In this episode, we speak with Sharon Dunn and Gwen Johnson — two members of Hands Across the Hills (HATH), a grassroots group working to build bridges between communities in rural Western Massachusetts and in the Eastern Kentucky coal country. Formed in the wake of the 2016 election, this group seeks to build empathy and unity between diverging perspectives through structured dialogue and cultural exchange. Sharon and Gwen share their experiences and the lessons they draw, illuminating how a breaking dynamic can shift to bridging — and move towards belonging — through deep conversation, care, and resiliency.
This episode of Who Belongs? is part of a new series of podcasts focused on telling bridging stories. Throughout the series we’ll talk to leaders implementing bridging work and individuals who have experienced the bridging transformation. This project is led by OBI’s Blueprint for Belonging project (B4B), and today's episode is hosted by OBI Summer Fellow Nicole Li. Read the case study written by Li here.
Transcript:
Erfan Moradi:
Hey listeners, Erfan here, one of the producers of Who Belongs. We have a treat for you today—another installment of the Bridging to Belonging miniseries. This time hosted by Nicole Li. Our podcast feed has been quiet, sorry for that, but we're hard at work on our other miniseries, Cultures of Care. We'll have episode three of that show out soon. In the meantime, enjoy this episode.
Gwen Johnson:
We don't have an aversion to science. We know about climate change and all that, but at the end of the day, if you can't feed and clothe the children, who cares about all that? If you're living in squalor, the prognosis is not good for you and your family anyway.
Nicole Li:
Welcome to today's episode of a new subseries of the podcast Who Belongs. The Othering and Belonging Institute is developing a series of podcasts to capture examples of bridging to belonging. We want a world where everyone belongs. So how do we get there? The answer: bridging. Throughout the series, we will talk to leaders implementing the work and individuals who have experienced the bridging transformation.
My name is Nicole Li, an undergraduate student at Yale University and a summer fellow at OBI. I'll be hosting today's episode. Today I'll be speaking with Sharon Dunn and Gwen Johnson. Sharon and Gwen are both board members of Hands Across the Hills, a grassroots group working to bridge ideological and political divides among residents of rural Western Massachusetts and Eastern Kentucky coal country.
Founded in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Hands Across the Hills formed out of a desire to meet face-to-face with people from a community that voted differently in an attempt to better understand each other. Sharon is from Leverett, Massachusetts, a town of 1,800 that voted 85% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Gwen lives more than 800 miles away in Letcher County, Kentucky, a county of 20,000 in Central Appalachia that voted 80% for Donald Trump in 2016.
You may wonder: how can folks from two distinct communities begin to bridge with each other? Together, Sharon and Gwen will share more about Hands Across the Hills' unique approach to bridging across ideological and political divides through intentional dialogue.
Nicole Li:
Sharon and Gwen, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. To start the conversation, can you briefly introduce yourselves?
Sharon Dunn:
Hi, I'm Sharon Dunn. I live in Leverett, Massachusetts. I've been part of Hands Across the Hills since it started in 2017, and I'm a poet and a nonfiction writer. In my former life, before I retired, I was a businesswoman like Gwen.
Gwen Johnson:
I'm Gwen Johnson and I am sitting here in Hemphill Community Center, which is a community center in Central Appalachia. We're in Jackhorn, Kentucky and I was raised here and I'm still here—like eight generations deep roots. So we've been here forever and a day. There are about 600 people in my community and I'm a volunteer manager of Black Sheep Bakery. Black Sheep Bakery is a social enterprise owned by Hemphill Community Center, which is my heart work. We work with folks giving them second chance employment coming out of incarceration, and we produce some very yummy things to eat.
Nicole Li:
Great. Thank you so much for introducing yourselves. Could you give our listeners a brief background of the origin of Hands Across the Hills? What sort of problems did you see that inspired the formation of your group?
Sharon Dunn:
Well, I'd say that the origin in Leverett had to do with the reaction to the 2016 election. A group of people formed that were really interested in bridging and really trying to understand why the election had gone the way it had. People were mystified, people were befuddled, people were really searching and wanting to understand. We wanted to reach out and connect and begin to hopefully understand the other part of our nation that we didn't understand. So that was really it in Leverett. What about you, Gwen?
Gwen Johnson:
Well, there was a guy living here who was from Connecticut, and his name's Ben Fink. He had come here as a community organizer to organize something that we call the Letcher County Culture Hub. Hemphill Community Center and Black Sheep Bakery are partners in the Letcher County Culture Hub.
So Ben had written a piece for Moyers that was published, and a man by the name of Jay Frost up in Leverett at the time—I don't think he lives there now, but he lived in Leverett at the time—had drafted an email and sent it to Ben. Ben was and is a far left liberal, and he was living down here in Trump country. Not everybody here voted for Trump, but almost everybody did. Just as in Leverett, almost everybody voted for Hillary Clinton. But when I got up there, there were folks who approached me who voted for Trump up there too, but it was about 80-some percent in the opposite direction in each community.
So they went about 80-some percent for Clinton, and our neck of the woods went about 80-some percent for Trump. We had this almost balanced number of folks who had voted on opposite sides of the aisle. So it made for an interesting thing. But Jay had drafted that email as one liberal, if I may, to another liberal, and then Ben read that aloud at a Culture Hub meeting. There were folks around the table who burst into tears because emotions were really high, and there were folks around the table who did not vote for Trump. There was just—well, you all remember the climate then? I mean, it was rather chaotic here too.
We were kind of mystified that it turned out the way it did. I thought it was another "save the dumb hillbillies" ploy that we've had for decades, because we've been painted as ignorant and barefooted and lazy people and inhospitable. So I thought it was some more of that, but I'm willing to talk to anybody about what I think or what the constituency here thinks.So after the email was drafted and heavily vetted to make sure that everybody's thoughts had input into it, it was sent back to Jay Frost wanting to know more. And then that's how the ball got rolling with more emails and then eventually a trip to Leverett, Massachusetts in a 15-passenger van with 11 of us and all of our luggage and some moonshine and gifts for our hosts and that sort of thing. We were about 15 hours on the road going to Massachusetts and arrived there really late at night, maybe 10:30 or 11, not knowing what we were driving into. So it was pretty interesting, but I'll give anything a try.
Sharon Dunn:
Yes. And when they arrived—the Kentuckians—what I found was that we had spent many weeks preparing. Everyone was going to be having what we call a homestay, and so this gave an opportunity for everybody who was visiting us to live with a family, live with somebody who was in Hands Across the Hills of Leverett.
Even in advance, we had had a film show at the library that the whole community could come to that showed some of the films from Appalshop about coal mining and about how folks in Kentucky had been represented in the media. So we were sensitized to that and understood what they had been facing for so long.
What had been planned was a three-day visit, and that included an art project and then dialogue circles—several of those—and theater games. We had invited the community to come and meet everybody and be able to understand what we were attempting with Hands Across the Hills. We put out 35 chairs, and before you knew it, we had 200 people in the school auditorium. We did not realize the interest of our community in trying to understand what had happened in America in the voting process.
When we had our trip going down to Letcher County—was about a year later, Gwen, or maybe six months later?
Gwen Johnson:
It was.
Sharon Dunn:
Yeah, again, we were put up in people's homes and got a chance to meet people in their community like at a Shriners breakfast we went to where we presented what was going on with us. So I think one of the things that we tried to do is spend as much time as possible together—talking in informal conversations in the car as well as in dialogue circles to begin to become hopefully friends.
Nicole Li:
Thank you so much for talking about how Hands Across the Hills got started. Now that both of you have suggested that the issue was significant political polarization after the 2016 election, your solution was that one community should travel to the other community and experience a different lifestyle firsthand. I was wondering if you could elaborate more on the intentions behind your group's specific approach to bridging. So why travel and experience that face-to-face encounter and immersion in a different community?
Gwen Johnson: I think it's very important to look into people's eyes—and I know that culturally sometimes that's not possible, but with these two communities, it was possible—to hear the stories that were told in those dialogue circles about our lives, the differences in our lives, to look into each other's eyes. I can't remember who said it, but someone from Leverett—and Sharon might remember who said—that before we arrived, we were cardboard cutouts in their mind. You remember when that was said, Sharon?Sharon Dunn:
Yes, yes.
Gwen Johnson:
And then after we arrived, we were no longer that. I think maybe in hindsight we all kind of had some of that. I knew there were going to be class differences and all those things that happen that are unavoidable with the differences in worldview and religion and education and all the things that make such a difference in folks and the way that they form their worldview or the lens that they look through.
I knew that that was going to be probably real eye-opening, but I was not at all prepared for how eye-opening it was for us. And I believe for the folks in Leverett as well, there was a man that was at the—he was not a part of the Hands Across the Hills group, but he was someone who attended the assembly on Saturday when we went up there. And he told me at the lunch table that he almost fell off his chair when I said the reason the vote went the way it did in our communities here in the mountains was because of jobs. And he said that he didn't think we wanted to work.
So that's the stereotyping that the media has caused. That was some of the fallout from decades and decades of, I believe, journalists and videographers coming into these mountain communities and wanting to work maybe an eight-to-four, a nine-to-five day when most of the productive citizens were at work. The only ones they could get to talk to them were the folks who were not productive citizens. And so then as a result, we got stereotyped. It's just my thoughts on that.
Sharon Dunn:
What I saw was that we had in Leverett gotten together and we really wanted to be face-to-face and really heart-to-heart, to be able to talk to folks who had voted very differently than us. We really, really wanted to understand. Subsequently, it's so interesting—people would come up to us even a year later, a month later and say, "Did you change their vote?" And we finally said it was not about changing the vote, it was about trying to understand what caused the vote. What were the reasons behind it? You have to realize that that's the underpinning of all this.
The idea that our folks had up in Leverett was to construct—it was really a three-day weekend. It had dialogue circles, it had some theater games, it had a little art project having to do with our families that actually started off our first dialogue circle so that we could talk about our families, which is something we all have in common—our family stories.
We even had a public meeting where we invited the Leverett community and the broader community to come. I remember Gwen, you spoke to everyone at that meeting in the elementary school gym, and people were afterwards clustered around you to meet in the little tiny chairs in the little cafeteria later on.
The idea all along was to have a return visit for us in Leverett to visit you all in Letcher County. And we did that about six months later I think it was. That was an amazing visit for me. I had never been to Kentucky. I had never seen a holler. I had never seen a mountaintop cut off to be mined. I had never been inside a mine before because we took a little tour of a closed mine. All along we had dialogue circles where we just talked heart-to-heart and began to understand each other.
Nicole Li:
You described these dialogue circles and the intention was to just understand why people voted the way they did, not necessarily trying to change anyone's vote. With that goal in mind, how do facilitators enforce that or make everyone cognizant of that expectation? How do they structure the discussions—the dialogue circles—in a way that welcomes all perspectives and minimizes conflict?
Sharon Dunn:
Well, I remember that at the very beginning, Gwen, I'm sure you remember this too, there were ground rules that were set out at the very beginning of a civil conversation. When something happened to be able to say "ouch" about it, to not shuffle things under the carpet. There was also confidentiality—that was one of the ground rules so that our stories weren't going to be taken outside the circle. So the idea was to create a really safe place for emotions to be able to come out and to be shared.
Nicole Li:
Thank you so much for explaining how the dialogue circles were able to be successful. I imagine that going into those dialogues, people probably had assumptions or biases about the other party. So from your experiences or from just what you've heard from the other participants, could you share some of those assumptions or biases or stereotypes that people held but perhaps were dissolved once people started talking to each other?
Gwen Johnson: I was worried that they couldn't forgive me for voting for Trump. But after Hillary Clinton went to West Virginia and said—she said a lot of other things, but she said she was going to put the coal miners out of work—I couldn't vote for her. I fully intended to vote for her, but I couldn't. I knew what that was going to mean for us.When the bottom dropped out of the coal industry, it was a really dark night of the soul for us here in the mountains. We had already been hit by the opioid crisis that had just torn apart the very fabric of our community. And then all the people who were productive citizens were suddenly out of work, even the service jobs, because if people have no money then they're not frequenting restaurants or any entertainment venues or any of those things.
It was just the darkest time ever. And I knew what that was going to mean for us. There was nothing else it could mean for us. And so I couldn't vote for her. But then I worried when I climbed in that van that when I got to Massachusetts, these people were going to tar and feather us up there. But I was like, "Okay, they want to hear why this happened. I can tell them why this happened." And so I went.
The guy who drafted the email that was sent initially that got the ball rolling—he said something pretty profound to me about the differences. The folks in Leverett had done a lot of reading about Appalachia before we got there, and Sharon can talk more about that, but they had stacks of books. I was amazed at the preparation that they had done for us to be there.
But Jay Frost said something really that I just marveled at. I was like, "Well, that's really cool." He said in some of his readings that he had drawn the conclusion that when we went to Leverett, that the folks up in that area would try to impress you when you went to visit them. And that when they came to visit us, we were just trying to make sure that their basic needs were met. And he said that it was just a difference in the culture—the two cultures.
When I thought about that, we were impressed when we got to Leverett because there's a vast difference in the mean income of the two places and many different differences. When they came to visit us, we were just trying to make sure they were fed and warm and comfortable and well taken care of. We just wanted to see to them really well, and they saw to us really well, but they saw to us in a much more extravagant way than we live usually, if that makes any sense.Sharon Dunn:
I wasn't aware of all that, Gwen. So this is really interesting to me. Jay never shared that particular thought with me, but I was thinking that one of the ideas behind a three-day weekend and that kind of immersion—the idea was that we would stay in each other's homes, that we would sit around the kitchen table over breakfast, that we would have chances to talk in the car as we were going back and forth to various activities or field trips or whatever we were doing.
As a way to just instead of always being in a dialogue circle, to have all these other kinds of just regular family get-together moments and to be able to have our hair down and relax with one another. I think that was an important part of the kinds of visits that were constructed. There have been two visits to Leverett and so far one visit to Whitesburg in Letcher County, and we're hoping for more visits in the future.
Gwen Johnson:
Our county is in the red right now with COVID. Our numbers are really high and there's some reasons for that, but we don't want them to be at risk. And so we're hopeful that another visit can take place before very long.
Sharon Dunn:
COVID really has changed how we've been able to interact in the past two and a half years. We've had to go with Zoom, and Zoom is not—I think your internet connections are not always so great down in Kentucky, it's true for the most part. And that's been a problem for some individuals who are part of the Kentucky contingent. It's just hard. It's just different being on Zoom than it is really being together, seeing each other really there. But we'll get through it.
Gwen Johnson:
We will.
Erfan Moradi:
Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
If you like what you're listening to, check out our sibling show Uncommon Threads, a podcast from the Democracy and Belonging Forum where you'll hear from leading thinkers and practitioners working to build better democracies, even when faced with disagreement. You can find that show by searching for Uncommon Threads wherever you listen to podcasts. Now, back to the show.
Nicole Li:
So then, after both of you participated in those dialogue circles and those weekend gatherings, how successful would you say you have found the Hands Across the Hills experiment? How helpful do you think the dialogue circles were in terms of fostering an authentic sense of belonging and inclusion among all the participants?
Sharon Dunn:
I'd say that what happened in the dialogue circles really did help us see each other as real individuals, not as voters of a blue or red cast—really people. So that's huge. That's probably the achievement, I would say.
In addition to that, the other thing that we started doing is we started working together on different kinds of projects where we would share how we could discuss things in a civil way. When you and Jay, I think, did columns that were about vaccines, they got published both in newspapers up in the Pioneer Valley and down in Letcher County. So two different voices about believing in vaccines or not.
We had at least two Zoom events where a lot of people joined us. And Gwen, you were there with I think Kip and Pat and Mike Gover and there were others. It was like, "Do we trust the government?" That was one of the questions.
Gwen Johnson:
No, we do not.
Sharon Dunn:
Right? I know. And I think it was guns and abortion.
Gwen Johnson:
Guns, coal, and abortion.
Sharon Dunn:
Right, and guns, yes. And it was all about people being able to discuss things and really listen to each other instead of not listening and just barreling ahead. Those were really well-attended Zoom events. More and more participatory events like that helped spread the work that we're doing.
Gwen Johnson:
I traveled to Leverett last weekend and I got this phone call and it was in a really joking manner that said, "Gwen, don't forget to take your gun out of your handbag." I said, "Okay, thanks for the reminder."
Sharon Dunn:
Well, Gwen, you should really tell the story of when we were down in Harlan County, I think it was at a lunchtime, and you and Kip went at it. Kip from Leverett and you from Hemphill.
Gwen Johnson:
Yeah. So we had went to Portal 31, which is kind of a sanitized coal mining experience, such as Sharon talked about a while ago—going in mines that had been closed. And so afterward we went to lunch at the Benham Schoolhouse Inn over there, and it was on a Sunday afternoon and it was—we're in the Bible belt, so it was after church, and there were a lot of little demure ladies in cardigan sweaters in there eating their lunch.
Kip says something about guns at the lunch table. And I just looked around the room and I said, "Well, Kip, there's probably 20 guns in here." And he said, "What? There's not 20 guns in here." And I said, "I'd venture to say there are." And he said, "Where are they?" And I said, "They're in the purses of these little ladies eating their lunch after church."
And he went off. There was this difference between myself and Kip, and most of the people that I know around here: Kip felt safer when nobody had a gun. And I felt safer when everybody had one. And so I said, "But Kip, don't freak out because there's not going to be anybody wounded, and surely there won't be anybody killed here today." I said, "I'd venture to say everybody's as safe as in their mother's arms in here." And I said, "And by the way, there's a gun sitting in that bag right there at your foot." My bag was right in the floor by his foot, and he about freaked out. And I said, "But it's inanimate. It's not going to shoot you on its own. It's an inanimate object."
Yeah, I mean we went at it, it got pretty heated and I was really wanting to—oh my God, he can argue really well and I can too. So we got really heated and Jim Perkins was sitting at the table and I heard Jim say under his breath, he said, "There are warrior people." He was talking about us.
I thought it was hilarious. So then we go back in and we're sitting down to have another dialogue circle, and Kip said, "Gwen Johnson and I just had a knockdown drag-out at the lunch table." And Herbie Smith was sitting beside him and Herbie just jumped around and looked at him and said, "Did she pull a gun on you?" He said, "No."
So that's kind of how things have evolved, that we can laugh about these things. I mean, I do take their viewpoint into account when I'm thinking about things, whereas I used to not. And it's just because we're friends and I know what matters to them. And I think on the flip side of the coin, I think you can speak to that, Sharon. I think you guys probably do that too somewhat. Things are not as cut and dried for any of us anymore, or black and white if you will. There's some gray areas now that I didn't have before.
Sharon Dunn:
That's right. I think we've all changed. I say that we've all gotten grayer. Our eyes have widened and so have our hearts really.
Nicole Li:
Amazing. Well, it's really interesting to hear that despite learning about these culture shocks, whether some people think guns make them safer, some people disagree, you guys both came out of those dialogue circles as friends. And so that's really amazing to hear. Did a lot of participants feel that they left those dialogue circles with a different perspective than they had going in? So I know that the intention was not to change votes or change people's opinions on any issues, but did most people feel like they gained a very different worldview after participating in those circles?
Sharon Dunn:
There are a couple of instances that come to my mind of things that happened both in the dialogue circles and elsewhere. Gwen, tell me if you remember this too. There was an instance where in our very first dialogue circle about family, two of our folks in Leverett told Holocaust stories because their parents had left Europe and they told their stories. And because when you tell a Holocaust story, these women cried because it was really a difficult thing that their families had gone through and they had arrived here.
One of the responses from folks in Kentucky was, "Oh, you are actually immigrants." Just like Gwen said, she was from eight generations of people who've been rooted in Kentucky. That's not true of folks in Leverett at all. My people all came over in the mid-to-late 1800s, much later than Gwen. And the folks in the dialogue circle whose parents had left, I think Germany and Russia, they came over in the thirties.Somebody in the Kentucky group said, "I'm meeting you—you are immigrants. And I was kind of taught not to trust immigrants, that they were dangerous and they were going to take things from us, but here, your families are immigrants. And so my view about that has changed. My view has changed." I guess the definition of immigrant definitely changed.
The folks in Leverett learned a lot more about coal mining. Back in the time of World War I, coal being extracted from the Kentucky Earth helped win the war. And that's something that coal miners were extremely proud of. There had been an exemption in order they could stay and extract this coal, which helped the war effort. That's something that we hadn't realized. We hadn't realized the amount of pride that went into being a coal mining family. Those are two examples of information that opened our minds.Gwen Johnson:
There was a really tense time for me in one of the dialogues when we were discussing coal. And it was early on and there was no understanding of the things that Sharon is speaking of now. And it got pretty intense. And there were some judgmental comments about coal and the environment.
We don't have an aversion to science. We know what the science is. We know about climate change and carbon emissions and all that. We know about all that. We're not disregarding it. But at the end of the day, if you can't feed and clothe the children, who cares about all that? If you're living in squalor and living in abject poverty, I mean the prognosis is not good for you and your family anyway, health outcomes or otherwise.
And so if you are sitting in a place where that is the thing that you're more worried about than any other thing, the carbon emissions and the climate change and that sort of thing, well then you're vastly better off than a lot of people around here are. And so I think that too was a chasm, if you will, between the two cultures. And it's not that we don't know about it and don't care about it, it's just that it takes a back burner when everybody's out of work.
Sharon Dunn:
Gwen, I could remember listening to that explanation that you've just given. Later on when I was in some kind of public thing and somebody asked me a question, a young man said, "Well, don't they know about carbon emissions and what's happening to the planet?" And I delivered back to him just what you just said. When you are worried about food on the table and shoes on your kid's feet, those are the things you're worried about. And you want to have a job that's going to help you deal with that.
It's really interesting that people have to be told that. The imagination isn't there for how circumstances could be different in another place in the country.
Gwen Johnson:
Yeah, coal has not been kind to us, but it was the only industry in a mono economy. My mom had three brothers that were killed in mining accidents and my only brother, my younger brother, was killed in a coal mining accident.
And so we've had our share of heartbreak and blood, sweat and tears, but it was still the way that families lived here because it was the only industry. And it's been a pretty dark night of the soul for us since the coal industry took a big downturn because all of our infrastructure and all of our public services were based on severance taxes, and suddenly there was no coal to mine. And so all that money went away and there was nothing to replace it.
So services got shut down and there was all kinds of fallout from it. And it's kind of how Black Sheep Bakery came about—we were trying to figure out how to employ some people as cheaply as possible. And there's nothing cheaper than flour and water and salt. And so we just started, we set up shop baking.
I mean, in a lot of ways the gravy train is kind of how I explained the coal industry. When it rolled out of here, we just had to envision—we had to look at latent assets and try to envision a different way forward. And has it been easy? Heck no. It's not been easy. It's been hard and it's still hard. And it's maybe going to get harder as the pandemic goes on, who knows? But yeah, it's been pretty heartbreaking to watch.
Nicole Li:
Thank you for sharing those stories. In almost all of our interviews, we've heard that bridging is really difficult. Could you share any challenges that you've experienced attempting this bridging work? How have you had to navigate moments of frustration when you talk to people who disagree with you? And also, despite those challenges, why do you think bridging is worth the investment—worth doing?
Sharon Dunn:
I'd say that the time and effort both Gwen and I have put in over these years—for me, it's been a transformative experience. I'm not the same. I view Kentucky so differently than I might have six, seven years ago before we got involved with one another.
I remember early on after the folks in Letcher County had gone back to Letcher County after our first visit, we got an email from Nell Fields and she said she was keeping watch on the weather in Leverett. And I just loved that there was this kind of connection of even wanting to know what we were experiencing on a daily basis. And that's a form of love really. And I think things like that have happened continually.There have been—I know somebody was helping Nell doing a little coaching when she took a chair on a board down in Whitesburg. And there's been trips that people have taken together, a Kentucky person and a Leverett person to have new experiences. Like Gwen actually had a wonderful experience that way in travel. You could talk about that. The friendships have blossomed out of the contact that we've kept on over these six years.
Gwen Johnson: Yeah, the experience that Sharon was referring to—I got an invitation to go to France and work in a French bakery for two weeks from Susan, who's part of the Hands Across the Hills delegation.And then there have been things like Kip and Judy—we talked about Kip and I having these dialogues on Zoom about coal, guns and abortion. And then Judy sends a big library down here to be—we've got these little free libraries outside that people can come and leave books or take books. And Judy has donated hundreds of books to those libraries.
And there've just been a lot of benefits that we didn't count on happening that have happened. We had a solar project and we got solar on top of our building and solar in three other locations in the county. And the folks in Leverett donated toward those projects because of course they didn't want us to use coal and they were all about us using solar. And so when we proposed those projects, they were happy to contribute to that.
And just to sit around the table together and to get to know each other's culture a little bit and to get to know the families and what's going on with them. And so I got friends in Leverett that I check up with every week, and Sharon and I work closely together both on the Hands Across the Hills board. And so we're in touch pretty much every week on something or other. Like this morning I just emailed her for some addresses and right away I got them.
And we've got cheerleaders now—cheerleaders that we didn't have. When we've got efforts going on or things happening, we're checking on them, they're checking on us. It's invaluable. It's family. When things that are pretty monumental happen here—and one thing that comes to mind is the Blackjewel miners have been denied their pay and they blocked the coal train and picketed on the tracks of the train for weeks and weeks. And so when that news hit the newsfeed, I forwarded it to Leverett, and we had a cheering section in Leverett for the miners.
And just whatever's going on here is of interest to those folks in Leverett now, and whatever's going on up there is of interest to us. There's so many of them that are Jewish. And when some antisemitic violent act happens, my first thought is, "Oh my goodness, how are they? Are they okay?" And we send condolences back and forth.
I lost my mom and was showered with so much kindness from Leverett. Nell had COVID and they sent money and Black Sheep Bakery catered meals to Nell's house. And I mean, there's just been so many wonderful things that have come about because of these friendships.
Nicole Li: For listeners who may be interested in implementing Hands Across the Hills' bridging strategy in their own community, what is your advice on how they can get started? Can you outline the suggestions that you would give to people who are embarking on this type of bridging work for the first time?Sharon Dunn:
Two things come to mind. First, you really need to find a principal person on what you might call the other side who can be helpful in organizing that community. You have to have somebody who encourages and gathers people to form a group that you can bridge with. That's one thing.
The other is that we in Hands Across the Hills have actually begun doing trainings where participants come and learn how to do dialogue circles and how to organize. So that's another possibility—you can actually have a project in mind and come get some training about how to maintain a project that will really work and will really bridge to another community or another place. We held one last October and we're going to be holding another one in Spring 2023.
Gwen Johnson:
I think you have to have a strong facilitator who will hold the space in a safe manner, because things get difficult really quickly if the space is not being held properly. The ground rules that we spoke of early on are really important to be able to say, "Oops, there are going to be things that wound and hurt." I think just a simple apology or trying harder to understand when that happens goes a long way with participants.
I know it did with me when I would feel so wounded initially, and then I would think, "Well, they didn't mean it. They just don't understand." You have to give each other that room and that permission to air those differences and not stay wounded. You don't want to be a victim because then nobody wins. But if you just say, "Well, I'm not a victim in this and I'm going to try harder to understand what made them say that, and they're going to try harder not to hurt my feelings because they don't understand it," it all works out in the end. I think that's what's happened to us. You just have to keep talking. You can't throw in the towel when it gets hard.
Nicole Li:
That was Sharon Dunn and Gwen Johnson. Thank you so much for your time. And to our listeners, please check out our other podcasts where we discuss belonging and bridging in more detail. For more resources and curricula on belonging and bridging, please go to belonging.berkeley.edu/b4b. That's slash letter B, number 4, letter B.
