As the election approaches and tensions mount, executive director Nealin Parker — a veteran of conflict zones abroad — talks about the red flags in the United States.
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Nealin Parker had spent much of her career working abroad to help countries recover from war and internal strife — places like Afghanistan, Kenya, and Liberia. But about a decade ago, she began to see red flags in the United States itself, signs that Americans were edging closer to the type of political violence more common in conflict zones abroad.
Today, Parker runs Common Ground USA, the U.S. affiliate of Search for Common Ground, the world’s oldest and largest peace-building organization. It started during the Cold War and has worked in some of the world’s biggest hotspots: the Middle East, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan. And in 2021, it turned its attention to the States.
In a LinkedIn Live interview as part of our Commons in Conversation series, Parker talked about the organization’s work, which comes to a head in the next few weeks. As Election Day in an incredibly tight presidential race nears, the potential grows for contested and delayed results that could inflame tensions. Common Ground has been working for months in election battleground states to build early-warning systems and prepare responses to incidents that could spark violence.
An early test came in July, when former President Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pa. Community leaders who had worked with Common Ground to prepare for such a moment mobilized, and fears that the shooting would touch off more violence never materialized. “We shouldn’t forget that,” Parker says, noting that a constellation of organizations aims to prevent political violence. “People are working extremely hard. And that unseen energy is having a profound effect.”
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Our conversation took place on LinkedIn; free registration is required to watch. You also can watch a recording of the interview on the Chronicle’s YouTube channel. Below is an A.I-generated transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
What the U.S. Can Learn From Liberia
Drew Lindsay, senior editor, Chronicle of Philanthropy: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Commons in Conversation. This is the fourth in a series of one-on-one interviews we’re having with leaders in the nonprofit world and philanthropy who are working to strengthen democracy and bring Americans together at a time, really, of polarization and deep division.
You can see all of our interviews at the Chronicle of PhilanthropyYouTube channel.
The series is an extension of The Commons, which is our dedicated line of coverage launched in April to explore the country’s divides. And when I say that, people automatically jump to political divides. We’re in an election season, after all, but our coverage really is extending beyond politics.
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We’re looking at division along lines of race, gender, income, the rural/urban divide — all sorts of things. So you can check out all that we’ve done and all that we’re going to be doing at The Commons.
I’m really excited today to have Nealin Parker as our guest. Nealin and I’ve had lots of conversations over the past few months. She is a wonderful storyteller with a lot of great background and history.
She is head of Common Ground USA, which is the U.S. affiliate for Search for Common Ground. That’s the oldest and largest peacebuilding organization in the world. It started during the Cold War and has worked in some of the globe’s biggest hotspots — the Middle East, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and a whole host of others.
In the United States, the organization is working in a lot of election battleground states and was actually on the ground in Pennsylvania when former President Donald Trump was shot during his rally in July at the fairgrounds in the town of Butler. So their work has been critical now and is even more critical as we come up to the elections.
Nealin, thanks so much for taking time to join us.
Nealin Parker, executive director, Common Ground USA: Thank you for having me. I’m really, really glad to be here.
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Drew: Before we start talking about the work of Common Ground USA, I want to talk a little bit about yourself and your career. You’re working in the United States now, but for most of your career, you’ve worked outside of the United States in a lot of countries that have seen war, internal strife — places like Liberia, Kenya and Afghanistan.
We’re going to show a few of the pictures that you’ve shared with us from Liberia. And I was hoping you could give us a little context on the work there and this moment in time that you were capturing.
Nealin: I spent about 15 years working overseas in countries in conflict. And I specifically worked on elections. The photograph that you have up right now is actually a bit special to me. I was deep in the throes of typhoid and malaria and was in quarantine at that time. But this election was the first post-conflict election that Liberia had had, in 2005.
It was also an election in which the first female head of state was elected in the continent of Africa. it was a really momentous time for the whole of the country. And for me personally. Just looking at the photograph reminds me of a woman who worked for me and had been taken as a slave for many years and had made her way, amazingly, back to Liberia.
But by the time she’d gotten there, she had lost her native language and couldn’t speak to her mother anymore. But she could on that day vote. And it was such a poignant reminder of all of the injustice that happens in the world. But exactly how profound it is that each life, each voter, is afforded the dignity of an equal vote.
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You can see in that photo this is a line of people who want to vote on October 11, 2005, hoping to make their individual voices known. And I think that that that probably is quite motivating for why I’ve continued this work, but also why I feel the pull to do this work in the United States and why elections I think are so important here.
Drew: And if I could ask, I think one of the most important things is that she had the vote. She had the power to make change. But the people who had taken her slave didn’t have that vote.
Nealin: That’s exactly right. She was, in fact, on equal footing with every warlord, with anyone who ravaged her towns. And she was in a position that those who took her away to another country were not, in which she had the vote to determine the future of her country. And they did not.
Drew: Let’s turn to the United States. We have an election coming up, a very important election. There’s a feeling perhaps that the power of our elections is a bit challenged and questioned. I want to take you back to the notion of why you started Common Ground USA. You were doing all this work abroad and you saw some red flags in the United States, in in this country.
And you really pressed Search for Common Ground to open a U.S. office. Tell us about those red flags. What you were seeing that reminded you of the work you were doing abroad?
Explore ideas, conversations, and solutions for a fractured country.
Nealin: There are a couple of things. One is just the psychological steps that we take to be able to do harm to one another. We have to see each other as somehow different from humanity. In other words, we have to either think somebody else is less human or less deserving of dignity, or we think they think that about us.
And that’s a very important psychological step to take because then you can do harm to someone else because you feel like you’re protecting yourself, even as it is an aggressive action. And what I started to see in the United States — and this was over a decade ago — I started to see the kind of dehumanization, the sense that not only is somebody different from me, not only will they vote differently for me or do they live differently for me, not only do they have different faith than I have. But they are actually my enemy. They are even potentially someone who will do harm to me and someone who is potentially evil.
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Those kinds of psychological steps are really important and a very counterproductive set of things necessary for people to do harm. And I’ve since then seen things like normalization of violence in our politics. The idea that it would be part of our political system for you to receive threats as a candidate or for your family to even the kind of more affective and extreme polarization that breaks down the way that our Congress works, our decision making works, and the distrust in our systems.
Those things come together in ways that affect each other. So it’s not just that there’s one thing that’s happening right now. It’s on the social side, and on the structural side in our leadership, we have increased polarization in ways that that are almost a vicious cycle.
Drew: A lot of these things you’re talking about are what we’re reporting about in The Commons — polarization in the country, how do you bring people together, how do you help them see each other as people. But you also talk about very specific early-response systems and early-warning systems that alert you to what violence might be coming.
So I was hoping you could explain that here. What does an early-warning system look like?
Nealin: I love that you started with Liberia, because that’s actually a place that I was part of setting up early-warning and early-response systems. What that means is that you get a network of people in communities together from across a lot of differences that have reach that can find out information and that can share information back out.
And you put them together in a room. And then when you hear information, you can share that out with the group and find out if it’s accurate. Or they can pull up information, find out what’s going on in their community, and tell you, ‘Actually, this is kind of a big deal.’ So, it is a big deal that people are no longer going to the night market on Friday evening — that’s an indicator that might be really important locally, but that you might not pick up on the national level as important indicator for where there might be a spike in violence.
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And so we apply that approach to the U.S. The United States is a very rich country in social capital and in civil society. We have more than any place I’ve ever worked. There are people who are leaders on the ground in functional communities who have a huge sense of a pride of place, who are very enthusiastic about coming together across differences in service, of doing honor to the place that they are from.
So when I say civil society, I mean everything from faith leaders, head of Chamber of Commerce, sports teams and leaders. There are lots of different kinds of influence that that people carry. Sometimes we refer to it as “Jedi skills.” And if you bring them together across these differences ahead of time, then they’re in a much stronger position to, first of all, gather information that they wouldn’t otherwise be privy to.
But in addition to that, they can make plans and solutions across those differences that bind us together more strongly rather than putting up walls. When a crisis happens, anyone’s instinct is to go to somewhere safe. That is what our psychology needs, and we do a great job with that. But the problem with that is if you pull apart when a crisis happens, then you pull farther and farther and farther apart and then you start to erect walls.
And at the end of the crisis, you have to actually start to break down the walls to get back to your steady state. If you’ve come together across the differences and built a safe, safe place across those differences ahead of time, then when people need to retreat to a place of safety, it doesn’t mean pulling apart, it means working together.
And we can solve the problem. Then it is a mutual problem together.
Drew: Let me to put this some concreteness to these ideas. You and I talked directly after the assassination attempt of former President Trump in July. You had your network built in Pennsylvania. Talk a little bit about that network, who the people were and how it operationalized and mobilized directly after shooting. There was a lot of discussion after the shooting: Could this spiral out? Could this one event trigger a lot of other violence? And it didn’t happen. You and I talked about this; it was a story because it didn’t happen. There was no violence. But what specifically did your network do?
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Nealin: So just to give a little bit of a context. We have a network that’s in Pennsylvania and in Texas with our partners, Over Zero. They have a similar network in Ohio, and they’ve been doing a lot of work in Springfield, as you can imagine, and in Arizona. So we had a team that was on the ground in Pennsylvania.
And it’s a group with a lot of different backgrounds and ideologically and in terms of their day jobs. They’ve been seeing what’s happening in Pennsylvania and want to do something about it.
Let me give just one example, because there’s a lot of work that we were doing there. There was a member of the network who was a faith leader and organized faith leaders across different faiths, different geographies, all ages, different backgrounds to come together to the fairground. The fairground in Butler is a place that is a community space. It’s where the people in that community come together often to celebrate being together.
Yet it became a symbol in that moment of what our country looks like when we tear apart and what violence does. So they came together across these differences to reconsecrate that space and to consecrate that land. Now, part of that was healing. How does the community deal with the fact that not only was there an attempted assassination, but there was a real loss of life in that community — a family man who was in the fire department and really part of that community.
So you need some of that healing. From a political-violence prevention perspective, there’s also the opportunity in that moment for those hurts to turn into either copycat violence or reprisal violence and to be able to stop that cycle. And you had leaders rededicate that space and that community to being a symbol of what it means to come together to heal and what it means to come together, to reestablish who we are as a community.
Drew: What does re consecrating that space look like?
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Nealin: It means, in that moment, bringing in the sacred reminder that this is a space where beauty flourishes, where we come together, where depending on your faith, where God’s people live and try to reflect the best of who we are and who we might be.
That same group of faith leaders has also come together and then expanded to try to advocate for political leaders to reduce the amount of violent rhetoric and in their language. So they are working as advocates as well as faith leaders, and seeing themselves as greater than the sum of their parts by coming together.
Drew: You and Search for Common Ground have been working for months, if not years, to prepare for this moment, November 5, 2024. What were your expectations going into this? Where do you feel like we stand as a country and what do you expect heading up to the election?
Nealin: It is my expectation that we will see violence around this election, but that is what we are built for and we are but one small piece of a very busy and very impressive ecosystem that is working very hard to remind us of the preciousness of this democracy, to support the elections volunteers and election workers, to make voting free, fair, open, transparent and following the rule of law.
This is what we’re built for. And it’s time to put one foot in front of the other and stay that course. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of imagining that because bad things are happening they are inevitable in our future. I’ve worked in countries recovering from war. They tell the impossible story of the end of the bad and the turning around to the good. There is nothing in this country that says that that cannot be our tomorrow. And the people who need to make that decision are in fact, us.
Drew: That’s one of the distinctions you’ve made in our conversations. You’ve worked, as you said, in places recovering from war. We aren’t recovering from war. The United States has a lot of advantages in dealing with this. And that’s something we have to hold on to as we go forward.
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Nealin: I think that’s exactly right.
(The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, and JPB Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. See more about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.)