In today’s polarized climate, working across our differences to solve tough problems can sometimes feel hopeless. To address this problem and to offer citizens a way to become involved, The Listen First Project has created “The Bridge-Building Innovation Showcase.” As the title implies, this innovation program selected five teams of Americans from across the country to work across differences to tackle significant problems in their own communities.
The projects these citizens addressed differed depending on the assessment by each group as to what problems they could effectively focus on in their community. The teams in each community felt so strongly about the importance of bridging divides in service to their communities that they completed the work in time allocated outside of their day jobs.
Today, we feature the problem identified in these five communities plus the action taken and the secret sauce that each group found to turn ideas into action.
Tillmook, Oregon
- Problem Identified: The need for financial education and empowerment.
- Action Taken: As part of UR Action's Uniting for Action on the Oregon Economy, we worked with Financial Beginnings Oregon to develop a plan to train volunteers and offer financial literacy classes through community partners and area schools.
- Secret Sauce: They humanized the topic of financial literacy by showcasing local heroes' journeys from financial frustration to financial freedom.
- Video presentation by the team
Lexington, Kentucky
- Problem Identified: The need for a network of people engaged in creating community resilience in the face of climate change.
- Action Taken: Recognizing that conversation is a powerful tool to effect change but that conversations about climate change can be intimidating, they facilitated conversations between community members in ways that generate genuine connections between people.
- Secret Sauce: They managed a yard sign library full of positive messaging to stir conversation!
- Video presentation by the team
Muskegon County, Michigan
- Problem Identified: A lack of housing and safe places for youth to gather.
- Action Taken: Upgraded a city park, revitalized a high school field, created a community center, and helped youth learn how to build houses.
- Secret Sauce: They engage the rest of our community to ensure our actions align with their vision of bettering our surroundings.
- Video presentation by the team
Franklin County, Pennsylvania
- Problem Identified: Targeted violence can occur when we lose sight of each other’s humanity. Our current political division increases tribal ways of viewing each other.
- Action Taken: Through UR Action’s Uniting to Prevent Targeted Violence in South-Central PA, we’re working to expand Franklin County residents’ awareness of resources currently available to meet basic life needs.
- Secret Sauce: They realized they all had a desire to address violence by collaborating with people with different perspectives, and that starts with active listening.
- Video presentation by the team
Emporia, Kansas
- Problem Identified: The Hispanic community is experiencing poor health outcomes due to unequal access to health information and services.
- Action Taken: As part of UR Action's Uniting for Action on the Oregon Economy, we worked with Financial Beginnings Oregon to develop a plan to train volunteers and offer financial literacy classes through community partners and area schools.
- Secret Sauce: They humanized the topic of financial literacy by showcasing local heroes' journeys from financial frustration to financial freedom.
- Video presentation by the team
Louisiana
- Problem Identified: Incarcerated Louisianans suffering from unconstitutional, non-unanimous convictions without a judicial remedy.
- Action Taken: They formed the Unanimous Jury Coalition and succeeded in mobilizing Louisiana voters to abolish a Jim Crow era law in LA that allowed non-unanimous convictions.
- Secret Sauce: The built out the largest ballot initiative campaign in Louisiana's history with some of the most conservative Republicans and most liberal activists leading the movement, together speaking to values that resonated with people across the state.
- Video presentation by the team
Last month, the participants from the above groups came together for the 2023 Bridge-Building Innovation Showcase. The event featured the community member teams showcasing their efforts and offering citizens from across the country the opportunity to learn about these important initiatives and to engage in conversations as to future opportunities in their own communities.
The Bridge-Building Innovation Showcase proves there is a solution to the toxic polarization that is dividing us as a nation. The Listen First Coalition 500+ organizations are working daily to bring Americans together across divides to listen and understand each other, to find common ground, and to make bridge-building and collaboration the norm in America.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.