- Tired of the toxic level of polarization in the United States?

Interested in talking with people whose perspective differs from your own in ways that stay constructive?

We invite you to join us for a year focused on creating a culture of conversation rather than division.

(inspiring music) The Padnos/Sarosik Center for Civil Discourse, Kaufman Interfaith Institute, Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, and WGVU Public Media are pleased to partner for Talking Together, Strengthening our Communities through Conversation.

A dialogue initiative aimed at interrupting polarization and investing in the principles of civil discourse and respectful conversation.

The aim is to assist community members engaging in conversation with one another across differences in perspective, identity, and life experiences.

Today, how to cross lines of difference by cultivating trust and goodwill using the age old practice of breaking bread.

Joining us from the People's Supper is community director K Scarry.

How are you?

- I'm well.

I'm so glad to be here.

Thanks for having me.

- Yeah, you know what's interesting is you and I have already had a number of conversations.

And really that's where this begins.

It's the storytelling.

- [K] Yeah.

- In the hallway before we began, it was like, where are you from?

That's a real basic.

But then it got into sports and we started talking about football.

And my favorite team growing up as a kid, and your grandfather was the center - for the Cleveland Browns.

- That's right.

- That's how we got to know each other.

- That's right.

- That's how dialogue begins.

- Yeah, absolutely.

There's something about the kind of sinking into stories and finding moments of resonance and deepening our sense of who each other are through chasing those stories and conversation down together.

- And yet we let those conversations get clouded by other things that kind of are floating around in our orbit and oftentimes it's the political landscape today, and the ideologies that lie within.

You are with The People's Supper.

And this all came about, I believe it was 2016.

- That's right.

- Take me through the origins.

- Yeah, so I feel like the 2016 election was a moment where polarization was really a big conversation in our country where people were feeling the acute pain of that polarization.

And The People's Supper was founded out of the belief that we weren't gonna argue our way out of this.

But that what was happening was there was such an ease by which we could retreat into our own ideological or identity silos and then continue to see one another and reduce one another to a particular narrative based on our bias, our assumptions.

And that so often what was happening was we're seeing people's landing place without really understanding the deeper stories, experiences, values that might propel people to show up in the world in all the ways that we do.

And actually that's the place that helps us figure out a collective way forward together, not trying to get everybody to get to my side or to agree with me.

And so The People's Supper was founded out of how do we kind of bring people together to have deep conversation with each other, to build trust to figure out, yeah, what it means to find common humanity over common ground and to build a collective future alongside one another with varying perspectives in the room.

- So you say, hey, this is broken, we need to fix it.

What are the next steps then?

Who gets together?

How does it launch and become this thing that now is really taking off across the country?

- Yeah, so our model has shifted over time with culture shift.

It started by being a 100 day campaign.

So in the first 100 days of Trump's presidency, there were gonna be 100 suppers all over the country of people gathering with neighbors they might not have otherwise met.

Sitting with people across their community that might disagree with them, really intentionally trying to choose to connect when it would be all too easy to disconnect.

Since our model has shifted where we still really resource individuals to be able to power these on their own, but our organizational focus is really deep community partnerships where we can explore questions alongside community leaders around, what is it that needs healing here?

Or perhaps there's been a moment of rupture that we don't know how to move through together.

Perhaps we're realizing there's a conversation in our community that we've never been able to talk about and that keeps being the elephant in the room for our moving together into a different type of future.

And so now that's what our work mostly looks like, and something we think a lot about is, we've had the privilege of sitting in these questions that a lot of people have been wrestling with.

We've gotten to sit in them full-time for years now.

And so thinking about how we can also just teach people some of our learnings is an important piece of our strategy as well.

- So who has been coming to you?

You said you've had, in 2016, 100 of these suppers.

Who reaches out to you?

How do you set the table, I guess?

- Sure.

So it varies.

And I think something that's really important about our model is we really try to honor the particulars of place and the particulars of the people that we'll be bringing together.

So we've worked with local governments, we worked with the government in the mayor's office in Erie, Pennsylvania.

We've worked with interfaith groups, we worked with one outside of Washington DC, a group of interfaith leaders thinking about racial equity.

We have kind of people wanting to know how to invite their neighbor over.

We have people reach out who wanna figure out how to have a different conversation at the Thanksgiving table.

We have organizations who reach out saying, how do we better help Afghan refugees feel like they're part of our community as they're settling here?

So it really varies and that part of our model is to really sit in a series of discernment questions alongside those partners to figure out how to build the conditions that allow for trust building to happen amongst the particular people in the room.

- So much of what's happening now is that political polarization that you're trying to break through.

And that's why Grand Valley State University has invited you in to be a speaker as part of the series.

You could describe politics as becoming this team sport.

And us versus them, and the other side.

It's not just the team.

You don't even like the people on that team anymore.

So I've been to the website and it looks as though you want people to break free from their political and ideological bubbles.

And that's not just in person but also online.

So how are you working through and navigating all of this?

- Yeah, it looks like a few different things.

It's interesting in some communities it really is that the fissure is around politics itself.

In others, it's that politics have become the place that deeper fissures are more expressed, if you will.

So there are communities that are wrestling with other forms of rupture and then politics are the easiest place to fight.

Part of the struggle we sit in is twofold.

One is the question of how to even get folks in the room is a complicated one.

Partially because people come with all kinds of motives.

So how do you really invite people to let go of the need to change other people's minds?

How do you think about even setting a table for when we're probably not gonna agree, but can we hold each other's humanity?

Can we figure out within that not agreeing what it still means to be neighbors?

That's a piece that we think a lot about.

We also think about kind of connecting folks around a deeper value set and thinking about what it means to live on some of our deeper values.

There's this interesting study that was done actually about sports fans and it was a soccer team, and they kind of set up this person in the parking lot after a soccer game who was hurt.

And they were trying to see who would help them.

And what the study found was that if I talked to you about your specific team before you walked out, and the person who was hurt was wearing the other team's jersey, you'd walk right by.

But if I talked to you about your love of soccer before you walked out, you would go help the person, even if their jersey was on the other team.

And so getting people to, what are the even deeper connective tissue moments beyond just being on this party, on this party, such that we might see ourselves as a collective, as a community, that's a piece that we're really trying to get at.

Certainly it's the holding that we all contain multitudes.

It's the, how do we sit and, not just how do I not reduce you to a particular assumption I might make about you based on your identities or your ideological perspectives?

There's that piece and the interruption of that that can come through setting of the table and the framing of a conversation in a particular way.

There's also the piece that is my own self examination.

What are the stories I tell about myself?

What are my own patterns in reaction and stereotyping that I can maybe witness over the course of a conversation with someone such that I realize the work I need to do to interrupt some of those impulses in me.

And yeah, it's interesting to see where people find points of connection.

There's a community we worked with in Colorado, and there was like, one of the more conservative pastors in town sitting down next to a young adult who was part of the LGBTQ community and they both kind of just assumed they might really have a hard time connecting.

Well they both found out that they had been kicked out of their families.

The pastor, for his religious perspective, and the young adult for his sexual identity.

And they never met somebody else who had had the experience of being removed from their family from something that felt core to their own sense of self.

And so there was really a profound moment of, oh, this is actually this deeper core thing I carry that we can connect around.

I never would've known that if I hadn't been willing to check my assumptions at the door, been asked a question that got me deeper than just what I think about whatever issue might be on the table.

But that invited me to share my experience with you and the ways that that experience animates how I then show up politically.

- It can take time to find that understanding.

To find that point of understanding.

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

So we think about People's Supper events as a couple of things.

In some communities we do kind of series of work.

And when individuals want to power these in their own homes, we'll challenge them to think about doing this over time.

When we're doing a one-off event, which are deeply meaningful as well, we think about it as an invitation to practice.

So, perhaps I've never really had the chance to practice suspending judgment or paying attention to my impulses.

And so can we pay attention to that for the next hour?

Can you notice where you're reactive?

Can you notice where you rush to judgment?

Can we lean into curiosity in a moment of tension?

Can we do that for the next hour as an experiment, see how it goes, practice, build some new muscle memory around our relationships to each other such that perhaps those new learned musculature might exist beyond the particular table itself.

- So much of it is having the background, the experience.

You're in a good place.

I'll read your bio here.

You've worked with a number of non-profit organizations exploring different manifestations of community with women coming out of sex trafficking, in a fraternity house.

That had to have been interesting.

As an associate pastor, as a chaplain in a maximum security women's prison.

So you've experienced a lot of the world from different perspectives.

And you're currently finishing up your Masters of Divinity at Wesley Theological Seminary.

Did you wrap it up yet?

- I did.

- [Patrick] Okay, good.

Congratulations.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think all of those places for me has been propelled by this similar impulse of, what's the deeper story here?

You know, I had, when I was young, I had a cousin who was incarcerated, and I remembered.

I remember being in elementary school and hearing people make comments about people who were in jail.

And I remember being like, oh wait.

It just doesn't fit with this beloved cousin of mine.

And I remember that really being kind of a catalyst for me of being able to see a bigger story about who a person was and to hold complexity in a person.

And that has really driven me to kind of sit alongside all different kind of communities to see how communities are formed, how people are thinking about what it means to be in relationship with each other and how to do this kind of work of deep connective tissue building such that we can weather the inevitable moments of rupture.

And I think right now we're looking at a cultural moment where we really don't have the tools necessary to move through moments of rupture or issues of division in a way that's never been quite as relevant as it is right now.

- What advice do you give to people to feel comfortable with approaching somebody who they might consider as the other?

- Sure.

- How, mentally do you get there?

- Sure.

I think that it starts within your own kind of personal prep.

So having a sense of what are your boundaries around where you will and won't go with somebody, I think is an important question to ask yourself.

And even kind of beginning to rehearse lines you might be able to use when those boundaries come up.

So you're prepared for the possibility that there could be tension here and this could be hard.

So things like, I know a line that I kind of tuck away is if I'm sitting with someone and they say something that really makes me react and I feel it coming up in my body, I've already rehearsed a line that is like, hey, I'm noticing this has made me react.

I wanna just take a beat before I respond 'cause I wanna sit with what you've just shared and be really careful about what my response is to you.

So there's that piece, the kind of personal prep, it's the knowing the why.

Why is it important that I wanna connect with this particular person?

It's the leading with vulnerability.

So willingness to say, hey, I have this particular relationship with you.

I go to church with you every week, or we're gonna have to have Thanksgiving together because you're my sister-in-law.

Or you're the person that sits next to me in class and it's important to me to be able to hold a good relationship with you.

And I know that this particular thing is a place that's meant tension for us before.

And I wonder what it might look like for us to dig in differently.

I'm committed to trying to be curious here, and not to leap to judgment, but to really, I wanna be able to hear you, and I wanna share my concerns.

So there's the, what I just tried to do is model the framing of a conversation.

So it's the naming the why, the leading with vulnerability, the preempting that which might get in the way, like, hey, I know this could be complicated, but I want to try and go there 'cause it matters to me that we're in good relationship.

And I wanna trust that we can, if we have a moment of tension, we can pause if we need to and re-enter later.

Something I think a lot about in this work is, we so often react to the panic that there is even tension that we can't get to the tension point itself.

And so giving some tools to people to normalize that tension might happen such that when it does, we're not worried about it.

We're just, oh, they said this might come, and here we are, so let's move through it.

Or kind of giving the expectation of how we'll do that.

So, hey, if that comes up for us and it's actually feeling too much, we'll just pause and check in with each other and if we need to step away and revisit in a week, we can do that.

So that way you kind of give people outs, you give people steps by which they can have a sense of what's coming.

Because it is, somebody asks you to sit down and have a conversation about the latest hot topic political issue.

I'm worried that even if you tell me you wanna hear my story, you're really just trying to make me like you enough that you'll change my mind.

And that ulterior motive is hard.

- That's interesting you mention that.

Because from my experience, you're not gonna change somebody's mind.

- Absolutely.

- You're just not.

- Sure.

- You can throw out all the data you want.

Not gonna happen.

But can we listen?

Can we hear each other?

Can we give each other space?

Can we find the common ground?

Can we at least get that far?

And is all of that really, are the things that we are confrontational over, are they truly that important?

I think maybe that's a question a lot of people need to ask themselves.

- You know, I think yes and no.

I do think there are certain baselines like, it's interesting, when we start to meet with communities, they'll often say, but how do I be able to bring this, and they describe the most extreme person in their community.

How can I bring them to the table?

And in fact, in the name of harm reduction, for bringing folks across lines of difference, you do wanna set some baselines, right?

So if I'm gonna have a conversation with a mixed race group about racial equity, I'm not gonna bring folks that don't think racism is an issue yet to this mixed race space.

That might be a conversation I'll have with a group of white folks because we can have a different conversation in that setting because of the identities we carry into the room.

So there are certain issues I do actually think we need to be able to have some baseline around.

And I do think that being in deep relationship with each other is the way by which we expand our own perspectives.

And that's some of the paradox of our work.

But to your point, there is also the question of, I was in a conversation about Roe v Wade a couple weeks ago, and the conversation started with, we've all heard everything the other side is gonna say about how we should feel and think about this.

We're probably not gonna swap sides.

What we need to be able to have a conversation about today is how might we collectively be community in light of our inability to come to this same agreement, and how might your perspective sharpen mine and mine sharpen yours such that together we forge a way forward that works for all of us?

And that something that gets lost in the, if only you thought like me, everything would be fine, is, the humility to say, there are limits to my perspective.

And the thing that you are seeing, the vantage point you have could help illuminate some of those limits and vice versa, such that together we can forge something even more beautiful for our communities.

- It's finding that understanding at the very least.

You're not gonna change minds, but at least can we, can we accept certain guidelines here, I guess, that's one way to look at that.

So the convening a table.

There is a sequence here, right?

I'm gonna guess there's a little bit of apprehension for people walking in, but... - Sure.

- You bring down the barriers a little bit to make people feel comfortable.

So if you can take me through some of this process.

- Yeah.

So when we're thinking about how to kind of respond to that apprehension, I think about it in a number of ways.

One is, how do you help people understand the boundaries we're working within or the parameters we're working within?

So you give people as much as you can before they walk in the room.

You say, hey, we're gonna spend the next two hours together.

We're gonna set some ground rules.

We're gonna turn it over to a conversation at small group tables where you'll have a peer facilitator who will ask you questions that are gonna get us deeper than the issues themselves.

And so we try to give people a very clear, as much as we can, this is what you're walking into.

And we try to give people the tools to stay in the conversation.

And so in the moment we'll offer ground rules.

Whenever we're working with a community, we'll talk about, what have been the barriers to connecting before and how might we give tools to preempt those here?

So an example of that, we worked with a church in Maryland who had folks across all generations, and they couldn't get past the way language differences, and the way that language had evolved over time.

And so some of the older folks would say something, and some of the younger folks would be like, see, the fact that you even use that language is the problem.

So we knew we had to give them a tool to move around that.

And so we named that as a possible barrier up front, and when everyone was in the room.

And we invited them to use the phrase, hey, that term made me bristle.

Help me understand what you meant by it.

And then they could move through it.

And so, we think about all the ways that we might see the possible barriers.

And it's, you know them.

You know when you're gonna talk to whomever what the barriers have been before.

To be able to just be frank about them and even together to work out, hey, this has been the thing that's gotten in our way before, how might we maybe try and move through them differently in this conversation is an accessible tool people can use.

And that really sets the tone such that even when you get into old habits, people can say, oh, I'm remembering we're trying to interrupt that, so let me course correct.

And so there's ways by which you create a container that invites people in such that they can feel at ease, and they have agency over their experience and how much they share.

But they're invited to lean into some discomfort over the course of this bounded time we have together.

- Second time this week I've heard the phrase, help me understand.

It seems like that brings down the heat.

- [K] Sure, yeah.

- And you can have a better conversation and yeah, understanding means a lot.

But when you say, help me understand this, then people have to explain it a little bit more, and there's not as much maybe anger involved.

- Yeah, I think it's to say, help me understand is to acknowledge that I might be missing something, and that my assumption could be incorrect, and that I'm willing to keep it in check in order to see something deeper than what's presenting to me in the conversation we're having.

And that goes a really long way, And that's some of it, right?

I think in this moment I would say, we sit in a moment around cancel culture as a big conversation.

I would say that I think a lot of people feel like that's their only option when they don't have the tools to stay in relationship.

And I'm not saying there's never a time in which you break a relationship with somebody, but I think what communities are needing are tools to stay.

And one of them is the trust that I'm not just gonna suddenly say something that's gonna make me not belong anymore.

Belonging is a big deal.

And so, to know that, oh, even if I say something that might have landed funny for you, you're gonna go there with me instead of just reject me, is practiced in things like, help me understand.

- We have a few minutes left.

So if we can get through some of the flow here.

Conversation starters, creating brave space, and then you have some ground rules mixed in too.

So the conversation starters, we don't have to go through all of them, but they're important.

- Yeah.

Yeah, we think about questions as, these conversation starters as tools to get conversation to a deeper place and cracking conversation open.

So questions that anyone can answer, that allow for varying degrees of vulnerability, that aren't questions I know the answer to.

So things like, tell me about something that makes you proud to call this place home.

Or tell me something that might surprise people about what it's like to be you.

Are ones that kind of get us deeper.

Or tell us about an identity you hold that not everybody holds, or a moment you realized you held an identity that not everybody holds.

Questions like that really get us to this deep experiential place.

- And then there's the creating a brave space.

What's a brave space?

- Yeah, so brave space is language that came out of academia when they were having conversations across racial lines and using the language of safe space.

The pushback to that was twofold, that some folks in the room were conflating safe space and comfortable space.

So the second a conversation got uncomfortable, people would say, oh, this isn't safe anymore, and they'd disengage.

But also for folks who have been historically marginalized, or people of color in our communities.

Safe space is a little bit of an illusion.

So we use brave space to invite people to be willing to lean into discomfort.

And to be willing to go there with each other, and to acknowledge that it takes courage to be vulnerable and to show up to conversation like this.

- And then having ground rules.

- Yeah, so things like, be present here, or honor confidentiality, or when tension arises, lean into curiosity, or stick with I statements, speak from your own experience.

Things like that that kind of, allow silence to be a conversation partner.

Things that allow us to kind of, I think of our ground rules as our ways of being in the conversation with one another, that helps us honor the stories that are shared and helps us do this towards harm reduction as well.

- And then of course you have a toast or a blessing at the end, which seems like a nice way to wrap it up.

- Yeah, just something to kind of, especially when we can kind of get deep with each other, something to bring us back out to a moment of levity, and honoring the fact that folks showed up.

It matters that people are choosing to live into this counter narrative to the polarization in our country, that are choosing to say, hey, we're gonna show up anyway.

We're gonna sit down, we're gonna try, we're gonna keep trying to figure out what it means to do the work of repair and relationship building across these lines of difference.

There's something about honoring that with a kind of final toast or blessing to honor that folks showed up at all.

- All right, well a toast with the water on the table.

- Cheers.

- K Scarry, The People's Supper.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Appreciate it.

- Thank you, yeah, thank you.

- And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

(inspiring music)