Use your listening skills to heal the partisan divisions of this election cycle.

Jenn Muster
Oct 27, 2016
2 min read

From Minda:

I met David Campt at the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Conference in Boston. David calls himself “The Dialogue Guy.” He is a keynote speaker, audience response systems guru, civil engagement specialist, expert in racial equity, and author of many books. Watch this short video to learn more about David:

Dear Minda,

It was great to see you at the Dialogue and Deliberation conference in Massachusetts.

I am very glad that you see the potential alignment between the Friday Fellowship and Americans Listen. I think that many of the Friday Fellows alumni would see the benefits of participating in the project. As you know, Americans Listen is an election season project designed to heal the partisan divisions that seem to have intensified in this election cycle. The project will connect those who oppose Donald Trump—but who value the leadership skill of listening—to his supporters (of the

same race). The listeners will use a semi-structured interview protocol to hear the primary drivers of the interviewees’ support for Mr. Trump; the protocol includes probes for experiences or deeper values that animate those views. The listeners will also ask Trump supporters for their views on other issues, such as race in the campaign and in the nation, and about how division might be healed.

The primary task of the listeners is to provide an empathetic listening experience and to subsequently provide an extensive written reflection about what the Trump supporters said and their internal reflections on the challenges of staying in a stance of empathetic listening. These reflections will be compiled into two large databases (publicly searchable) that will serve as powerful addition to scholarship about “Trumpism” and about the challenges of dialogue across ideological lines.

My hope is to get enough interviews done in North Carolina so that this data can be analyzed as its own subset. In addition to contributing to this important body of knowledge, Friday Fellows alumni who participate in Americans Listen will find it beneficial to put their listening and reflection skills to the test.

Thank you for passing this on to the Fellows.

They can learn more about the website at www.americanslisten.com,