• Impact Story
  • May 11, 2026

Impact Story: Belonging in Action

OBI’s Places of Belonging program supports community efforts to rebuild trust, share power, and create systems where everyone belongs.
  • Impact Story
  • April 30, 2026

Impact story: Creating belonging through arts and culture

Othering and Belonging Institute’s Resident Cultural Strategist, and UC Berkeley lecturer, Chelsea Gregory has devoted her life to weaving art, culture, and justice together to create spaces of belonging
  • Impact Story
  • April 2, 2026

Impact Story: At first I struggled with bridging, then it gave me new energy

Long time Detroit organizer Ponsella Hardaway on church-rooted power, regional bridges, and why this moment demands conversations across the aisle
  • Impact Story
  • March 12, 2026

Impact Story: Hard conversations can help us bridge toward a bigger “we”

Lawrence Benito, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, on bridging tensions in Chicago and why democracy depends on it.
  • Impact Story
  • February 26, 2026

Impact Story: Belonging isn’t a soft feeling - it’s a hard practice

Make the Road Nevada Deputy Director Blanca Macias: “People often ask why bridging matters in a time of deep division. My answer is simple: because democracy will collapse if we only talk to “our people.”
  • Impact Story
  • February 10, 2026

Impact Story: Learning to bridge before I had the words for it

Orange County organizer Blandy Morales traces her journey from fighting for community space as a child in Fullerton to building bridges and cultivating belonging in the same neighborhood today.
  • Impact Story
  • February 2, 2026

Impact Story: Power of Bridging in Action

Othering and Belonging Institute’s Bridging for Democracy project, a coalition of grassroots organizations across the country, started listening to people. What they are finding is an antidote to authoritarianism.
  • Impact Story
  • August 28, 2025

Impact Story: Bridging in the biosciences by building a better environment

When Caroline Williams thinks about ecosystems, she doesn’t just picture insects pollinating flowers or birds feeding on seeds. She imagines people—students and faculty, scientists and staff—woven together in networks of support and care. “In an...
  • Impact Story
  • August 21, 2025

Impact Story: Renewing my commitment to the power of connection

Curious to see if the fellowship had the same effect on others in my cohort, I asked five fellows how the program impacted their beliefs, purposes, and futures.
  • Impact Story
  • July 23, 2025

Impact Story: How OBI's conference helped me to tell my story

*Note: The author's name was changed to protect their identity amid the ongoing repression targeting student activists. Gathering is a form of disruption. Being in a space of community and love, you disrupt societal norms that reflect apparatus and...
  • Impact Story
  • June 16, 2025

Impact Story: How Targeted Universalism Is Bringing Equity to Chicago's Public Schools

Chicago Public Schools former equity chief Maurice Swinney explains the transformative power of TU and the importance of listening to our young people
  • Impact Story
  • May 12, 2025

Impact Story: What belonging looks like in data

Co-founder of Conscious Community Connectors, Fatima Elkott shares how OBI's recent North American Equity Data convening has impacted them. This is an excerpt of Elkott's first-person narrative which was initially published in full on May 7 here. I...
  • Impact Story
  • April 10, 2025

Impact Story: How libraries can serve as places of belonging

The calluses and scars on Shamichael Hallman’s hands serve as lasting reminders of the frigid Alabama winters he spent as a 20-year-old logger, cutting and bundling 20-foot cedar logs in a Birmingham lumber yard—timber destined to build homes. “I’d...
  • Impact Story
  • February 7, 2023

Impact Story: Making Democracy Better in Oregon

Editor's note: This article belongs to our Impact Stories series in which scholars, activists, artists, policymakers, and everyday people share their experiences putting OBI's research and principles into action in their communities. -- When we first...
  • Impact Story
  • February 1, 2023

Impact Story: Puerto Rico's Energy Insurrection

Editor's note: This article belongs to our Impact Stories series in which scholars, activists, artists, policymakers, and everyday people share their experiences putting OBI's research and principles into action in their communities. -- A couple...

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  • Newsletters

E-Newsletter Archive

An Archive of past issues of our bi-weekly newsletter.
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  • May 20, 2026, 16:00 - 18:00 UTC / 9:00am - 11:00am PT

Worldmaking in Motion

Join an interactive online workshop exploring the political economies and geographies of climate-related (im)mobilities and environmental injustices. Through a series of global maps, we will collectively examine how climate change, extraction, supply chains, migration, displacement, dispossession, environmental harm and global inequality intersect across space.
  • Blog
  • September 2, 2025

Our policy on publishing blog & opinion pieces

Consistent with our mission and values, as a multi-disciplinary research center that seeks to advance a world of belonging without othering, the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) conducts research, develops narrative strategy, and supports...