PACE Executive Director Kristen Cambell interviewed Andrew Hanauer, CEO of the One America Movement, a national nonprofit that works to confront toxic polarization and division by equipping faith communities to work together across political, racial, and religious divides to solve problems that matter.

In the conversation, Hanauer discusses the risk that toxic polarization poses to Americans’ ability to work toward justice and make real progress on issues affecting their communities. He also delves into how the patient, long-term work of bridging can counteract that toxicity and build more resilient and understanding communities.

Q: What would you hope that funders would understand about bridging work? How might you encourage them to think about their role and their place in this space?

Someone recently talked about it like this: “It’s not a game, it’s a garden.” By that I mean that this isn’t something we’re going to win this year or next year. It’s about building ongoing resilience to toxicity, and that means that, as long-term work, it’s not always going to be the most exciting, most pressing thing on your agenda. But if we don’t do it, we get what we’ve seen happen over the last couple of years.

People want shortcuts. They want an app. They want a Facebook policy change. They want an ad campaign that’s going to reach a hundred million people at the Super Bowl and somehow depolarize them…This work takes patience, and it requires something different than having the sleek new thing that you’re going to put out there that will magically change the world. I think we need to make sure that [this understanding is] embedded into our theory of how we make change on this issue.

Read the full article about building community resiliency by Andrew Hanauer at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.