Bridging Urban-Rural Divides with Joseph Bubman

Joseph Bubman:

The action and the relationships go together because, as it turns out, the more you work together to solve a problem with people who are different from you, the stronger relationship and trust you’re able to build with them. And similarly, the stronger relationships and trust you’re able to build with people who are different from you, the more you’re able to work together to solve problems.

Paul Kuttner:

Welcome to Partnership Work, where we explore what it takes to move from isolation to action. I’m Paul Kuttner. After the 2016 presidential election, the deep divisions in American society that it highlighted, there was a boom in efforts to build bridges and facilitate dialogue between people of different backgrounds and political beliefs.

My guest today was similarly inspired, but the approach he took was a bit different than most. Because Joseph Bubman had spent years doing peacebuilding and conflict resolution work around the world, and in 2016 he asked what it would look like to use some of those successful peacebuilding practices here at home. This led him and his colleagues to launch Urban Rural Action. They started by focusing on bringing together urban and rural communities, but the work quickly expanded to address the many ways that we are divided by race, religion, age, class, politics, and geography.

I don’t know much about international peace building so I was really excited to have Joe on the show. I was not disappointed. Joe and I talked about his experiences abroad and the lessons he carries with him from that time. He describes how he began translating peace building practices to the US context and the limitations of initiatives that focus only on dialogue without also creating opportunities to build capacity and take action. Joe tells the story of his organization’s evolution from early experimentation into what is now a network of local hubs across the country. And he shares some concrete tools and frameworks he’s picked up along his journey.

If you’re enjoying partnership work, you can sign up for our free Substack newsletter on our website, partnershipwork.org. And when you have a moment, please share this podcast with one other person who might like it. That’s how we find our audience. And now, here’s Joe. Joe Bubman, thanks for joining me on Partnership Work.

Joe:

Thanks so much for having me, Paul.

Paul:

So there’s so much I want to talk about with you today, but let’s set the stage. So I want you to imagine you’re at a party or a family reunion or something like that. You’re talking with someone who doesn’t know anything about the work you do. How do you describe what it is that urban rural action does?

Joe: I think I prefer to imagine the party than the family reunion. I appreciate the question nonetheless. I think the tagline for urban real action is quite useful. Reduce division, unite America. And I think it’s useful because if you live in the United States today, you recognize that it feels a lot harder to coexist, maybe, than it once did. It feels like conversations on tough topics are harder. It feels like It’s no longer just about disagreement on policies it’s about demonization, dehumanization of people who are different from us.

So Urban Rural Actoin is about bringing people together across our differences to build relationships to engage in better more constructive conversations where we can understand one another and to take action to strengthen our communities, and the action and the relationships go together because as it turns out, the more you work together to solve a problem with people who are different from you, the stronger relationship and trust you’re able to build with them. And similarly, the stronger relationships and trust you’re able to build with people who are different from you, the more you’re able to work together to solve problems.

Paul:

Excellent. I love that. Actions and relationships. So I want to get in the details of what that looks like later on, but I want to start with you because I know the organization and the work you do, it has some deep roots and things that you and some of your colleagues were involved in years ago.

So you actually started in conflict resolution and negotiation working in places like Kenya and Guatemala. Could you tell us a bit about that work? Like, what were you doing? And maybe give us an example of one of the projects that you would have worked on at the time.

Joe:

Absolutely. The work that I did for a number of years was work that could be characterized as peacebuilding, which means working at the community level. In conflict zones or regions where communities are trying to emerge from conflict and build a more peaceful society or where there are risks of violent conflict emerging and escalating. Working in those communities to build more peaceful societies where there’s not only the absence of violence which is what Martin Luther King Jr. described as negative peace but where there is justice and equality for all and economic opportunity, what he characterized as positive peace where everyone can thrive by coexisting and cooperating across differences.

And so I’ll actually share two examples. In Kenya, I spent three months in early 2011, a few years after that country had suffered some really significant election-related violence. The work there was trying to advance reconciliation, to be able to reckon with the past, reckon with violence that had been perpetrated by community members affiliated with certain ethnic groups, and that had killed humans and livestock, and in many cases, neighbors. And so the work there was really about engaging community members and community leaders and tribal leaders in conversation and dialogue for the sake of understanding and repairing broken trust and improving relationships.

Paul:

How do you go about doing that, especially as an outsider? Like, what does that look like for you to support that process? And how do you even enter into that situation?

Joe: I really appreciate you highlighting that piece. One of the shortcomings of some peacebuilding approaches is when someone from outside of a context enters in and assumes that they know better and tries to dictate what folks who you’re trying to help should be doing. And that is rife with all sorts of flaws. And it’s based on assumptions that are grounded in arrogance.

And the work I was doing, I don’t think I mentioned, was with Mercy Corps. And Mercy Corps is an international, non-governmental organization that responds to humanitarian emergencies. Promotes economic development and implements peace building programs like the ones that I’m describing. Something like 95 percent of Mercy Corps team members live and work in the communities where they are supporting these types of programs. I mean there were so many layers. I was far removed, in fact.

So just to be a little bit more concrete about it, because I think your question is really insightful, Paul, the dialogues I was referring to, to advance reconciliation were in many cases led by tribal leaders, maybe faith leaders, maybe with involvement of young people, maybe some business owners. And those conversations were largely organized by local community-based organizations, nonprofit organizations that Mercy Corps partnered with. So Mercy Corps’ role was largely to provide some technical support around how you might structure these conversations to provide financial support. And then my role as  a U.S.-based — at that time I was living in Kenya — but as an American with a background in conflict resolution negotiation was to support the Mercy Corps team, which was supporting the local partner, which was supporting the local leaders. So it’s not as though I was leading conversations about reconciliation.

There are limits to what someone well outside of a context can reasonably hope to achieve when you’re talking about conflict transformation. One of the best practices is really locally led peacebuilding. And the conventional wisdom, which I think has been developed and emerged over generations, is that the people who are closest to a conflict are the best positioned to address it. And I think that type of awareness and humility is what is reflected in Urban Rural Action programming, because we believe that community members are the best position to decide what type of action and solutions are going to work best in their community to make their community safer and stronger and more welcoming for all.

Paul:

So I sidetracked you a bit.

Joe:

You were asking about examples, and I just want to share a very different type of example of a peacebuilding program, which was a land dispute resolution program in rural Guatemala in the spring of 2011. And the idea there was that there are a lot of property disputes in Guatemala, in part because historically there haven’t always been good processes and measures for determining where one household’s land boundary ends and where a neighboring household’s property starts. There are also disputes between large landowners and less financially secure households and families who might be living on that land. And these conflicts often turn violent and it can result in the loss of life or the destruction of land.

And so this program was about helping families and community members and landowners resolve conflicts over land and ensuring that those agreements result in proper land titling and land ownership such that the land, which is really fertile and provides opportunities for growing and harvesting crops, can be utilized to its maximum potential.

Paul:

And was that also with Mercy Corps?

Joe:

That was also with Mercy Corps. And one of the things that I was troubled by with that particular program, Paul, that I think a lot about is that the way that those conflicts were resolved was really by an almost exclusive reliance on engineers to conduct GPS measurements that were meant to pinpoint exactly where land boundaries were meant to historically end and start. I think it worked fine when that was attainable. But of course, there are a finite number of engineers and there’s a large number of conflicts.

And I remember one day we went out, this was maybe a year or so, or even two, beyond when I spent three months in Cobán in Alta Verapaz. I went back out with the team to meet with parties in the mediation process, folks who had benefited supposedly from the mediation of their disputes. And we asked them, what are the benefits? And we hoped to hear that there was more coexistence with their neighbors, less violence, better relationships, more agricultural productivity. And sometimes we did hear that.

But with one family in particular, the response was, “it was really great that this one dispute with one neighbor was resolved. But we have active, ongoing disputes with other neighbors.” Our follow-up question, of course, was, “Why have you not been able to resolve those disputes?” And the answer was, “we’re still waiting for the engineer to come and do the GPS measurements.” ”why could you not talk with them and try to work out?”

And what was quickly apparent was that there was no effort in this program to equip the supposed beneficiaries of the program, the program participants with the skills to navigate conflict themselves, to try to engage in conversation with the parties with which they were in conflict to explore what was important to both parties to generate possible solutions. To find standards, objective standards that they could turn to absent some sort of engineer measurement or land scoping and move towards an agreement that would be fair to both parties and that would meet the underlying needs.

The framework for conflict resolution that I learned over many years and that we apply at UR Action is one where you really, it’s called interest-based negotiation. It’s about discussing the underlying needs and concerns of both parties explicitly and transparently and using that understanding. You can imagine for example that if you want a parcel of land there are all sorts of things you could do with that land. You might want to keep it as an asset that you might be able to sell later on, you might want to build a house, you might want to build a soccer field, you might want to build a church, you might want to grow crops, you might want to raise animals. And you can imagine that the other party in the conflict might have some similar interests, might have some different interests, even if they want to grow crops they might want to grow different types of crops that require larger or smaller parts of the land, that might require harvesting and planting at a different time of year.

And so an understanding of all that might allow you to generate a whole range of potential solutions that might allow you to meet your needs and interests and might allow them to meet theirs. But absent a conversation and an exploration and a discussion of what would be fair, you squander an opportunity and you resign yourself to living in conflict, potentially with episodes of violence, with no opportunity to make productive use of that land to achieve your agricultural outputs that you might want.

And so the lesson there was, if you’re going to implement a conflict resolution program you really ought to equip participants in that program with a collaborative mindset, with tools and framework and skills so that they can try to resolve, manage, transcend conflict themselves rather than having to bring in a third party to help them resolve their conflicts for them.

Paul:

Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. So that’s a helpful background on the expertise you are bringing to the work now. So I know you were doing this international work, but at some point you decided to turn your focus on the United States. Why did you make that change?

Joe: So in the fall of 2016, after the presidential and congressional elections that year, the next day, I walked into the Mercy Corps office and engaged in conversation with a couple of colleagues who I really admire and enjoyed working with. And the conversation quickly turned to the parallels between the conflict dynamics that we have observed in East Africa, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America, and the conflict dynamics not present, not only because of that election victory by Donald Trump, but that really had become more visible and apparent throughout the entire campaign, deeper rooted than just a single event.

Paul:

Right. Like what?

Joe:

The dynamics that I’m referring to are the toxic polarization or affective polarization in our country where we as a society tend to deplore the other side more than we affiliate with our own side. Where the rhetoric from our elected officials is divisive, is meant to exacerbate divides rather than to bring us together. Where our political system is broken and dysfunctional, where people feel like they don’t really have a voice, where they can’t contribute to decisions locally that make their communities and their own lives better. A society where we suffer from isolation and loneliness, which is getting worse, where economic inequality is one of the most drastic in the world in terms of that disparity between the largest income earners and wealth holders and least. And where misinformation and disinformation exacerbate our differences, including the marginalization of groups that are a minority racially, generationally, ethnically, religiously, and so on.

And so what struck me was these parallels and the desire to want to do something about that in the United States, applying the wisdom and experience that we had gained over many years of doing Peacebuilding work internationally.

Paul:

So what were your first steps in that direction?

Joe:

One of the first steps — there were a lot of steps and, now I’m trying to play back a linear description. It was, as you might imagine, experimenting with a bunch of different things.

Initially, it was seeing what else was out there. And what I saw in 2017 suggested that there were efforts to promote cross-partisan dialogue, which seemed like an important mission of depolarizing America, and which struck me as only partially responsive to the conflict dynamics that I articulated earlier, in large part because there wasn’t a lot of action. There wasn’t a way of using conversations as a foundation to address challenges and problems that are broadly agreed or seem to be broken.

So the underpinning of that approach, meaning the solution-oriented action-oriented work, is intergroup contact theory which is a set of principles laid out by Gordon Allport decades ago which said that the way you can build more enduring trusting relationships across differences assuming certain conditions are met is by bringing together those groups across differences to work on achieving shared goals. What I observed in 2017-2018 was not that. It also wasn’t the skill building piece that I referred to earlier from that example in Guatemala.

Instead, I saw some kind of robotic moderation of community discussions as opposed to skillful facilitation that really empowers community members to navigate disagreement and conflict in their own lives. And again, that’s important to me because conflict is inevitable. None of us is born a skillful conflict resolver. It’s a skill that needs to be learned, practiced, cultivated over time.

And then one of the things that I experimented with, Paul, which had some promise, but also had some real shortcomings, was something called Super Decathlon for One America, which was all about fun-friendly team competition and bringing together community members in Washington, D.C., where I was living, with community members first in Warsaw, Virginia, a couple hours away in a more rural county called Richmond in Virginia. And in 2018 with community members in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, Franklin County, south central part of the state, bringing them together to have fun together. Things like kickball and chocolate truffle tasting. And those were fun one day events that held some promise because it showed that, we can lift up our common humanity and our common identity as Americans by. Just connecting across our differences through fun through conversation through doing things that are enjoyable.

And at the same time you’re not going to build a relationship through one kickball game alone, right, just as you’re not going to build a relationship alone by one conversation or one shared meal. The work needs to be sustained, and that’s why the intergroup contact theory is really the only approach globally with evidence to support its efficacy in transcending the fissures of our society, working across fault lines.

Because when you are working to achieve a shared goal it requires sustained interaction and thinking through, What are the problems we’re trying to solve? What are the causes of those problems What are the solutions that we think will work? And then rolling up your sleeves and doing that side by side. And you recognize the benefits of cooperation, but you also appreciate that these are people like you who might not be as different from you as you might have feared, who might share a lot more in common with you in terms of their desire for a stronger, safer community where everyone can provide for their family and coexist peacefully.

Paul:

I want to back up a minute. I’m curious about you. So not everyone grows up and says, “You know what I want to do? I want to put myself right in the middle of conflicts and divisions. And that’s where I want to live.” So I am curious what led you there. Were you a peacemaker as a kid in your family? Like, how did you become the kind of person that does this work?

Joe: My parents got separated and then divorced when I was eight, nine, ten years old and I don’t know at the time, right, I certainly don’t think at the time I consciously thought. ”Okay this is the manifestation of a dysfunctional relationship and negative toxic conflict and I know that relationships can be managed better.” But I do think I maybe subconsciously over time recognized that there are certain mindsets and practices and approaches that are more and less effective for managing conflict, which is an inevitable outgrowth of living in a diverse society where people have their own ideas and their own beliefs about how things should work.

I also, I guess, I faced a crossroads coming out of college. I had an opportunity to do a fellowship relating to Holocaust education, which I had been passionate about during my undergrad years. And I had an opportunity to participate in a symposium around international conflict resolution, dispute resolution, and learn about different approaches to addressing ongoing conflicts. One of my best friends persuaded me that while both are really important, maybe there was an opportunity to really lean into how I might play a positive role in creating, contributing to the resolution of conflicts around the world. And so I went with that friend, Avi Rosenblit, to the Hague in the Netherlands and I was equipped with these different ways of thinking about conflicts um and dispute resolution.

When I was in graduate school at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies I took a course that really changed my trajectory. It was called Dispute Settlement Methods with Professor John Murray. And we read two books that were really transformative for me. One was called Beyond Machiavelli, which really described the ways you might, in conflict, put yourself in the shoes of your counterpart and understand what’s important to them. Because if you can’t address their concerns, whatever solution you might have in mind is not one that they’re likely to get on board with. And in many cases, you’re going to be better off with an agreement than no agreement.

The other book was called Difficult Conversations, which is largely about trying to achieve mutual understanding of different perspectives rather than reaching agreement. And understanding the ways that we, our own identity, might be called into question or challenged or triggered in conversations because of values that we hold and grappling with that. And being able to put on the table things that are challenging for us and that we want to address with the other party and also being willing to hear what’s important to them and how their identity might be challenged. Because often there’s such a difference between the intent we have when we say things or do things and the impact that is felt. We often unknowingly end up hurting others and being hurt by others, but that can be addressed and even repaired through a conversation grounded in curiosity, humility, and an effort to understand the impact on the other party of our actions and the intent of their actions and words that resulted in a certain impact on us.

Paul:

Yeah. So that early experimentation led into the founding of Urban Rural Action. Can you tell me about what the vision was for Urban Rural Action? And I’m particularly interested in why you landed it on the urban-rural divide. I hear why you said action. Action is coming out very loud and clear from your description. Why urban-rural?

Joe: One of the fault lines that we identified in that first conversation post-2016 election was the urban-rural divide because it seemed to us that the urban-rural divide is a proxy for a lot of lines of division in our country. Certainly political leanings, differences in terms of levels of diversity, racially, religiously, ethnically, from an education perspective in terms of four-year college degrees, property values. There’s also a lot of resentment. I’m speaking generally, and this shows up very differently across different parts of our country in different states and counties, but a resentment among many people living in more rural areas that their interests, their values, their concerns aren’t reflected in decision-making and centers of power in their states. And it occurred to us that there are a lot of similarities and a lot of interconnectedness across different issues, whether it’s housing, whether it’s food justice.

The first model for our programming was bringing together community members in rural areas and community and urban areas to build relationships and solve problems together. Our first program was called Consensus Building for Incarceration Reduction. And we brought together community members in Philadelphia and community members in Adams County, which is a couple hours west, to learn about mass incarceration, learn about our criminal legal system, understand how that’s similar and different in a place like Philadelphia and a place like Adams County, and then to explore opportunities to take action locally rather than waiting for our elected officials to solve a problem that they might not be well-positioned or inclined to solve. And that program, as a pilot, had a lot of strengths. It also had some shortcomings.

And over time, we realized that… Maybe a few things. One is that people are going to be maximally motivated to take action in their own community as opposed to in a community a couple hours away. Second is, just from a practical perspective, it’s a lot easier to travel to gatherings and events in your own community or a neighboring county. And you might be more, again, invested in building connections within your south central Pennsylvania or southeast Wisconsin region than being paired with another community that you might not have any apparent connection to.

And what we also began to prioritize just as much as the geographic difference and diversity was the political diversity, the racial diversity, the generational diversity, the religious diversity of the cohort of community members who we call “uniters,” recognizing that we live in a society where it’s become fashionable and common to other people who are different from us and to assume based on what we consume on social media and cable news that those other groups are out to get us, or a gain for them is a loss for us.

And so we really, for the last several years, have homed in on the idea that our programs are about bringing people together across geographic, political, racial, generational, religious, and other differences to build relationships, engage in better conversations, and solve problems. And the best way to do that from a programmatic perspective is to work within a single region, contiguous counties. In a small part of a state like southeast Wisconsin, where those counties experience significant social division and they’re in a politically polarized state. And yet that contiguity among those counties allows you to travel from your county to a neighboring county with relative ease for positive experiences that increase your view of those communities that you’re interacting with.

Paul:

So can you tell us a bit about one of these more recent projects?

Joe: Yeah. Our model is that we set up what we call Uniting for Action Local Hubs. And the hub implies a level of permanence. It’s not a one-off program that we pop in to carry out and then we go somewhere else and carry out a different program. The idea is that we serve as a civic hub, as an opportunity for anyone in our community, in that community, who wants to be a part of the solution rather than complaining about the problem. Someone who wants to engage with people who are different to make their community better.

And the hubs consist of three components. Number one, annual civic participation programs that bring together people across the hub over a nine-month period to build relationships, strengthen collaboration skills, and then within their own county analyze an issue like mental health or targeted violence or housing and homelessness, and do that analysis with a community partner, a social service organization that might support mental health outcomes, that might provide suicide prevention services, that might work with veteran populations, and so on. And then to design an intervention, a solution, a set of actions that group of five to eight community members, along with a community partner, can implement. So that’s component one, which I’ll come back to.

Component two, quickly, is community workshops, meaning we want everyone in the community, regardless of their ability to commit or not commit to a long-term endeavor, to be able to engage in conversation constructively at a house of worship, at the public library, on issues of concern to them, whether that’s crime and violence in their community, whether it’s around education, whether it’s around criminal legal issues. And those constructive conversation workshops, which are partly about skill building, partly about connection and conversation, are open to the public and they’re free.

The third piece is called Powering Pluralism and Democracy, which is working with local leaders to make their institutions more responsive to community concerns, more accountable, more transparent, so that community member trust in those institutions is increasing, not because community members are being told that you should trust your institutions more, but because the institutions are becoming more trustworthy themselves.

And so when you ask about an example of a program, I’m thinking about our Uniting for Action nine-month civic participation program. And one example is in Southern Oregon. The program was called Uniting for Action on the Economy in Southern Oregon. In each of the four counties, the uniters in those counties designed their own interventions.

And there was one that said, we really want to revitalize this community garden, which is next to a food pantry in a very small town called Butte Falls. And that’s a town that really experiences a high level of food insecurity. And this team of uniters came together across differences, working with a local partner that had some expertise around community garden development and crop growing and harvesting and food production, to transform this plot of land into one that could not only grow crops, but that could sustain the food pantry next door. And that could enhance food security across the larger community.

And that community garden is still operational and thriving today, as far as I know. And it really represents, I think, the twin missions of our projects. And by project, I mean the intervention within a larger program. Number one, build relationships, trust, promote agency and belonging through the collaboration and the connection. And then second, create something meaningful that addresses a tangible problem that the community has identified.

One of the features of our Uniting for Action local hubs, Paul, that really reflects the community-led approach is the role of our county coordinators. These are people who live and work in the county, that live and work in the counties that make up the hub. Each coordinator is a part-time UR Action team member, and their role is to first recruit community members to apply to become uniters, and then to help the leadership team, the core team, we call it, that’s leading the program, to decide which applicants are going to be successful and become uniters with an eye towards who is going to really contribute to problem solving across differences and the diversity politically, racially, generationally, and so on across that uniter’s team in their county, as well as the broader cohort.

And the county coordinator is also responsible for leading that team of uniters once the program starts to analyze the issue in their county, whether that is mental health or whether it’s targeted violence or whether it’s housing and homelessness, ensuring that all voices are heard, that the team is thinking about the causes and effects of the problem as well as the resources and assets that are available to help address that problem in an impactful and sustainable way. And then that county coordinator is really leading the team through the process of designing their intervention and implementing it, where they’re not guiding the team of uniters towards a specific substantive direction or specific outcome, but instead facilitating a process where the community members, the uniters, have ownership of the substantive direction that the project takes.

And I just thought that it’s a really great manifestation of locally led peace building where our role is to convene, organize, provide frameworks and structure such that the community and the community members who are participating in the program can decide what action is most needed and how should that action be implemented to address an agreed problem that this team wants to take on.

Paul:

Got it. And you mentioned frameworks, so I’m curious about a couple frameworks you have on your website and what that looks like in this kind of situation. So is that process that you talked about leading, is that where the problem tree analysis comes in?

Joe:

That’s exactly right.

Paul:

So what’s a problem tree analysis and what does it look like?

Joe: Problem tree analysis looks like a five-step process of, number one, identifying a problem. And the tree part is just a metaphor. With the problem representing the trunk if you’re visualizing a tree. A problem statement, it might be that too many people in our community are experiencing adverse impacts surrounding mental health or relating to mental health.

Step two is mapping out the effects of that problem what are the effects economically socially environmentally and politically, right, thinking about these different systems and how might one immediate or direct effect result in a secondary or tertiary effect. And the process is one where all the team members are thinking expansively brainstorming writing on sticky notes their thoughts, their experiences. And I should say, step two is the branches of the tree, right? What is up above.

Step three is looking at the causes of the problem or the roots. What are the social, political, economic, and environmental causes of the problem, both immediate contributors as well as underlying causes? And again, this is a process where the county coordinator is inviting people to share a bunch of ideas about what might be causing this problem across those different systems. And they stick those Notes up on the wall or a flip chart paper.

And then the county coordinator is fostering a conversation where people can ask questions about what their peers have written and deepen their understanding of why those teammates think that cause X is actually a cause and how it might contribute to the problem. And then even to some of the effects that result from that problem.

Step four is overlaying that with some assets and resources that exist in the community because we want uniters to not carry out an intervention in a vacuum but rather leverage what already exists so that their intervention can be maximally impactful. And step five is to identify a cause based on that entire map that they want to address working side by side with their community partner.

And as a reminder, the lead of the community partner organization is part of the uniter’s team, and they’re providing some substantive direction and might be most knowledgeable about the assets and resources that exist. And so the team is reaching a consensus on which cause do we want to address. And once they’ve decided on that, it provides the foundation for the next framework, which is project design, basically designing your intervention in the community. Knowing that you want to address that cause is different from knowing how you’re going to address that cause.

And that’s the next framework and tool that’s used. Again, facilitated by the county coordinator with the uniters deciding substantively what’s the goal that they want to articulate, what’s their theory for how to achieve it, what are the activities that they’re going to carry out.

Paul:

Got it. Could you give us an example of that process and maybe anything surprising or unexpected that’s come out of one of them in the past?

Joe:

Okay. In Multnomah County, Oregon, The problem statement there was many residents in Multnomah County can’t afford housing. And their analysis was really interesting because they identified all sorts of effects that you might not typically think about. For sure, evictions, but also a fear that crime was increasing, that people were leaving the region and that there was a loss of talent for businesses. So there was this economic impact, a sense that residents experiencing homelessness would not be able to participate civically. So their voices weren’t heard by elected officials.

Tent communities, in parts, making it harder for everyone to enjoy clean and safe public spaces. And then there was also this emergence of causes that the team identified around increased demand for housing, inadequate mental and physical health care.

And so the question was, what’s causing that? And the group identified barriers to mental health services, paperwork being a barrier to some, the medical system being unaffordable even if you might otherwise want to have health insurance, predatory landlords and mortgage suppliers. So, this type of analysis really expands people’s conception of the problem in a way where you’re not debating what’s accurate and not, but you’re thinking through a problem that is impacting everyone and that you can affect in a way that’s more comprehensive and expansive than you otherwise might imagine.

Paul:

So you’ve assembled a bit of a team around yourself at Urban Rural Action. Could you say a few words about who the “we” is of Urban Rural Action, who you’re doing this with?

Joe:

It’s a phenomenal team, and it’s really hard work. And what we have accomplished over many years is really a reflection of the skill, the talent, the steadfastness, the hard work, the creativity of many, many people.

Our executive team consists of four of us. Lisa Inks is someone who I worked with at Mercy Corps during that time period. She is one of those two other people who I engaged in conversation with right in the aftermath of the 2016 election. And she later became the first board chair of UR Action. She then left Mercy Corps to join us as our Senior Director of Evidence and Learning.

Kira Hamman is our Senior Director of Programs and was also really instrumental in founding UR Action. We met through volunteering at Better Angels, now Braver Angels, back in 2018. Kira helped me get more involved in volunteering for Braver Angels and observe different red-blue workshops that were happening and gave me the opportunity to experience what I thought was really powerful about that model of red-blue dialogue and also what was lacking.

And Kira, from the very get-go, was involved in our first programming. Our first workshop that we ever carried out was in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, in September 2019, where we brought together gun shop owners and gun rights advocates alongside violence prevention advocates. And the community members were from Washington, D.C. and Franklin County, Pennsylvania. And that workshop, which Kira and I co-facilitated, really demonstrated to us, even in the early days, that this was a model that could work. There was something here that we could build on.

And Pearce Godwin is our Senior Director of Communications, founder of the Listen First Coalition and the Listen First Project. The coalition is a collection of 500 plus bridge building organizations. And Pierce is really the national leader of the bridge building movement and someone who really laid the groundwork for the idea that we Americans are stronger together when we are engaging across our differences, giving others the benefit of the doubt, working together to solve shared problems that we widely believe are broken.

Paul:

Thank you. So we are just about out of time. I really appreciate you taking the time to join me on the podcast. My one final question as we head out the door would just be, what’s next for UR Action? Is there one dream or vision that you’re hoping to work on in the coming years?

Joe: yeah. I love that, Paul. there’s so much. We just met as an executive team, and we shared all sorts of goals we have for this year and beyond. And I’m really hoping that what we see over the next years is the growth of our hubs, going deep where we’re already working in southern Oregon, southeast Wisconsin, central Arizona, central Indiana, eastern North Carolina, south central Pennsylvania, southwestern Pennsylvania, and measuring the impact of that work such that we can demonstrate that this can be done anywhere because it’s needed everywhere.

Paul:

That makes a lot of sense to me. And I’m excited to keep an eye on what y’all are doing. So I appreciate the time. Thanks for coming on.

Joe:

Thanks so much, Paul. I really appreciate it.

Paul:

Take care.

Thank you all for listening. For transcripts, shownotes, and links to subscribe to the podcast and our Substack newsletter, go to partnershipwork.org. Partnership Work is an independent podcast produced with the support of Urban Media Arts here in my hometown of Malden, Massachusetts. Visit them at urbanmediaarts.org. Until next time, take care.