This is the third story in a series about the Othering & Belonging Institute's Bridging for Democracy project, a coalition of grassroots organizations canvassing—door-to-door, across the country—to bridge across differences. What they are finding is an antidote to authoritarianism.
Growing up, my mom had a way of cutting through the noise with one question: “¿Tu hijos no merece tener una escuela?” (Doesn’t your child deserve to have a school?). When parents answered yes, she’d nod and say, “Entonces, esto es lo que vamos a hacer.” (Then here’s what we’re going to do.)
I didn’t realize at the time that my mom was organizing. I thought she was just being a mom—trying to make sure her kids, and all the kids in our small town, had a shot at something better by finding common ground families could relate to. Now I realize my mom had been organizing long before I had language for it.
She was a bridger.
Blanca Macias' parents (left) and Blanca herself today (right)
So, years later when, as Deputy Director of Make the Road Nevada, I joined the Bridging for Democracy project through the Othering and Belonging Institute, I found myself asking the very same kind of questions my mother asked. I found myself cutting through the noise. My team and I didn’t show up to persuade people how to vote or to push a talking point. We came to ask, genuinely and without an angle: What do you need to be okay today?
And just like they did for my mom, the answers became the blueprint for what we would do next.
From corporate comfort to community purpose
“You have to remember how you grew up. I’ve been helping people since before you were born.”
My path into this work wasn’t direct. About 15 years ago, a friend asked me to help lead a youth leadership camp. My first instinct was, “That’s probably not for me.” But they pushed back: “That’s exactly why we need you. Your lived experience reflects what young people are going through.”
So I said yes. That yes changed everything.
I started working with youth who were unhoused, in foster care, and were in the system—youth who were overlooked and underestimated. What drove me was simple: making sure they felt seen, heard, and not forgotten.
That work lit a deep fire in me that marked my path forward.
For years, though, I balanced that passion with a corporate career. I had stability, a good paycheck, even a promotion coming. Then Leo Murrieta, the Executive Director of Make the Road Nevada, asked me to join the team as an Operations Director. We had met nearly a decade before while we were both volunteering at the same youth camp that I thought wasn’t for me. He told me that joining Make the Road Nevada would give me the chance to merge my skills with my purpose, and with my lived experience.
I hesitated—until I called my mom. Sitting on the floor, torn between comfort and calling, I asked, “Mom, what do I do?” She didn’t hesitate: “You have to remember how you grew up. I’ve been helping people since before you were born.” That reminder made the choice clear. I left corporate America, and I joined the Make the Road Nevada team.
It didn’t take long for me to witness the impact bridging and organizing could have. In early 2021, during the pandemic, I sat in on a city meeting about COVID-19 vaccine distribution. City officials celebrated how smoothly the rollout was going and asked community partners to share feedback. I spoke up and shared what I had witnessed the day before.
I’d gone to get my own vaccination in East Las Vegas, near my mom’s house. What I saw there still stays with me: an older man in line, speaking Spanish, turned away because he hadn’t made an online appointment. There was no one to translate as pharmacy staff tried to explain that he couldn’t be seen without an appointment and asked for insurance information. I stepped in to help—only to realize he hadn’t known an appointment was required for a vaccine he believed would not require insurance.
That was bridging too: cutting through barriers, meeting people where they are, and affirming that their lives matter.
This experience showed how the digital divide, layered on top of language barriers, was shutting people out of care.
I left that vaccination clinic frustrated, but I turned the frustration into action.
With my team’s support, I helped build Make the Road’s health equity program. We organized mobile vaccine clinics in our offices and delivered vaccines in areas where floreros, taqueros, paleteros, jornaleros, and other street vendors were conducting business.
We didn’t require IDs or appointments for vaccines. We didn’t wait for communities to navigate English-only websites. We went to them.
That was bridging too: cutting through barriers, meeting people where they are, and affirming that their lives matter.
Bridging as democracy work
We weren’t there to deliver answers—we were there to ask questions and build trust.
At Make the Road Nevada, I discovered that my mom’s lessons—her simple, powerful questions—were the essence of what OBI calls bridging. Bridging isn’t about pretending differences don’t exist. It’s about creating spaces where people can speak their truth, be listened to, and recognize one another’s humanity –and sometimes even common ground–across divides.
Through Bridging for Democracy, Make the Road Nevada created that kind of space in concrete ways. Our canvassers were trained to go door-to-door not to register voters or repeat campaign lines, but to have deep, listening-centered conversations. We asked, “What is impacting you right now? What do you need to make your life better? What do you need to feel okay right now? or What issues are important to you that are impacting your everyday life?”
The answers were never about politics. They were about rent, wages, healthcare, safety, and education—things that unite us no matter where we fall on the political map. Those conversations shifted the tone because people felt genuinely heard, opening the door to trust and deeper engagement.
They recognized us because we recognized them.
The most powerful part of this project for me has been bringing it home to rural Nevada. Last year, we organized a listening tour across the rural Nevada, including Elko County, where I grew up. With OBI’s support, we designed it not as a series of speeches, but as true listening sessions.
We rewrote our canvassing scripts, trained staff to slow down and really hear people, and approached communities with genuine curiosity and humility. We weren’t there to deliver answers—we were there to ask questions and build trust.
When we visited Wendover, my mom slipped right back into her old role, calling my tías and tíos, making pozole, and filling the room with family and neighbors. It wasn’t a campaign rally; it was belonging in action. People shared their worries about housing, wages, and healthcare. Again and again, healthcare rose to the top.
For me, that was a moment of deep validation. I thought of my mom being airlifted to Salt Lake City during a complicated pregnancy with one of my younger siblings because there was no hospital nearby. Decades later, the same gaps still exist. Hearing people name them out loud reminded me: this isn’t history—it’s still a lived reality right now.
Out of that work came concrete commitments: hiring organizers who already live in rural Nevada to help shape advocacy around healthcare access, and proving that communities often dismissed as “too rural” are full of people waiting to be heard.
For the little girl who looks like me growing up in rural Nevada right now, I want her to inherit more than survival. I want her to inherit belonging.
Democracy starts with listening
People often ask why bridging matters in a time of deep division. My answer is simple: because democracy will collapse if we only talk to “our people.”
Bridging for Democracy has reminded me what my mom taught me all those years ago. Democracy starts with listening. It starts with asking the questions like she asked: Don’t our kids deserve schools? Don’t our families deserve food and healthcare? And when people say yes, the work begins.
That’s why Make the Road’s expansion into rural Nevada matters so much. From Las Vegas to Reno to every community across the state, we’re planting roots not just for today, but for the little girl who looks like me growing up in rural Nevada right now. I want her to inherit more than survival.
I want her to inherit belonging.
When I look back, I see how my mother built bridges without ever naming them. She didn’t collect petitions; she organized parents and proved we needed a school. She didn’t run campaigns; she organized neighbors around shared accessibility needs. She didn’t call herself an activist. She called herself a mom, just doing what had to be done.
Through OBI and Bridging for Democracy, I’ve learned to name that work, to deepen it, and to carry it forward.
Belonging isn’t a soft feeling—it’s a hard practice. It’s listening sessions in Elko. It’s pozole dinners in Wendover. It’s canvassers having real conversations and making true connections. It’s mothers like mine, who knew before anyone taught her that democracy begins with ordinary people demanding what they deserve. It’s what is laying the foundation for me, a mother now myself, to continue to do this long-term work.
And now it’s Make the Road’s turn, it's my turn, to keep asking, to keep listening, to keep building the bridge my mother started.
