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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.