Power of Bridging in Action

This is the first 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.

On a cloudy fall afternoon in Southern California’s Anaheim Hills, Lorena P., a canvasser from the Orange County Congregation Community Organization (OCCCO) stood on a porch facing a skeptical retiree who’d warily opened the door to speak to her. It was early October, and campaigns for and against the state’s proposition 50, had riddled the neighborhood a month before the ballot measure would be decided at the polls.

Politics as usual.

But instead of launching into a voting pitch, she began with a question:

How has all this—politics, polarization, the feeling of division—touched your life?

The man, tall and slender, exhaled and folded his arms. Then slowly started talking about a sick family member he hadn’t spoken to since 2020. About avoiding neighborhood cookouts and gatherings. About how his faith in people had faltered. And about how small his world had become because of the fear of dissenting political views. Thirty minutes later, after sharing personal stories he hadn’t told anyone in years, the man asked Lorena to stop back by “And he said ‘this gives me faith in humanity. You weren’t here to sell anything and I feel less alone,’” Lorena P. recalls.

That exchange—ordinary, fragile, quietly radical—captures the heart of a recent grassroots canvassing pilot that brought together longtime partners of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) network. Along with OCCCO, the Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCRJ), Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Make the Road Nevada, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) teams in Georgia and Tennessee, and the Detroit-based Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), all joined forces to test a new approach: Bridging for Democracy.

Their shared diagnosis was blunt: simply turning out “our side” is no longer enough. Democratic norms are fraying. Authoritarian leaders are exploiting fear and division. Entire communities are being pitted against one another as scapegoats. If movements are going to build power that lasts, they need to knit the civic fabric back together—not just win the next news and election cycles.

Bridging for Democracy (B4D) groups, in the past year, have knocked on over 26,000 doors across six states and held nearly 2,350 deep conversations with residents from all backgrounds. Organizers tracked not just contact rates but shifts in openness. The impact? Residents grew more engaged as conversations unfolded, and three-quarters said they’d welcome canvassers back.

Canvassers and organizers themselves also transformed—a key goal of the project. Pre- and post-surveys showed that those who knocked on doors became less anxious, more curious, and more convinced bridging is both possible and necessary. Canvassers also brought their bridging skills back to other organizing efforts, reshaping how they approached coalition-building.

Our civic engagement sector is stronger than ever—but authoritarian movements are advancing policies that strip away rights and concentrate power, said OBI Program Director Olivia E. Araiza. 

“Bridging isn’t a distraction from social justice work—it is a strategy to get us to a bigger we,” Araiza said. “Without a ‘smaller them’ we’re just shoring up one side of a fractured system while the floor collapses beneath us. We need broader pathways to define unconditional belonging for everyone.”

Bridging as an antidote to authoritarianism

History shows that authoritarianism doesn’t only arrive with tanks in the street. It often creeps in through everyday fractures—declining trust in institutions, widening divides between neighbors, scapegoating of vulnerable groups. When people begin to see opponents not as fellow citizens but as existential enemies, strongmen find fertile ground.

And the U.S. is not immune. In recent years, and currently, authoritarian-style policies have gained traction: restricting voting rights, rolling back reproductive freedoms, banning books and curricula, targeting immigrants and LGBTQ+ communities, and undermining the independence of courts and the press. Each move narrows who belongs in the polity, shrinking democracy into something conditional and fragile.

Against this backdrop, the coalition’s experiment is urgent. Bridging—deep listening, mutual recognition, seeing across lines of difference—isn’t charity work. It is survival work.

“Our values dictate that everyone has a right to be listened to and respected,” MOSES Executive Director Ponsella Hardaway said. “Bridging is how we practice those values—and how we deny authoritarianism the soil it needs.”

The long-bridge approach

The B4D pilot, which initially began in fall 2024, embraced a “long-bridge” strategy. Instead of persuading people to back a candidate, sign a petition, or even change their mind on an issue, canvassers knocked on doors to listen. They were trained to hold sustained, humanizing conversations with people outside their usual base—those they might normally avoid, dismiss, or fear.

Long-bridge canvassing included door-to-door conversations with voters and residents that organizations had historically written off. Community dialogues were also facilitated as small-group “café” conversations in congregations and civic spaces wrestling with polarization in their own ranks.

Both required more training, more debriefing, and more care than a typical get-out-the-vote effort. But leaders believed the investment was essential.

“We can’t just be better at mobilizing electoral bases while authoritarianism advances,” said SURJ and Southern Crossroads Director Kelly Sue Waller. “We need to rebuild the capacity of people to see each other as human.”

And the Bridging for Democracy work has done just that — in communities across the country.

Bridging within immigrant communities

When Texas governor Greg Abbott began busing migrants to Chicago in 2022, tensions flared across the city. Thousands of asylum seekers arrived in the middle of a Chicago winter, some sleeping on police station floors while the city scrambled to open shelters—many of them in long-disinvested Black neighborhoods. “Residents understandably asked: why were these buildings suddenly reopening for asylum seekers when their communities had been ignored for decades?” said Lawrence Benito, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR).

In Latine wards, canvassers heard a different frustration. Families who had been undocumented for years looked at newcomers receiving temporary protections and work permits and asked, “What about us?” Benito said these tensions were raw, and pretending they didn’t exist would have been dangerous: “We knew that a traditional advocacy approach wasn’t enough on its own.”

As part of the B4D pilot, ICIRR launched a deep-listening canvass—knocking on nearly 18,000 doors and holding over 1,400 extended conversations. “The goal wasn’t to deliver a script or win people over—it was to listen deeply,” Benito explained. “When conversations stretched to five or ten minutes, residents began connecting their own histories—the Great Migration, earlier immigrant struggles—to the journeys of today’s asylum seekers.”

That, Benito believes, is democracy work. “Belonging is not an optional add-on—it’s the foundation of democratic participation,” he said. “If we fail at bridging, we leave people isolated and vulnerable to propaganda. But if we succeed, we strengthen the foundations of democracy itself.”

Crossing the mountains

Make the Road Nevada knew it couldn’t call itself a statewide group while only organizing in Las Vegas and Reno. So organizers drove six hours over the mountains to Elko, a rural town where organizing outreach was previously dismal. And that brought unwarranted issues for canvassers as residents, unaware of what people from outside of their small community were doing knocking on their doors, called the police on them. But after negotiating with officers for “permission cards,” they kept knocking.

And what they found surprised them.

“We have more in common with these folks than I thought,” one canvasser admitted after conversations about wages, healthcare, and family.

Through the Bridging for Democracy project, Make the Road rewrote canvassing scripts to slow down, ask questions, and listen. “We weren’t there to persuade people how to vote,” said former Make the Road’s Civic Engagement Director Lalo Montoya “We were there to ask: What do you need to be okay today?”

Those conversations often led back to common ground: the need for decent wages, access to healthcare, and stability for families. Out of that work, Make the Road hired its first rural outreach manager, shaped advocacy around health equity, and planted roots in communities often dismissed as “too red” or “too rural.”

“Belonging isn’t a soft feeling—it’s a hard practice,” said the group’s Deputy Director Blanca Macias. “It’s listening sessions in Elko, pozole dinners in Wendover. It is bridging that cuts through barriers, meeting people where they are, and affirming that their lives matter.”

Long-bridging efforts recently led the group to establish rural hubs in Pahrump and Winnemucca, Nevada where they conducted community assessments to better understand the needs and priorities of rural Nevadans. Grounded in MRNV’s commitment to ensuring that all Nevadans have a direct voice in shaping their community, this effort gathered feedback rooted in residents’ lived experiences regardless of political ideology. They collected more than 300 completed assessments that reflected strong participation across both regions. 

This level of engagement underscores both significant unmet needs and the trust built through long-bridging and sustained relationship-based rural outreach, said Alicia, rural outreach organizer from Winnemucca: “Our community needs assessment allowed us to listen to the real needs of rural residents who are oftentimes overlooked and excluded from decision making processes.” 

Conversations in the rural South

Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) teams ventured into counties where Tea Party and MAGA signs still dotted lawns. There, canvassers listened to people vent Fox News talking points, sometimes for long minutes before trust began to form. These conversations didn’t erase ideological divides, but they disrupted the isolation that authoritarians thrive on.

“That’s where bridging matters,” said Waller. “It isn’t about pretending differences don’t exist. It’s about creating spaces where people can tell the truth about what’s hurting them, be heard with dignity even when we disagree, and then choose concrete action we can take together.”

The pilot’s approach—making space for real listening across differences—Waller said gave them more room to: knock on doors, ask hard questions, and create spaces for people who don’t always agree to still move together.

And real results came from that.

In Columbia, Tennessee, tenants that were canvassed are now building a tenant union. People who might be written off as “too red” or “too rural” are organizing shoulder-to-shoulder with immigrant neighbors, said Waller “because everyone needs the mold cleaned up, the rent stabilized, the leaks fixed.”

Asking Hard Questions, and Congregations in Conflict

The Workers Center for Racial Justice (WCRJ) canvassers—all people of color—took their script into majority-white Wisconsin suburbs with a direct question: How is polarization affecting your relationships? Instead of sparking debate, the honesty disarmed residents. By naming fragmentation, canvassers created space for reflection and vulnerability across entrenched racial lines.

A similar spirit guided Lutheran pastors in Detroit’s suburbs, who turned to the Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), a faith-rooted organization that has long helped congregations confront division. As political tensions spread across their pews, MOSES facilitators piloted café-style dialogues where members from five churches explored their values, divisions, and hopes together.

One site carried particular weight: Livonia. Historically one of the whitest, most segregated suburbs around Detroit, Livonia was long known as a sundown town. 

“My own brother, as a young man, had to pass through for work and lived with that fear. To begin bridging work there was historic,” said Hardaway.

Four all-white congregations—economically and politically diverse—came together. Pastors carefully invited participants, who arrived skeptical and guarded. The café-style setup helped, but trust was still fragile. By the end of the dialogue, though, the atmosphere shifted. People dropped their defenses. One participant admitted: “I had all of you pegged. I was wrong.”

Now organizers are planning deeper conversations and will diversify the room by bringing in various perspectives. 

“Starting in Livonia was a breakthrough, showing that even in communities marked by exclusion, bridging can take root,” Hardaway said. “Creating spaces for honesty are essential practices of bridging for democracy.”

Power building, redefined

While the results and impact of the initiative have so far been a success, some worried bridging would divert resources from “hard” power building—moving issues, winning campaigns. But the pilot suggests the opposite: bridging expands the pool of who can be engaged, strengthening both civic trust and organizing capacity.

For example, Make the Road went from an experiment in Elko to sustained rural organizing, and ICIRR reoriented to include outreach in conservative-leaning immigrant communities. Pastors in Michigan are carrying bridging into wider Lutheran conferences, spreading the practice congregation to congregation. 

More recently, OCCCO organizers in Anaheim are sustaining new points of connection with residents in the wealthier Anaheim Hills neighborhoods, spending weeks knocking on over 2,700 doors and having nearly 300 completed long-bridging conversations. 

“This is long-term work that can create transformational relationships. But it doesn’t happen overnight,” said OCCCO Lead Organizer Blandy Morales. “Sharing our personal stories and finding similarities builds a healthy curiosity that can be healing for other people and even ourselves.”

To create a community and feedback loop for organizers, OBI and its partners have also developed a full toolkit—10-hour canvasser training, facilitator guides, survey instruments, and data protocols—so other organizations can replicate the approach. 

A growing “community of practice” now meets monthly to share experiences and draw lessons.

“This is real on the ground work that organizers are doing in communities that often aren’t engaged,” said OBI Field Strategy and Research Analyst Mansi Kathuria. “So we want to continue to create spaces for dialogue to grow, learn and bridge together in this work that has shown a proof of concept for success in such a short amount of time.”

Continued courage and curiosity

The urgency of this work cannot be overstated, said OBI Director john a. powell. Around the world, democracies are faltering under authoritarian pressures. Leaders have eroded institutions by exploiting division and manufacturing enemies. In the U.S., we see echoes of the same strategy: narrowing voting rights, criminalizing protest, censoring schools, demonizing migrants.

“Bridging is not a cure-all," said powell. “But it is an inoculation. It makes authoritarian stories harder to sell because it restores people’s experience of shared humanity. When residents who disagree politically have felt truly heard by one another, it becomes harder for demagogues to convince them that democracy is a zero-sum fight for domination.”

And for the retiree in Anaheim, the canvasser’s knock was a reminder that democracy isn’t just ballots and institutions—it’s people showing up for one another across divides. For Lorena P., it was proof that courage and curiosity can soften suspicion, even in the hardest conversations.

Hope, in this sense, is not sentimental. It is strategic. In an era when authoritarianism feeds on despair and cynicism, hope becomes resistance.

“I’ve canvassed for 10 years, and these conversations felt different,” Lorena said. “When we see each other as people, concern and fear goes away and we can bridge across our differences. There is power in that.”

Want to learn more about these long-bridging efforts? Tune in Thursday, Feb. 5 at 9:30am PT for a livestream panel discussion featuring organizers from OCCCO sharing their experiences of canvassing in the Anaheim Hills of California in conversation with MOSES and OBI. Register here for free.