Reflections on the Bridging Summit 2025

By: Allison Ralph

Late last month, I was privileged to attend the first-ever in-person Bridging Summit convened by the Listen First Project. Several hundred folks gathered from across the US to learn from one another, discuss the state of the field, and deepen our friendships all on the beautiful grounds of George Washington’s Mount Vernon home outside of DC. It was a great time.

I’m in a lot of “cross-difference” gatherings, including trans-partisan pro-democracy spaces, “pluralism” gatherings, and multi-faith settings. The biggest thing that stood out to me about the gathering was the buzz of excitement.

The bridging field is relatively new as a field of practice. Rooted in contact theory, bridging “brings together people and perspectives that are disconnected or divided to cultivate understanding, trust, and productive disagreement that can lead to collaborative problem solving and a way forward together.” The field has been growing over the last decade in response to the deeply divided, bitterly polarized, and anxious politics of our times. The Listen First Project now names 500 organizations as coalition members.

Folks have been building organizations, testing out strategies on the ground in hundreds of diverse local situations, and building a community of practice that is tailor made for this political moment…

If it can scale.

And that’s a huge challenge. Bridging is, for the most part, personal, relationship-driven, and challenging. It is, therefore, expensive. It’s also neither possible nor wise to scale a process that works in one location across a wide area. And for those reasons, funders are increasingly hesitant to pay significant funds into the field.

Bridging also has a wider PR problem. Most folks, if they know it all, reduce it to the first part of the definition: to “bring together people and perspectives that are disconnected or divided to cultivate understanding, trust, and productive disagreement.” In other words, “make friends and forgive grievances.” Although dialogue-only efforts generally have small positive effects, they are rarely widely transformational. They can also unintentionally undermine activist efforts (see my paper on the interplay between activism and bridging here).

Anecdotally, some folks at the Democracy Funders Network were giving a lot of side-eye to those who support this kind of work for all those reasons. For example, a recent article by David Callahan at Inside Philanthropy argues that, sure, “bridge-building grantmakers are playing the long game, trying to shift civic norms,” but that these efforts are not “going to change political incentives in the near future.” Instead, Callahan goes on, there are “more promising” pathways. He writes, “funders can work to shift public opinion to make ideologically extreme parties less popular, and at the same time, aim to change patterns of civic participation to help defeat those parties in elections.” I get the criticisms. I’ve written my own.

But here’s the problem: the only solutions to getting ourselves out of our current mess involve bridging ways of being. Frankly, if Callahan doesn’t see a way for bridging to make change in the near future, I don’t see a way to accomplish any of his named goals without working across ideological, racial, religious, and geographical divides “to shift public opinion…[and] change patterns of civic participation.” Unless he thinks he’s going to get there by getting out the vote. And if that’s the plan, well um, that ship has sailed.

The real power of the bridging movement is in its capacity to get sh*t done. The work being done by the folks at the Bridging Summit is a fabulous example. The Bridging Summit had its share of nationally focused organizations, but local grassroots organizations were more prevalent there than any other “cross-difference” gathering I attend. That folks in neighborhoods and small towns across the country, and from every kind of background, thought it was worthwhile to get together with neighbors who were different from them to address local issues … well, I think that shows the power of bridging. Not for its own sake, but to make transformative change in their own communities. And boy do they ever. They challenge police brutality, create access to mental health resources, and teach high school civics as a few of the inaugural showcase winners prove.

This was all in the back of my head as I listened to The Bulwark S

eptember 30^th podcast. Host Tim Miller and guest Van Lathan were batting back and forth the merits of going in for the fight versus finding a way to build a more ideologically diverse coalition. (Again, same tension I wrote about here.) Their discussion centered on empathy and its limits in situations of deep harm and the two kinds of work. Then Lathan says about this kind of tension “we need to trade Cs. You trade me some compassion, … and I’ll trade you some courage.”

That’s it, in a nutshell. That’s what bridging can get folks to do: trade compassion and courage for real change. I get all kinds of shivery over it.

The best part of bridging work is working together, with compassion and courage, to get sh*t done, or as we more often say, #ExpandWhatsPossible. That’s why this week I made a significant donation to the Listen First Project, and you should too.

If your organization is dealing with a situation of deep divide, either because you meant to be in it or fell in backwards, and you need facilitation, strategy, or evaluation, get in touch. Cohesion Strategy can help you #ExpandWhatsPossible.