Community Resources

Transpartisan initiatives
While some attempts at cross-partisan dialogue (aka: transpartisanship) in the USA (such as No Labels) are well known, a wide variety of initiatives are advancing on many different fronts.

Allied resources

  • Living Room Conversations (livingroomconversations.org) founded by a lifelong Democrat and a lifelong Republican provides proven tools and networks to people who want to engage honest productive conversations that link them with people across various social divides. Most of these conversations reweave connections among people on two or more sides of America’s current dividing lines of cultural polarization.
  • The Transpartisan Review (transpartisanreview.com), edited by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner, is a recently inaugurated digital journal of politics, society, and culture. It explores the apparent disintegration of the traditional political, social and cultural order from a transpartisan point of view, and looks at the deeper social and cultural forces in play in our political system.
  • The Institute for Cultural Evolution (ICE) (culturalevolution.org) is the first avowedly integral think tank in the United States. Founded by integral philosophers Steve McIntosh and Carter Phipps, ICE looks to find ways that both the left and right can get past political gridlock and enact a dialectic that gets past the destructive dead-ends of our culture wars. ICE is discussed in detail in chapter 8.
  • The Bridge Alliance (bridgealliance.us) is a diverse coalition of more than 80 civic action organizations committed to revitalizing the democratic process in America. It provides infrastructure and investment for its member organizations to connect and collaborate on projects that further shared goals to generate a collective impact on elections, governance, policy, and civic life.
  • Undivide Us, and the practice of “Undebate” (undivide-us.com) implements ways to reunite the United States through a powerful dialogue-based, five-step method (called the “undebate method”) for collaborative problem solving, and by providing a framework to help identify biases and cultivate empathy.
  • Civil Conversations (civilconversationsproject.org) was created by podcaster Krista Tippett “to renew common life in a fractured and tender world”. It convenes public conversations and publishes a starter guide to better conversations across divides.
  • Converge (convergeforimpact.com) has led the creation of multi-stakeholder collaborations, partnerships, and networks in diverse fields such as urban revitalization, health care, and environmental conservation. It brings its experience and expertise in systems and design thinking and in organizational and network strategy.
  • All Sides Now (allsides.com) is a unique news site that displays reports on current events from the left, right, and center, designed to free people from filter bubbles so they can better understand the world and each other. It employs multi-partisan technologies fueled by patented crowd-driven data. Founded by lifelong Republican John Gable, it intends to ameliorate the national security threat of excessive polarization.
  • Better Angels (better-angels.org) is a citizens’ movement aimed to reduce political polarization and gridlock in the US by bringing liberals and conservatives together for workshops and teaching skills for bridging the partisan divide.
  • Village Square Conversations (tlh.villagesquare.us) is a US nonprofit, membership organization whose mission is to build dynamic, constructive civil discourse across political divides in one’s hometown, state, and nation, reviving the spirit of the town hall across America, and fostering debate that is both vigorous and civil.

International transpartisan initiatives include well known efforts like The Elders (theelders.org) an independent group of world-famous global leaders working together to promote the shared interests of humanity and small creatives like SimPol (simpol.org) which promotes “simultaneous policy implementation” to enable individual nations to express leadership and build momentum toward addressing global problems. It is described in chapter eight.