New Podcast: Navigating Division on Your Staff and Board
We introduced you to Tim Dixon in July, when he was the first person I wanted to talk to after Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally. His organization, More in Common, works around the world to bring unlikely allies together. Tim was motivated to try to heal divided communities after a politician who was a close friend was shot at a meeting with her constituents.
Now you have a chance to hear much more from Tim in a new podcast the Chronicle is launching on Tuesday, April 15 — Nonprofits Now: Leading Today.
Our CEO, Stacy Palmer, asks Dixon to walk listeners through his approaches to persuading people with widely different views to unite and get things done. They also discuss how he helps leaders navigate divisions on their staffs and boards and how CEOs can muster the courage to speak out on controversial issues.
You can find the conversation on Apple Podcasts, on other podcast platforms, or on philanthropy.com starting Tuesday.
New Event — Beyond the Beltway, a Bid for Community
As federal Washington burns with division and conflict, some grant makers are trying to repair the country’s social fabric by strengthening communities. Join Rockefeller Brothers Fund president Stephen Heintz and Katie Loudin of the West Virginia Community Development Hub for a discussion of the year-old Trust for Civic Life, an unusual $30 million cross-ideological funder collaborative bankrolling homegrown initiatives. Members include Rockefeller Brothers, the Carnegie Corporation, the Omidyar Network, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Stand Together, and Walmart.
Register now for this Commons in Conversation event on Tuesday, May 6, at 12:30 p.m. ET.
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News and other noteworthy items:
- Democrats and Republicans increasingly “view one another less as fellow citizens and more as enemies,” according to a new report from Beyond Conflict, a global conflict-resolution organization. The group believes its research points to a tool that can fight polarization — what it calls “meta-perception correction” to address false beliefs “about what individuals think others think about them.”
- Only 5 percent of public spaces are meeting the needs of their communities, according to a survey of city planners, architects, parks and recreation officials, and other professionals and volunteers in the field. Public spaces like libraries, parks, and arts centers are “ourcivic infrastructure,” declares the report from Project for Public Spaces. The No. 1 takeaway from the survey, the report says: “The way we fund public space is broken.”
- In the inaugural Pluralism Lecture at Duke University, scholar John Inazu — author of Learning to Disagree and Uncommon Ground — spoke of the role of work and shared purpose in bringing people together. “People don’t usually learn to empathize with one another through dialogue alone — we learn by forming relationships with others committed to a shared endeavor,” he said. “We build meaningful relationships by working toward endeavors that unite us across our differences. And that requires a sense of purpose.”
