How a Smaller "Them" Gets Us to a Bigger "We"

Bridging for Democracy (B4D) is a partnership among social justice movement organizations to develop practices and narratives for rehumanizing and rebuilding our mutual commitments to one another across deep “us-them” divides in US society.

The motivating purpose of the work is to strengthen the foundations for a multi-racial democracy in a time of deep fragmentation and erosion of democratic norms. Countering those dynamics requires overcoming false perceptions and meta-perceptions that drive us-them animus in the country—at the interpersonal level, but also in the approach to engagement taken by most social justice organizations.

Our movement field must be committed to inoculating as much as possible against politics of resentment, othering, and disaffection—especially in the ways that our own organizations do our work. B4D was founded and is co-led by the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) and the Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCRJ), and several leading movement organizations have engaged with the initiative. Core partners during the pilot year that this report covers include the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Make the Road Nevada (MRNV), Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).

After decades of movement organizations building robust civic engagement programs to expand the electorate, voter turnout in the US has recently increased to levels not seen in generations. Yet higher turnout alone is not enough to cultivate a healthy democracy. In fact, through this period of higher engagement, dividing lines among Americans have grown wider, and our sense of sharing a “we” in common with the “other side” is increasingly strained.

Without that enduring “we,” the prospects for a sustainable, multi-racial democracy are dim. Wider and wider social divides tend toward mutual dehumanization. These are fertile grounds for demagogues and authoritarianism, because when the equal worth and humanity of the “other side” is no longer a given, anything can be justified. This dynamic cannot be countered by amassing more forces on one side. Wide divides require long bridges.

B4D is redefining how we defend democracy along these lines. Collectively, we propose a radical new vision of what civic engagement work requires, by incorporating “long bridge” activities into movement organizations’ repertoires. Long bridging aims to reconstitute larger “we” identities that are not predicated on agreement or sameness. Instead, they are about a “we” in which two sides of a divide recognize their difference, but also their shared humanity and stake in a shared future. Each of these recognitions is fundamental to a sustainable, multi-racial democracy.

Bridging activities and experiments challenge our field to confront our own exclusionary barriers in the way that we define who we will engage and “see.” They demand us to rethink how we define the “us” and “them.” Is there a hard “them” in our efforts to build a healthy multi-racial democracy? Are there limits on the empathetic listening and humanizing that we can or should be able to do across racial, ideological, or urban-rural differences?

We are guided by the principle of belonging for all, without othering, and the knowledge that democracy does not survive on a bare majority. We need a pro-democracy supermajority, and must build our “we” accordingly. We are confident that by directly challenging our barriers we can build a smaller “them” and move toward this larger “we.”

B4D is innovating and experimenting with field-based and narrative initiatives that utilize our collective expertise, including civic engagement field programs, narrative research, message-testing experiments, curriculum and training development, and more. This report covers our pilot, run in 2024. The pilot consisted of a long-bridge canvassing campaign and a congregation-based bridging conversation series. The long-bridge canvassing was built on our shared expertise to design and hold listening-centered, in-person conversations on doorsteps with constituencies that B4D partner organizations have previously kept at a distance, written off, or even othered. The second B4D approach used similar cross-divide listening and structured conversations, but in a group setting, hosted in a familiar place with a trusted community organization.

Across organizations, conversations in the pilot were designed to allow all sides’ voices to be heard, and for mutual recognition and understanding to be achieved. Through these conversations, individuals can overcome false perceptions and rehumanize one another, even across very long divides. This rehumanization in turn can help inoculate against politics of othering and authoritarian appeals.

Critically, this process is transformational for social justice-centered canvassers, participants, and organizations themselves, and strengthens our field’s commitments and practices of belonging for all. This makes the field not only better at reinforcing the foundations of democracy in the near term, but also better equipped to be the types of leaders we need for the future of belonging without othering that we envision.

This report details the pilot carried out by the Bridging for Democracy table, from its conception to our findings and lessons learned in the field. The first round of the B4D’s long-bridge canvassing pilot was conducted in 2024, and included four organizations knocking over 24,000 doors and having over 2,000 deep conversations across five states. The first group bridging conversations also took place in the fall of 2024, with a set of congregations in suburban Detroit.

The urgency of bridging political divides and countering fragmentation has been rising since we launched the B4D pilot. Now, in 2025, more movement organizations are talking about building a bigger we. In the wake of the 2024 election, rhetoric proliferated about the inability of progressives to respond to the political moment. Yet, our pilot was already underway. We recognized the need for this work and remain committed to it. Having run a successful pilot, B4D is now looking to expand—both in scale and scope. 

As we hypothesized, the pilot proved transformative for the organizations involved. Multiple partners have expanded the literal footprint of their organizations, growing their outreach and base building programs as a result of their bridging work. B4D partners want to grow their bridging work, bring in new partners, and continue experimenting with practices and narratives to help us build toward the multi-racial democracy we deserve. 

Background

Taking stock of the field

As organizations that deeply understand the importance of democracy to all of our struggles, the B4D partners came together in 2023 to reflect on what was still missing from the social-justice field’s work to build a stronger, multi-racial democracy. Increasingly, movement organizations were concerned with threats to democracy and growing fragmentation in the US, but was our field strategy shaped by this analysis? Were we talking to people outside our comfort level or core constituencies, and were we equipped to do so to directly address this fragmentation? And if not, how could we transform our movement to address the moment?

There is a large and diverse share of the US population who share our commitment to democracy, but who may have very different issue or policy views than our field. Unlike “political junkies” of left and right, the majority does not make their party preference central to their identities, feels “exhausted” when forced to think about politics, tries to keep politics at arm’s length, and would prefer that it play a much smaller role in public life.1 Through a civic engagement lens that tends to organize our thinking more in terms of “us” and “them,” this exhausted majority is often left out. 

We reflected on the extreme social fragmentation and erosion of democratic norms that persisted, despite the growth of our field and multiple rounds of high turnout elections.2  We looked in the face of a political moment marked by rising authoritarian and exclusionary ideologies, prolific mis- and disinformation, and increasing association of social justice movements with coastal elitism instead of a broad working class politic. It was evident that there was one or more “lanes” missing from the work we were leading to advance multi-racial democracy. We built B4D to address this gap and to rethink the impact of our civic engagement programs on growing fragmentation and our democracy. 

Designing B4D for the moment

The B4D table built on ten years of past OBI collaborations with the community organizing field on civic engagement, bridging practices, and narrative change, such as OBI’s Civic Engagement Narrative Change project, founded in 2018 to convene power-building and labor organizations with researchers and narrative strategists. This project integrated research, scientific testing, narrative development, strategic communications, and organizing to address voter disaffection and politics of division. WCRJ, MOSES, and MRNV were among the early partners in this work. In 2020, Civic Engagement Narrative Change summarized lessons learned from across several of its collaborative research efforts in the strategy brief, From Estrangement to Engagement. The main focus of this alignment document was engagement and voter activation with Black and Latinx constituencies, and bridging for greater civic belonging.

B4D drew on skills and lessons developed through this past work, while acknowledging that recalibration was needed to meet the problems that democracy and the social justice movement faced in 2023. Our collective reflection and analysis told us that (1) trust in systems and institutions needed for social justice was in rapid decline across the board, (2) we were not expanding our “universe”—the people we reach out to with civic engagement programs—beyond limited ways of viewing voter groups, and (3) our strategies and narratives might be appealing to fewer people, leaving openings for anti-democracy appeals within communities we serve. We grappled with the possibility that the field is not talking, and may not know how to talk, to significant swaths of the electorate. Though some of those who our organizations had left out or written off are firmly committed to authoritarian politics, the great majority likely is not.

From there, each partner identified voter subgroups (constituencies) that they had traditionally seen as too far a “reach” to be allies on issue priorities, but who may still be “passive keepers of democratic norms.” Next, B4D conducted foundational research with some of these constituencies. This included six focus groups with voters in Chicago, Wisconsin, and Nevada to better understand prevailing experiences, perspectives, and narratives. We investigated what are these constituencies’ concerns and priorities for their communities, how they define “community,” how they view “us-and-them” dynamics in their communities, and where they see possibilities for overcoming divisions. Findings from the focus groups informed strategy development for canvassing outreach to each constituency.

Launching the B4D partnership

Bridging for Democracy (B4D) was founded by the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) and the Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCRJ) to build a community of practice for developing and experimenting with strategies through which the social justice field can learn lessons to better meet the precarious moment for our democracy. Joining the partnership in its pilot stage were Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Make the Road Nevada (MRNV), Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). This group co-designed and implemented strategies, created tools, and identified best practices in building bridges across divides that threaten the social fabric of our democracy. We did this through research, field and digital experimentation, and the grounded knowledge of experienced organizers. 

B4D works at the intersection of community organizing and narrative work to build long-bridges centered around humanizing the other as a pathway to upholding democratic norms. Bridging happens when two or more groups come together across acknowledged lines of difference in a way that affirms their distinct identities and creates a new, more expansive identity. This does not necessitate that different groups agree on everything, or even very much, but its members should have a shared empathy and lasting stake in one another. Bridging rejects all strict “us” versus “them” framings, but without erasing what is different and unique in each party. Bridges can be short or long depending upon the experiences and frictions that define the dividing line. Both bridging and breaking are dynamic forces, and as organizers, strategists, and leaders, we must pay attention to forces at play defining where those lines fall, how shallow or deep those lines cross groups, and how entrenched they become. While social justice organizations commonly work toward short bridges where they see opportunities to expand their base, long bridging is a less familiar premise. The B4D partnership’s purpose is to add long bridging to our movement’s analysis and practical tool kit.

The first approach developed through this partnership is long-bridge canvassing, wherein our organizations hold listening-centered conversations with constituencies that they have not engaged due to differences of identity, geography, or ideology. Long-bridge canvassing uses much of the same infrastructure as other canvasses—canvasser training, scripts, voter identification and targeting, data collection, and canvass team debriefs and reflection. But each part of the process was adapted to fit the goals of long bridging. This involved identifying people on the other side of a recognized divide, taking a listening-centered approach to conversations, and seeking understanding and rapport rather than landing on an “ask.” The trainings and scripts traditionally used in canvasses tend to be fine tuned to achieve persuasion; but that is very different from tools aimed at bringing down anxiety, diffusing fragmentation, and striving for mutual rehumanization. B4D’s pilot canvass created processes and practices for these latter ends—ones designed to be both flexible and replicable, for adoption and adaptation across social justice and civic engagement fields.

The pilot also implemented a second approach to bridging conversations. These were group-based, facilitated conversations within Protestant congregations. Like the other B4D partners, MOSES identified constituencies that it had not previously engaged, in this case located in suburban congregations beyond its existing network. Leaders of those congregations worked with MOSES to bring together church members of diverse viewpoints to speak across long, often unacknowledged political divides. These group-based bridging conversations within a shared faith community are an experiment with another type of model that is distinct from the canvassing setting. The lessons learned could be generalized to other similar settings. These would be ones in which members of a shared community or trusted institution—such as a faith or labor organization—experience unacknowledged or unspoken divisions. 

Navigating tensions in adopting a focus on a smaller “them”

Some fundamental tensions laid at the center of B4D’s concept and development relate to core principles defining conventional, long-standing field strategy and how movement strategies stay most relevant to today’s context of toxic fragmentation. These included the following questions:

1. Why invest in “them” and not our base?
2. Why “democracy” and not lead with issues when engaging new constituencies? 
3. Why just listen and not persuade, recruit, or build power through these conversations?

As any social justice movement organization knows, resources are always limited, forcing tough decisions about how to spend time and energy. All B4D partners grappled with these tensions as we developed the pilot. Why do bridging work when there are so many programs with our base constituents that need funding and staff capacity? The pilot cemented the commitment to bridging as both necessary and work that strengthens our organizations. If we can’t preserve democracy—even with the limitations that we all experience in its present forms—we lose the entire field on which we’re operating, and building power to make change. We won’t be able to continue the values-based campaigns that are often the heart of our organizations.  
The other core tensions centered on how we would approach this work. Why not bring up issues core to our organizations’ missions and use these conversations as an opportunity to persuade or base build? We knew this moment was demanding a different approach to strengthening democracy and that genuinely addressing fragmentation meant coming to the table without an agenda. Ultimately, the table decided that we needed to experiment and be willing to amend or expand our approach to organizing. If we are othering or writing off groups of people, we are leaving power on the table. And if social justice movements are not engaging “them,” we are all more vulnerable to authoritarianism.

The social justice movement field is not set up for the kind of bridging we need today, so B4D partners have built a prototype—with a tool kit and lessons learned—that can be shared, and upon which we can iterate and improve together. B4D created a process and set of practices to lessen or inoculate against dehumanizing strategies that emerge from within and without our movements. Especially in the current iteration of identity politics, just like the right, we are often feeding fragmentation through the myth that sameness equals safety. If we’re limited by people we believe are persuadable, over time this means our target universes are shrinking and we’re not able to grow our movements. Meanwhile, our values and vision are one of a world with a robust democracy, where everyone’s basic needs are met and everyone belongs. B4D emerges from this tension and serves as a community of practice for us to continue grappling with these questions, and innovating together. 

The Pilot

The B4D pilot was carried out during 2024 by five organizations, working across six states. Four of these organizations carried out long-bridge canvassing campaigns, and the fifth held group bridging dialogues hosted at churches. Across the pilot, partners reached out to communities that we had previously othered, written off, or kept at a distance. The goal was to listen, understand, and mutually humanize across acknowledged lines of difference—even tensions. Our listening-centered conversations did not aim to persuade, nor remain limited to predefined issues. Although specific issues naturally came up, canvassers and facilitators steered away from attempting to “move” or convince anyone, instead aiming to make people feel heard across the divide. 

For the long-bridge canvassing campaigns, partner organizations defined constituencies and geographies that had not previously been included in their organizational outreach for any purpose. Canvass teams consisted of paid canvassers, supported by full-time organizational staff. 

We followed three guidelines for the design of canvassing campaigns: 

1. There should be bridging happening in and through the scripts. Each campaign is reaching out and listening to a constituency with whom the organization doesn’t usually engage, or where there is a recognized divide between the organization and the constituency.
2. Seeing one another as full people across this divide is both means and end. This mutual humanization will change our organizations for the better. Achieving it involves a skill, a science, and an art that we are trying to learn through the pilot, and the scripts should reflect that.
3. We affirm across the divide our shared stake in norms around democracy and all of us having a voice.

The B4D pilot’s group-based bridging dialogues were led by MOSES, in partnership with a network of Lutheran churches in the Detroit suburbs. MOSES is a Michigan-based community organizing group that works with faith leaders and congregations, historically anchored in Black churches. They began bridging through building trusting relationships with the leaders of five predominantly white suburban churches. But beyond this, the group dialogues themselves expanded our effort to develop practices for overcoming social and political fragmentation. 

The congregational leaders who collaborated with B4D were ones that were concerned about ideological splits in the pews and how these could fester into deeper rifts. Lessons learned about bridging practices in this context could inform work in other similar settings with small-scale democratic practices of decision-making across diverse groups of people, be that other churches or similar civic institutions or community spaces. The prompts and facilitation plans for these conversations were built on lessons from our focus groups and canvassing scripts, with a focus on bridging long, often silent political divides within the context of a shared faith community. 

Pilot  Profiles

In March 2024, three organizations led the first round of long-bridge canvassing across four different states: ICIRR on the southwest side of Chicago, MRNV in Elko and rural northeastern Nevada, and SURJ across several counties in rural northern Georgia and Tennessee. Each organization’s context and capacities were distinct, but all engaged in shared training, data collection, and script elements across the four states. MOSES’s group bridging dialogues began in October and built on insights from the spring canvasses. Finally, WCRJ led a bridging canvass in Wisconsin in late November. Incorporating feedback from the other organizations, we updated our canvasser training and used a new script for this program, reflecting the post-election context. The table below provides more information about each organization and their work during the pilot. 

Organization	State	Mission	Long-bridge
Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR)	IL	ICIRR is dedicated to promoting the rights of immigrants and refugees across Illinois to full and equal participation in the civic, cultural, social, and political life of our diverse society.	Bridging across political leanings and views on immigration. Talking to voters on the southwest side of Chicago, a predominantly Latino community, in which anti-immigrant sentiment had become prevalent in response to thousands of migrants being bused to Chicago from Texas.
Make the Road Nevada (MRNV)	NV	MRNV builds the power of the Latine and working-class people of color to achieve dignity and justice through organizing, policy innovation, and transformative education.	Bridging across geography, talking to independent voters in rural northeastern Nevada.
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) - Southern Crossroads chapter	GA & TN	SURJ is a national organization that brings hundreds of thousands of white people into fights for racial and economic justice.	Reaching out to white voters in rural areas and towns in Georgia and Tennessee where the population is overwhelmingly working class and conservative.
Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES)	MI	MOSES organizes faith-based and grassroots civic actions to cultivate social justice across metro Detroit.	Addressing unacknowledged political divides within majority white, suburban Detroit  Lutheran congregations, with an eye toward longer term bridging across race.
Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCRJ)	WI	WCRJ is a grassroots organization fighting for Black liberation, and a fair and inclusive society that benefits all people. They work across Illinois and  Wisconsin.	Bridging across a racial and urban/suburban divide through Black canvassers from Milwaukee talking to predominantly white, suburban voters.

Our hypotheses for long-bridge canvassing

We formulated hypotheses for the pilot in three key areas:

1. Democratic norms and humanization
   • Canvassers and their organizations will have transformative experiences of mutual humanization that will impact all our work. 
2. Developing and supporting canvassers 
   • The experience gained and regular debriefs throughout will support better conversations by the end of the pilot.
   • We will improve upon the training and support structures for canvassers through the pilot.
3. Resources and capacity needed for a long-bridge canvass
   • The resources and capacity needed for a long-bridge canvass will be greater than for typical Get Out the Vote (GOTV) programs.
   • We will learn through the pilots what it takes to build capacity and get to scale for this type of bridging work.

Pilot Results

We collected a few different pieces of data across these canvasses: 

1. Length of each conversation
2. Change in the resident’s disposition/openness to engage from the beginning of the conversation to the end
3. Resident’s stated willingness to speak with the canvasser again in the future 

Our decision about which data to collect during the canvass needed to follow from our distinct goals and learning questions. Unlike all of the structured deep-canvassing experiments of which we’re aware, the purpose was not to figure out how to move support on an issue. We were interested in connection and recognition. This called for focusing on the quality and depth of the conversations happening at the doors, and the impact of the exchange on their openness to a canvasser on the other side of an acknowledged social divide. The data we collected sought to balance these measurement goals with a need to be straightforward and relatively easy for canvassers to record while in the field.

Interest in speaking with us again is the only piece of data where we directly recorded responses from the person being canvassed. This question attempts to gauge if the conversation was meaningful or enjoyable for the person being canvassed, although we are conscious that people may overreport “yes” or “maybe” simply to be polite. Conversation length is used as a proxy measure of the depth or “grip” of the conversation. 

Finally, canvassers made subjective assessments of each person’s disposition at the beginning and at the end of the conversation. They did so using a five point scale adapted from other groups’ field experiments with deep canvassing (though those are all different in that they focused on persuasion).3 Disposition and willingness to engage are difficult to measure, but our canvasser training provides guidelines and illustrative descriptions of how each point on the scale—1 through 5—might look in practice (see below). It was important to collect this type of data to offer another point for assessing the efficacy of the effort to foster connection. 

Here is the scale for disposition/willingness to engage: 

1	The person is frustrated, arms crossed, not opening the door fully, trying to cut to the chase, immediately responding “what do you want” and/or “we’re not interested.”
2	The person looks skeptical, is trying to hurry the conversation along, and/or mentions needing to deal with something (Ex: I have something on the stove, I’m heading out, etc.).
3	Relatively neutral, they are neither trying to end the conversation nor showing enthusiasm; answers are kept short.
4	The person seems interested in what you’re saying; they’re contributing and responding with some depth to questions. They might be asking you questions. Body language cues may include smiling, eye contact, and/or an open stance.
5	The person is showing enthusiasm, seems invested in the conversation. They are actively participating, disclosing things about themself, and extending the conversations/interaction. They may explicitly share interest, gratitude, or intrigue in what you’re doing and the importance of bridging.

Pilot data

 

Learnings from the pilot

The long-bridge canvassing conversations were transformative for the canvassers and organizations that participated. This section provides a glimpse into the experiences of all the organizations that were part of the pilot.

Make the Road Nevada (MRNV) is an organization focused on achieving dignity and justice for immigrants and working-class people of color. They formed in 2018, first beginning work in Las Vegas and then expanding to Reno. During the pilot, they bridged with rural communities in and around Elko, NV, a city of just over 20,000 residents in the northeast of the state. The MRNV team was surprised at how many Latinos lived in the area and how easy it was to connect with local residents in general.

One of the canvassers had a particularly impactful conversation with a white woman who started off the conversation railing against immigrants and naming increased immigration as her number one concern. As they kept talking, the two discovered the simple commonality that both had grown up in Colorado. The canvasser shared more about his family’s immigration story, and the woman also relaxed and opened up to him about a difficult and abusive relationship in her life. She was then able to talk about the difficulties she faces accessing health care in rural Nevada, and named that as the issue most important to her. As they wrapped up the encounter, she had kind words for the canvasser, wishing him and his parents well.

The overall success of the campaign confirmed for MRNV the need to expand into rural parts of the state, beyond their core work in Las Vegas and Reno. Within a few months of wrapping up their canvass, they hired a full-time rural organizer. Within a year of the campaign, MRNV had a team of three rural organizers to continue building out this work.

Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), a statewide immigrant rights organization, canvassed on the southwest side of Chicago, in predominantly Latine neighborhoods. They focused on the 15th and 23rd Wards, areas with many independent-minded voters that have been roiled by anti-immigrant sentiment since Governor Abbott of Texas began busing asylum seekers to Chicago. ICIRR intentionally canvassed a list of local voters who would not have been in their GOTV universe, to make sure they were talking to folks whose views and experiences the organization would otherwise not hear. As with MRNV, their canvassing team was surprised by how much common ground they found in these conversations and the bridging opportunities they saw. ICIRR’s political director remarked that the organization shouldn’t write these communities off based on perceptions of conflicting values.

Ten months after their canvass, the alderpersons representing the 15th and 23rd Wards—precisely where ICIRR had been working to bridge long divides—led an effort to weaken the city’s sanctuary policy that helps protect immigrants from deportation. Before the B4D pilot, this may have created another barrier to ICIRR doing outreach in these communities. Conventional wisdom in organizing has suggested that power-building practices involve finding supporters and moving undecided people—not talking to opposition. However, having had hundreds of conversations with people in those wards, the news about the wards’ elected representatives only reinforced the importance of continuing to bridge in that region—to understand the perspective of Chicagoans in those neighborhoods and to continue humanizing each other. Instead of pulling away during a time when resources are stretched and emotions are high, ICIRR remained. The canvass team spoke to many people who were supportive of immigrant families in those neighborhoods, and many others who were primarily concerned about how the city’s resource allocation impacted their lives. ICIRR plans to continue bridging in the 15th and 23rd Wards and expanding the scope of the initial pilot. 

Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) canvassed in predominantly white, rural, and low-income neighborhoods in both Georgia and Tennessee, where far-right ideology is prevalent. The field director in Tennessee remarked that, although this was sometimes challenging, “the facade is often harsher than their heart is.” The first 5-10 minutes of many conversations were full of predictable talking points from the right-wing media ecosystem. But, if you’re able to get past that, she said, go deeper with folks, and ask them about having conversations with people they disagree with, there’s two camps: (1) those who think it’s the stupidest idea they’ve ever heard, and (2) those who recognize just how important and helpful such conversations would be.

Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCRJ) wanted to bridge across racial lines and the racial divide that often exists between urban and suburban communities. WCRJ works primarily in Black communities, in Illinois and Wisconsin, on racial justice and worker rights. They also run civic engagement programs in the communities where they organize. WCRJ brought on a team of canvassers who were all men of color from Milwaukee, who canvassed in two suburban counties—Ozaukee and Waukesha, both over 85% white. This canvass took place several months after the other long-bridge canvasses and right after the contentious 2024 presidential election. As such, the approach both integrated lessons from other canvasses and shifted to meet the moment. The script in Wisconsin asked, for example, “How did divisions over the election impact your family, friends, or local community?” to directly address the fragmentation experienced during the election cycle.

The WCRJ canvass director reflected that it felt refreshing to canvass using an open-ended and exploratory approach. It pushed him to think of new ways to approach both canvassing and issue organizing, and he sees the potential of long bridging to lay the groundwork for deeper organizing, help us think about our work in more nuanced ways, and develop stronger narratives by incorporating diverse perspectives.

Michigan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES) organizes in community and faith-based spaces across the metro Detroit area. As we developed this initiative, they wanted to engage key leaders and members in their base who were interested in bridging but not ready to canvass yet. We worked with pastors at a few suburban Detroit churches who have noticed political divides among their congregations becoming more salient and contentious in the past few years. They wanted to create a container where people could have honest conversations about these divides and the impact they were having. The bridging began with engaging pastors and co-creating the approach, script, and structure of the community bridging conversations. 

Some participants came out of the first bridging conversation with more openness to talking to their broader community, outside their church. One participant remarked during the conversations, “It’s hard to demonize people you know,” perfectly encapsulating the potential of bridging and mutual humanization. Yet, the pastors and facilitators leading the conversation felt there was still a layer of polite, “Midwest niceness” that was present throughout the program. They want to bring this group back together, with a new set of questions to help them dig deeper. Many participants were eager for more and grateful for the experience. As another congregant remarked, “Boy, I thought I had all of you all figured out, but turns out I was wrong.” 

Revisiting our hypotheses

1. Democratic norms and humanization

We hypothesized that, through the pilot, organizations would have transformative experiences of humanization that would impact all our work. As the core of the pilot, this transformation is detailed throughout the report. There are three main outcomes that serve as proof of this transformation for us: the continued commitment to bridging, expansion of work within organizations, and reflections from organizers and canvassers who were part of the pilot.

Since the B4D pilot, MRNV has hired a three-person rural organizing team and permanently expanded their work into new regions of the state. Their director of civic engagement shared, in a debrief, that “[the pilot] feels really meaningful. We built connections that weren’t there before. People appreciated it. [I’m] feeling really validated. That’s the main word. Personally, [I] think about this area differently than I did before.”

Through the pilot, MOSES has built new relationships with pastors in metro Detroit, strengthened relationships with congregational networks, and built connections across different churches. Pastors, facilitators, and participants had transformative experiences even through one evening of intentional bridging, giving feedback that “It’s hard to demonize people you know” and “when we struggle together, we grow together.” 

2. Developing and supporting canvassers 

This pilot was both challenging and rewarding for our canvassers. Canvassers in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Georgia had the police called on them and had to navigate these uncomfortable encounters. Most canvassing teams also experienced neighborhood-based surveillance through doorbell cameras and photos of them being shared in local Facebook groups. Emotionally, canvassers reported that shifts were often draining, and they often found themselves listening to personal stories of hardship and despair.

Experienced canvassers particularly felt the urge to pivot to persuasion in their conversations, both because of previous training and out of a desire to offer hope in hard conversations. In a persuasion canvass, the script offers the person a potential solution or antidote to their struggle—usually one tied to the organization’s issue- or policy-based campaign. Our scripts, which explicitly stayed away from persuasion, didn’t have this same pivot. That said, B4D closes conversations with optimism about people’s ability, still in our current climate, to understand one another and bridge across differences. Still, that alone doesn’t address the issues around health care, housing, violence, and inequality that people often share at the doors.

Bridging can be challenging work, and canvassing can be both physically and emotionally draining. In continuing to grow B4D, the table is also thinking about how to create on-ramps to build up our capacity to do long bridging, helping folks grow, and improve our support structures for canvass teams. The bridging conversations are one way to do that and to introduce people to bridging concepts and practices in a more comfortable environment.

3. Resources and capacity needed for bridging

Long-bridge canvassing is resource intensive; we built a training and scripts specific to this work. While it builds on skills and materials used in other canvassing work, the training is longer and more involved than a typical GOTV program. Investing in canvassers is also a crucial piece of this, even beyond the initial training; regular practice and comprehensive debriefs help improve and strengthen bridging conversations. The goal of long-bridge canvassing is to have long conversations, to explicitly prioritize quality over quantity of doors knocked. This also runs counter to many traditional canvassing programs and means it’s resource intensive to scale up this work.

Practice is also essential when doing long-bridge canvassing for the first time. The WCRJ canvass manager advised that “you’re going to learn from doing; it’s important to just get out there even if it’s imperfect. Getting in as many practice sessions before getting out in the field is super helpful.” SURJ also found that practice and thorough debriefs throughout the program helped their canvassers have better conversations. The field director leading the Georgia team built in role-plays every morning before the team began knocking doors. She also paid attention to results from the previous shift and made a point to incorporate into the role-play any canvasser who had struggled to hold longer conversations. The SURJ canvassing team also maintained an active group chat for sharing notes as they had conversations in the field. There the whole team could contribute ideas on where they might go deeper or ask additional questions, as well as giving one another positive feedback.

Without the funds to run year-round programs, though, canvassers are laid off when the program ends. Despite having gained training and experience, organizations may have to hire new people and start from scratch in subsequent rounds of long-bridge canvassing. We hope to better integrate bridging work so it can be done year round, or intersect with other programs in a way that allows staff to stay on longer term and develop expertise in this area.

Bridging and Base Building

Bridging is distinct from base building, GOTV, or outreach programs regularly run by power-building organizations. Bridging is also not meant to be a replacement for traditional community organizing. However, it can support power building. Bridging broadens our understanding of the challenges and perspectives in communities with whom we do not typically engage. It pushes us to confront and challenge our own biases and assumptions, and find commonalities with people we perceive as different, other, or not aligned. This work sharpens our skills around listening, communication, having difficult conversations, and being open to new perspectives, all of which make us better organizers, communicators, and strategists.

As discussed with the long-bridge canvassing pilots, bridging does not seek to persuade or move people politically. But it can and should help broaden our idea of who could be “with us” in our commitment to democratic norms, which can strengthen base-building work both through expanding who organizations see as potential members, and through building listening and bridging skills. Bridging helps develop broader, more inclusive pathways toward building movements fighting for racial, social, and economic justice, including a movement for a multi-racial democracy.

What's Next

Bridging for Democracy is a long-term partnership that will expand the long-bridge canvassing and bridging conversations programs while innovating other strategies through which movement organizations can transform our work and broader field in strengthening democratic norms and building toward a strong, multi-racial democracy. B4D continues to grow—we are currently envisioning the next phase of this work while continuing to expand on the long-bridging work developed through the pilot.

We are facing sharper fragmentation, an accelerated erosion of democratic norms, and increased disengagement from the “exhausted majority” and people across the political spectrum. Our current context has grown both the urgency of our work and our commitment to long bridging. The transformative power and impact of bridging on our organizers and organizations has already shaped our work and better equipped us to organize in this political moment. We are now growing the scale of our work and sharing these lessons with our field, across the country. 

B4D is redefining how we defend democracy as social justice organizations. Collectively, we are proposing a radical new vision of incorporating long bridging into civic engagement work across the movement ecosystem as a core program. Long bridging can run alongside base building and, in some cases, be the central approach to field strategy. We must build this bigger “we,” in which we are able to acknowledge differences, while affirming our shared humanity and stake in a thriving multi-racial democracy by organizing toward a smaller “them.” As organizers, strategists, practitioners, and people committed to a world of greater belonging, we must ask ourselves how we can build the organizations and movements that are committed to a bigger, more inclusive “we.”

---

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all of the canvassers, facilitators, and participants in the pilot. Their hard work, expertise, patience, openness, and willingness to bridge made this pilot possible and successful.

Thank you to everyone who was willing to bridge with a stranger that knocked on your door.

Thank you to the Deep Canvass Institute for their expertise, advice, and tools that helped inform this work. 

We also thank our philanthropic partners for supporting and trusting our vision and making the work in this report possible.