By Max Broennle | FāVS News Reporter
Amid growing national divisions, a coalition of Washington state organizations launched a new civic forum this month aimed at bridging political, cultural and economic divides — and they say it’s just the beginning.
Paths to Understanding, the Inter-Movement Impact Project (IMIP) and dozens of other organizations convened the Thriving Together Washington State Civic Innovation Forum on March 2 via Zoom — the first of what organizers plan to be a bi-monthly gathering connecting leaders and civic renewal advocates across the region.
The Rev. Terry Kyllo, executive director of Paths to Understanding, says the moment demands it.
“We’re kind of shaken apart in this country right now and that’s not something that just happened overnight,” Kyllo said. “We’ve been building for this for quite a while.”
Kyllo began working towards this forum after years of working to counter anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S., starting Neighbors in Faith back in 2015 to further that mission.
Over the past three to four years, Kyllo and his partners have brought together roughly 220 people from 40 organizations across lines of tradition, culture, economic circumstance and age.
IMIP is one of those organizations, working to unite communities through pro-democracy initiatives at the local, state and national levels — and the March 2 forum was a chance to put that collective momentum on display.
“We really thought of this idea of civic innovation and how to do that, how to bring people together across a state and connect and be able to share and learn from each other about various kinds of bridging work, bridging divides, building a better future work, you know, blocking the bad things that are happening,” project director of IMIP, Walt Roberts, said.
Kyllo had clear goals for attendees: he wanted them to leave feeling less isolated, more connected to others doing similar work and reassured that shared problems often have shared solutions somewhere in the network.
“There’s other people that they can reach out to when they are trying to figure out some thorny problem — probably someone has faced it already,” he said.
He also wanted participants to know they have national connections, including government ties, to help rebuild systems at the community level.
Roberts shares that mission of connection and promoting conversations that lead to rebuilding of broken systems.
“Focusing on the sort of premise that the quality of our conversations is essential. If we’re going to have quality outcomes and create a quality future together, then the quality of how we have our conversations has to be top notch,” Roberts said. “All my work and most of my career has been around the idea of generative conversations, creative.”
But perhaps most importantly, Kyllo wanted people to feel seen.
“Part of it’s encouragement, but part of it is just the recognition that we’re not crazy to be worried about where we’re at,” he said. “You could tell there was a bit of relief.”
“I think there’s an awareness now that as the institutions have fallen down that people are going to have to stand up and we’re going to have to rise. And I think we can only do that, sustain that, together,” Kyllo said.
As IMIP and Paths to Understanding continue to promote this network of communication throughout Washington state, they also are working to connect institutions nationally.
“Ohio State is the next up. We have people in Ohio who are ready to create the Thriving Together Ohio Civic Innovation Forum,” Roberts said. “This work that we’re doing with a forum in Washington is to really acknowledge and amplify and really put the spotlight on Washington.”
By doing so, Roberts hopes to have that inspiration impact and inspire other states to get organized with their own forum and their own style.
Both Roberts and Kyllo are looking to the future of the Thriving Together networks with radical hope. The only question lies in if they’ll be able to secure the funds to do so, which they are pursuing through grant applications and donors.
“The only problem is resources. The strategy that we have and the blueprint and the design that we have that is exemplified in the project that we’re doing in Washington, that is solid,” Roberts said.
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