Giving Compass' Take:

• The Mission Continues transcribes a speech from MSNBC host Chris Hayes at a recent organization event, in which he calls for more people to get together to help their communities.

• Giving time not only can make us feel good, but it can expand our perspectives and foster better understanding. Which opportunities are we embracing in this area?

• If you're having trouble allocating time for volunteering, try out our tool Giving Planner for help.

You can talk all you want. Talk about race, you can talk about criminal justice, you can talk about war and peace, you can talk about civilian-military divide. You can talk about all the divisions in American life, and you can talk yourself blue in the face, and I do that all day, on Twitter, constantly.

But civil society actually gets constructed through collective action and collective action is action, is DOING. The most important thing that we’re lacking in America right now, as a means of repairing what is broken in civil society, is not platforms with which to talk to each other. It is not communication and it is not conversation. It is not a better discourse. That’s all there! Everybody in this room can talk to everybody they know, at an instant, at any time.

What we don’t have are opportunities to do things together.

There are precious few formalized methods by which we can get together with our neighbors, with fellow citizens, with people from different backgrounds, with people with different life experiences, with different political perspectives, with different worldviews, with different reads on the issues and simply breathe next to each other, labor next to each other, do together with each other. That is a preciously rare commodity in American life.

There are preciously few opportunities to do that, and it is what makes I think the work The Mission Continues does so particular and so inspiring and so important, specifically.

Read the full article about MSNBC's Chris Hayes' remarks about collective action by Abigail Pope-Brooks at Mission Continues Blog.