In his first message as president-elect, Joe Biden suggested his most pressing duty would be to help bring the country together.
“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again,” he said. “And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies.”
Biden’s message was welcomed by a group of foundation leaders who have supported efforts to get people who are locked in bitter political disputes back on speaking terms. But getting people to treat ideological adversaries with respect, and even love, will take a lot of work, they say.
“What leaders say matters a lot,” says Bob Boisture, president of the Fetzer Institute, a foundation that has taken a leading role in promoting civil discourse. “But the forces that have been driving the increasing polarization over several decades are deeply embedded and don’t go away with a particular election.”
Fetzer isn’t alone. Grant makers like the Charles Koch Institute, Civic Health Project, and Einhorn Collaborative, as well as the Arthur Vining Davis and the William and Flora Hewlett foundations, also have thrown money into efforts to help people overcome bitter partisan divides. (Hewlett is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
They seek an intangible goal: to help people treat one another with respect.
These efforts, which help people engage in constructive dialogue, inhabit a small corner of foundation work to bolster democracy. During the age of Trump, many progressive foundations began to plow money into efforts that could help win an election rather than help people get along.
In 2018, the latest year for which figures are available, foundations directed more than $1.7 billion to democracy efforts, including ballot security, get-out-the-vote work, a free and independent press, civics education, and political-movement building, according to Candid, which tracks foundation grant making.
Candid does not separately track the money foundations give to groups that promote a greater understanding among people who have different political views. But it accounts for a small part of the money flowing to members of the Bridge Alliance, a prominent coalition of democracy-focused nonprofits. Its members have combined budgets of about $700 million, but only about $14 million of that total is from member organizations that focus specifically on bridging ideological divides.
More money could be on the way. Over the past year, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has held gatherings — virtually during the pandemic — with several dozen foundation leaders interested in the subject.
Under the leadership of Rajiv Vinnakota, who became president in 2019, the nonprofit has changed its name to the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Under the new name, a big part of the nonprofit’s work will be to encourage philanthropy to support what Vinnakota calls “civic learning.” The idea is that to become constructive citizens, students need to find common ground with people who hold different viewpoints. The approach, which focuses on such things as how students communicate and whether they experience empathy, is different from a traditional civics curriculum.
“It’s not just knowledge acquisition,” he says. “It’s not just American history and how government works.”
Michael Murray, president of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, agrees with the approach. The foundation tested a project that brought together students from different campuses with different backgrounds and viewpoints to work together on a problem. The experience showed enough promise for the foundation to commit $2.5 million over five years to expand it.
Murray says the key to success is helping students who have been trained in the “cage match” of social media to really listen to others “not just with the intention of reloading for your next comment but to explore the ideas of others and the values that underlie those ideas.”
‘Way Deeper Than Politics’
When participants in a Braver Angels debate expound on the merits of the Electoral College, the role of law enforcement in America, or other urgent policy topics, they aren’t pitted against one another in some form of blood sport. Debaters make speeches and offer rebuttals to a moderator rather than directly to their opponent. Doing so helps participants stick to the substance of their arguments, says John Wood, one of the group’s senior leaders.
“We don’t want to make it a competition of egos or personalities,” says Wood, a former vice chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County.
“We ask people to be open when they feel doubt about their point of view,” he says. “The emphasis is on intellectual humility.”
Braver Angels was formed in December 2016 with a goal of helping people with different ideologies find common ground. It began by holding Red/Blue Workshops to bring together people for a daylong program of structured discussions. Wood estimates that about 50,000 Americans, split evenly along the partisan divide, have participated in the group’s debates and other offerings.
The Braver Angels board and staff are roughly divided between people who consider themselves conservative and those who identify as liberal. And it strives to maintain a balance of support from foundations with different world views. For instance, both the Charles Koch Foundation, which was started by the businessman and conservative political megadonor Charles Koch, and the Fetzer Institute, which has historically identified as center-left, have both made grants to the nonprofit this year.
With a budget of about $1 million a year, Braver Angels is one of several small organizations getting support from foundations that hope to soften people’s hearts at a time when political attitudes are hardening.
Behind much of the interest in funding work to close the partisan divide is a concern about the role Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks play in exacerbating conflicts.
Sarah Ruger, director of free expression at the Charles Koch Institute, isn’t convinced that Americans have forgotten how to find common cause with one another. Much of the discord, she says, reflects “growing pains” of the spread of social media, which makes it easy to insult people with different views without having to look them in the eye and acknowledge their humanity.
Koch supports a variety of efforts to overcome the partisan divide in addition to Braver Angels, including academic research on how polarization and distrust develops; Narrative 4, a nonprofit that works with high schools to help students develop a sense of empathy for their peers through storytelling; and the National Institute for Civil Discourse, which is working on an internet-driven approach to reaching consensus on difficult policy choices. She wouldn’t provide an exact figure, but according to a spokeswoman, Koch spends “tens of millions” of dollars annually on such efforts.
Ruger would like to give teachers, academics, and policy makers the tools to “grapple with the cacophony” of division being spread online and find common cause.
“As philanthropists, we can play a role in bringing together those institutional leaders in a way that they might not normally have an opportunity to interact,” she says.
Boisture, of the Fetzer Institute, says it will take a sustained effort to make a difference. Such work can be difficult, he says, because it is very different from other democracy work, like registering a certain number of voters in a precinct or researching a menu of policy choices. Encouraging people to overcome their perceived differences relies on changes in emotions and attitudes at the individual level that take more effort to measure than counting how many people vote.
“This is way deeper than politics,” he says. “Love is the only force powerful enough to overcome those incredibly powerful forces that are pulling us apart. You can’t love the country without caring about all of our fellow Americans.”
Lost Cause?
Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, some grant makers have questioned whether it’s worth trying to promote civil discussions about political issues.
Last year, Decker Ngongang, a former fellow at Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, wrote an essay on the topic that said with the White House setting a harsh tone for rhetoric in American society, grant makers are struggling with how to serve as “referees” when they bring people together.
Civil discourse in American politics is possible only when both sides of an argument agree on the basics, he says, like the validity of the scientific method or the rules governing debate.
Foundations that want to help people find common ground struggle to “remain unbiased, while also recognizing that bad-faith actors are intentionally poisoning our civic discourse,” Ngongang says.
Indeed, some grant makers seem to be rethinking whether it’s important to find common ground.
This summer, for example, the Democracy Fund, started by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar and the dominant philanthropy involved in election issues, said one party, the GOP, had poisoned the water.
“Our bipartisan positioning has too often been an excuse to not grapple with and address the deep injustice that is ingrained in our political institutions and system,” wrote Joe Goldman, president of the fund.
No Longer a Referee
The Chicago Community Trust is another philanthropy that changed its approach in the Trump era, moving away from the idea that it must play the role of a neutral referee. In 2015, it introduced On the Table, a series of conversations among Chicagoans.
Residents decided what to talk about, and the trust and its facilitators helped moderate and encouraged people to connect with those with different life experiences and viewpoints.
The program, which has been widely copied across the country, still exists, but in its latest iteration, the conversations serve to push the grant maker’s broader strategy of closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap in Chicago.
The conversations are now featured as “safe” places for Chicagoans and people across Illinois to talk about the harm caused by racism. The On the Table funding is accompanied by new grants the trust has made to support Chicago media outlets to better inform the public about the wealth gap.
“We have a point of view,” says Daniel Ash, the trust’s associate vice president for community impact. “We’re not trying to be neutral at all. We’re trying to create the conditions to achieve transformative change.”
Shared Discussions and Meals
Simon Greer, a veteran progressive activist who now runs an effort to help college students bridge their political divides, says he understands why grant makers might not want to support such work.
He is in a good position to make that judgment: He is a former president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a grant maker with a strong progressive pedigree.
The whole notion of finding common ground, Greer says, can easily be seen as compromising one’s ideals.
“One person’s definition of civility is another person’s definition of injustice,” he says. “What I mean by bridging, another person may define as watering down.”
But Greer founded his latest project, Bridging the Gap, on the premise that participants shouldn’t try to persuade others that they are wrong or try to change their beliefs. In January, the group brought students at Oberlin College, a bastion of progressive student activism, together with students at Spring Arbor University, a conservative private institution that defines its mission as “bringing the life of Christ” to its students.
Students worked together to develop policy approaches to criminal justice and shared discussions and meals with one another over the course of one month. It proved highly popular, and next year, the project will be copied at four other institutional pairs. Greer’s project has received a total of $500,000 from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and Templeton Religion Trust, along with funds from Interfaith Youth Core (through a grant funded jointly by the Fetzer Institute and the Charles Koch Institute), as well as a handful of individual donors.
Large-Scale Changes
Perhaps the biggest obstacle nonprofits face working on this cause is that it’s hard to do on a large scale.
“It’s pretty hard in a country of over 300 million to say. ‘Let’s all get together at 7:00 down at the local high school and talk about federal issues,” says Keith Allred, executive director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a program created in 2011 by the University of Arizona after a shooter killed six people and wounded 11 others, including former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords. Foundation supporters include the Cargill, Charles Koch, and Hewlett Foundations and the Democracy Fund.
Allred is attempting to expand his work beyond the intimacy of face-to-face discussion groups through one of the institute’s programs, called CommonSense American. The program works to get people to come to a consensus on policy issues. The institute sends participants a detailed examination of a policy question along with the pros and cons of specific bills in Congress to solve the matter.
Participants commit to studying the proposals and weighing in with their preference. They also commit to contacting their congressional representatives to tell them what the consensus was on the issue. Allred says interest in the project is far greater than he expected; nearly 24,000 people split among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents have taken part.
The project has started with issues that people are likely to agree on; an early exercise was over the practice of “surprise” medical billing — patients being charged without their consent for medical services performed by out-of-network health-insurance providers. Allred acknowledges that it will be difficult to come to agreement on thornier issues. But he’s confident that if enough people take part and focus on the merits of a policy argument, political discussions will begin to turn on substance rather than the money or crafty messages being wielded by political parties.
The gulf separating Americans from one another began to widen decades ago, Allred says. To bring people together will take a long time and is more important than who wins any particular election.
“The divide between the parties was becoming more bitter long before Trump and will be with us long after he’s gone,” he says. “That it is the more fundamental enduring challenge, and we overfocus on Trump and the election of the moment at our peril if we don’t realize there are deeper, systemic things going on.”
