media landscapes Search has worked in abroad. "When Search did Talking Drum Studio in Liberia, it was one of a very few shows. It was the Walter Cronkite of Liberia radio, where you could create a program, and it would be the program that was playing on the available radio waves across the country." Clearly, that isn't possible here. So they are still considering who is the audience that they are trying to reach, how they can best reach them, and what are the messages they want to send.
They have learned from work abroad that elections are dangerous times for violence — not just partisan violence, but hate crimes and other kinds of intergroup tension and violence. So elections pose higher risks, but also the potential for higher impact. By using media, they hope to scale up their efforts, but not to the national level. Rather, they are working at the state level and in partnership with other organizations. Right now, they are working in Arizona and Ohio with Over Zero. They have reached out to a number of other states as well, but nothing else is settled yet. "The reason we chose a state-level approach for our largest program, and that we built it intentionally in partnership with other groups, and in coalition, is because a state is big enough for broad impact and small enough to, at least theoretically, and we're working on the reality of this, to reach to the local level.
And so when you're thinking about scale or when Search thinks about scale, changing culture is one of the pieces. Changing institutions and policy is another way, and influencing markets is a third. But there are ways to try to make whatever dollars in programming you have go a little bit further by either targeting geographically or temporally or to specific communities and specific divides in ways that can increase the impact of what you're doing almost at whatever scale you're working. There are ways for you to think about what you're doing to try to hit the higher risk and more impactful moments.
I commented to Nealin that I've heard a lot of complaints from other "bridge-builders" that they have a great deal of difficulty getting conservatives to participate in their dialogues. So I was interested that most of the states Search is working in are "Red" (conservative). She answered that part of the issue, at least, is language. Most bridge-building organizations are left-leaning and they use words that are characteristic of the left. "Peacebuilding" is a leftist term. So is "democracy defense," "mis- and dis-information," while "fake news" is what they call the same thing on the right. Pride in country is something that is heard more on the right.
But there is a way to cut through that. And what we have largely found is that the way to cut through that is to tack local and to tack human. So it is not helpful if you are trying to open a specifically political space to enter the conversation of political violence thinking and talking about January 6th. Because that is a moment in time that has been, I would say, maybe even weaponized by many people to try to focus the blame on conservatives. And even people who are actually entirely opposed to violence and to people entering the Capitol and everything that happened that day will, at times, really resist a conversation that has that as an entry point. Because their assumption of what has just happened is that they've been set up to have a conversation where we can all conclude that they are the problem. So instead, if you talk about safety of local community members [you are likely to do better]....So if you tack to the experience of local leaders and what kind of community do we want to have, separate from whatever nonsense is going to happen at the national level, who are we? And how do we want to build something that leaves less space for that chaos? That's a much more compelling story for everyone to be part of.
This is just a sampling of what Nealin and I talked about. I hope many of you will check out the full interview, which is available as a video, or a readable transcript (both are available on the same page).
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