How we can Block, Bridge, and Build our Democratic Future Together

As part of the 2025 National Days of Dialogue, we hosted a session entitled, “How We Can Block, Bridge, and Build Our Democratic Future Together”, the recording of which can be found here.

This session is a born of our current moment in history that requires us to develop new organizing modalities where dialogue is complementary with other approaches. Civic actors have to come together to block the threats we are facing to our democratic values, we need to bridge across differences to foster broad-based movements with the widest participation, and we have to build together the future we want to live in our communities and our nation. As we seek to work towards belonging for all, protect democracy, and combat authoritarian trends, civic actors have to be and do several things at once: in this session we explored together the many paradoxes of being both in resistance mode while also being restorative. How we stay future-oriented and hopeful while acknowledging and redressing past and current harms? In conversation together, we interrogated these seeming tensions and investigated how we can wrestle in practice with these paradoxes, allowing us to move forward together with the broadest participation possible along many lines of difference.