Depolarizing America: #ListenFirst and America Talks. Kristin Hansen and Mizell Stewart

Let's Find Common Ground

USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future

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5 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We learn about two brave and successful attempts to get Americans of differing backgrounds and political convictions to engage in personal face-to-face conversations. America Talks and the National Week of Conversation, both held in mid-June, were part of expanding efforts to push back against deep divides and toxic polarization. In this episode, we discuss lessons learned, insights gained, and the vital difference between talking and listening. Our guests are Kristin Hansen, Executive Director at Civic Health Project and Director at AllSides, and Mizell Stewart, Vice President, News Performance, Talent & Partnerships for Gannett and the USA Today Network. Both were involved in this new initiative.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Talking to someone you don't know who feels differently about the world might seem intimidating
0:06.8	or unnerving. Yet it can also be rewarding. In this show, we look at two successful attempts
0:14.0	to get Americans of differing backgrounds and beliefs to engage in face-to-face conversations.
0:20.3	This is Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashley Nantite. Today we meet two
0:32.6	people who planned and took part in America Talks and the National Week of Conversation.
0:38.2	Each event was designed to get Americans to go outside their comfort zones and engage with
0:42.7	people they might not ever talk to otherwise. Our guests on this show are Kristen Hansen and
0:48.9	MyZell Stewart. Kristen is Executive Director at Civic Health Project, a non-profit that aims to
0:55.1	reduce partisan polarization. MyZell is a vice president at the Media Company Genet and the USA
1:02.6	Today Network. In this conversation, we discuss lessons learned, insights gained, and the vital
1:09.6	difference between talking and listening. Let's start with America Talks. The event received a
1:17.1	lot of publicity and Kristen, you were involved in organizing it. What was America Talks and will
1:23.7	it happen again next year? Well, we'll find out, Richard. America Talks was the first time ever
1:30.0	that we've brought the award-winning program called My Country Talks from Europe over to the United
1:34.8	States and the basic premise of any My Country Talks event, including ours, is that you bring
1:41.7	thousands of people together to meet face-to-face on video for conversations of about an hour
1:47.4	across political divides. And we held America Talks, the weekend of June 12th and 13th,
1:53.3	providing exactly that opportunity to Americans who signed up for the event.
1:57.8	So Kristen, just how big was America Talks? How many people were involved?
2:04.3	We held the event over a weekend. We had one set of conversations take place on Saturday
2:10.0	and another on Sunday. And at our peak on Saturday, we had over a thousand people at one time
2:15.6	on our purpose-built conversation platform, having those face-to-face conversations.
	...

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