Written by: Allison Ralph and Michelle Garred
Welcome to the final blog in our three-part series on bridgebuilding effectiveness, co-authored by Allison Ralph of Cohesion Strategy and evaluation specialist Michelle Garred, PhD, of Ripple Peace Research & Consulting. This series arose from Allison’s concerns about certain aspects of bridgebuilding work in the pro-democracy space in the US. She reached out to Michelle to invite her collaboration in exploring these themes.
Our first post, published December 2, explored why and how we advocate a focus on behavior when evaluating bridgebuilding work. Our second post, published January 15, provided an overview of contact theory, which informs the central core of many bridgebuilding interventions in the US. That second post surfaced some uncomfortable realities, namely that bridgebuilding can have unintended effects, and that bridgebuilding may be necessary but not sufficient for building a just, cohesive unity in the US. Michelle unpacks and meets these challenges in today’s final post.
Important: These challenges are not unique to bridgebuilding. Instead, they are common within any kind of social impact effort. These challenges are not a reason to stop doing the vital work of bridgebuilding. Instead, they are a reason to cultivate the skills necessary to design a program wisely and manage it adaptively to keep the work on track, even in a complex, fast-changing context. There are practical strategy and design tools available to help us, and this post highlights two of the best: “Do No Harm” and the “Reflecting on Peace Practice Matrix.”
These evidence-based tools come from the global peacebuilding sector. They were created by CDA Collaborative Learning, an influential international “think and do tank” where Michelle has served as a past senior staffer and an ongoing consultant partner. Just a few years ago, it was difficult to explain the value of these international peace tools to American colleagues, because we Americans did not recognize ourselves as a society at risk for conflict. That moment has now passed; America's status on the democracy index and our levels of social trust have fallen significantly, and political violence is on the rise. These tools, designed with and for practical use by communities and organizations, are highly applicable within the US context. With that said, the terminology may require some tweaking to ensure resonance with US audiences. (Terminology ideas are welcome, and we’ll share them with CDA, who kindly reviewed this post.)
How to address unintended effects?
Unintended effects are common in social impact initiatives. Some are positive or neutral, and it’s important to notice them so you can adapt accordingly. Some are negative, and those need to be prevented or mitigated as promptly as possible. CDA’s “Do No Harm” (DNH) tool is concerned with unintended negative effects on the relationships between different social groups, as well as strengthening local capacities for cohesion and cooperation.
The core concept of DNH - grounded in multi-country ground-level collaborative research - is that any initiative undertaken within a conflicted context carries the potential to either improve or damage intergroup relationships. In bridgebuilding terms, your efforts to help groups come together also carry the potential to exacerbate the tensions that drive groups apart. The challenge is to identify the problem and adaptively re-design so that the program can avoid unintentional harm and, instead, contribute towards better relationships.
DNH practice is deeply grounded in the discipline of analyzing the local context and the intergroup relationships within it. DNH collaborative research findings demonstrate that every intergroup relationship features both Dividers (factors or tensions that drive groups apart) and Connectors (factors that help bring groups together). Your program will inevitably interact with those Dividers and Connectors. If your program strengthens a Connector, or weakens a Divider, those effects are beneficial for intergroup relationships, and they may be worth replicating or amplifying. On the other hand, if the program exacerbates a Divider, or weakens a Connector, then it is causing an unintended negative effect that needs to be addressed.
Those unintended effects are caused by the decisions and behaviors, sometimes very minute details, that shape the program design and implementation. The solution lies in unpacking your programming assumptions to identify and then modifying the problematic details to improve relational impact. If you are working in a highly polarized context, DNH offers a means for periodic in-depth analysis and re-design throughout the life of your program. At the same time, DNH also equips many practitioners at an intuitive level, becoming a lens that transforms how they see their context and the effects of their own actions.
As an example of DNH-style thinking in action, consider the City of Chicago’s “One System Initiative” just launched to integrate its two shelter systems serving the local homeless population and newly arriving asylum seekers. Chicago prides itself on being a welcoming city, so when the number of asylum seekers increased significantly in 2022 and 2023, the city stood up a shelter system to help accommodate new arrivals, meeting important human needs. At the same time, some felt that Chicago’s local homeless population was neglected and, given the predominant demographics of each group, painful tensions were exacerbated between the city’s Black and Latino communities.
Launched last month, “One System” aims to mitigate this unintended effect by integrating the two systems, providing shelter beds based on need, without segregating or treating people differently based on their immigration status. “One System” is highly promising but not necessarily perfect; there may not be enough beds to meet the overall need, which could again affect intergroup tensions. A DNH lens anticipates imperfection by emphasizing that re-design is iterative, and best informed by the experience of the people most affected. Each re-design should be monitored for its effects on intergroup relationships and modified as needed.
For a deeper dive into DNH guidance, check out the following:
A DNH learner’s manual from CDA.
For interfaith bridgebuilders: an article on the surprisingly transformative effects of DNH in the faith sector by Johonna McCants-Turner and Michelle Garred.
The online library of the Global Conflict Sensitivity Community Hub, within which DNH is the most influential and widely-used tool.
How to address the reality of being “necessary but not sufficient”?
First, if it feels threatening to hear that bridgebuilding may be necessary but not sufficient for building cohesive unity in the US - you can relax a bit. This is true of most social impact initiatives. We affirm that light-touch bridgebuilding - approaches that focus on reducing ill-feeling across differences without directly seeking specific changes in action - are necessary because American life remains highly segregated. Our intergroup dynamics will not improve in the absence of real-life relationships.
At the same time, a single solution is rarely sufficient because most complex social problems are shaped by more than one underlying driver. Contact theorists Tropp & Dehrone (2022, p.5) state that intergroup contact works best when accompanied by at least four other support factors: equitable access to resources, public leadership and norms, public safety, and economic development. Contact theorists also continue to debate the extent to which intergroup contact can influence support for policies that address systemic discrimination - which implies the recognition that good relationships are not sufficient in the absence of fair public policy (Pettigrew & Tropp 2013, p.171).
CDA has a useful tool for thinking realistically about the extent to which your program strategies are positioned for high-level, far-reaching impact and what to do about it. Based on 26 international case studies, the Reflecting on Peace Practice (RPP) Matrix (CDA 2016, Module 4) focuses on two key dimensions of program strategy:
Does the program work toward change at the individual/personal level, or the socio-political level?
Does the program aim to engage “more people” or “key people?” A “more people” strategy reaches out to the general public. A “key people” approach reaches out to pivotal decision-makers (whether formal or informal).
When those two dimensions are arranged in rows and columns, they result in a four-quadrant matrix. Bridgebuilding programs work toward change at the individual/personal level, mostly but not exclusively through “more people” strategies, so they sit most often in the upper left quadrant.
The RPP collaborative research carries some sobering findings:
Any program that stays within just one quadrant, without linking to others, is not sufficient to achieve high-level, far-reaching impact.
A program that focuses on the individual/personal level, without also linking to the socio-political level, will have no significant impact.
When working at the socio-political level, it is necessary to engage both key people and more people to be effective.
This implies that many programs, including some typical bridgebuilding programs, are not solely sufficient for achieving high-level, far-reaching impact.
However, the RPP learnings on how to respond to this dilemma are actually quite encouraging. It is understood that most programs cannot operate in all four quadrants simultaneously! There are other options for improvement, such as:
Build linkages over time: As your program progresses into new phases or evolves over time, look for opportunities to extend its activities into other quadrants. For example, the Needham Resilience Network in the Boston area centers contact (upper left quadrant) in the context of community problem solving (lower left quadrant) by creating “a rapid response and prevention capability to counter hate-based events and foster social cohesion.”
Create linkages through partnership: Partner closely with organizations working in other quadrants to create synced-up operational linkages that shift the experience of some or all program participants and enhance cross-organizational learning. While some organizations can do this linking work on their own, others specialize in supporting those linkages. One such is Better Together America (BTA), which is an organization helping others create these linkages. BTA supports a nationwide network of local “civic hubs,” each of which connects a wide range of pro-democracy organizations. The purpose is to provide a shared, pro-democracy identity, to build relationships between the organizations, and ultimately to create unique, local “ladders of engagement” for individuals to move from relationship-building, to community service, civic education, bridgebuilding, deliberative democracy, and civic action.
Recommendations for Funders
Where Michelle brings expertise in peacebuilding and social justice practices, Allison has experience working with the American philanthropic sector, particularly in the pluralistic and pro-democracy spaces.
It appears to us that the learnings from the global peacebuilding space have some big strategy implications for pro-democracy and pro-pluralism funders here in the US.
Based on conversations held on background, we know that pro-democracy funders are keenly aware of effectiveness and value-for-money questions in allocating their overall portfolios and in engaging specifically with the work of bridgebuilding.
Despite such real concerns and our recognition that bridgebuilding work is not solely sufficient, we still believe it is necessary. Donors can provide the encouragement and support necessary for light-touch bridgebuilding programs to make use of DNH to prevent and mitigate unintended negative consequences, and to expand their work beyond a single quadrant according to the RPP matrix. When bridgebuilding extends into the socio-political dimension it may look like: participants influencing norms and behaviors at a community-wide level, taking action together on social issues of shared concern, creating new intentionally diverse civil society institutions, and/or transformatively desegregating the institutions that already exist.
In this moment of urgency, and while bridgers already struggle for funds, another readily available option is for bridgers to build partnerships with other organizations doing deeper work on policy, civic engagement, civic assemblies, and other pro-democracy work, especially if it is transpartisan. Bridgebuilding brings something essential to the US pro-democracy space, since democracy in a pluralistic society demands mutual respect, regard and ability to collaborate across diverse social groups. In the absence of healthy relationships between groups, democracy works well only for the advantaged majority, and it may cease to function altogether.
There is some limited evidence that the presence of active and successful citizens’ assemblies has positive impacts not just on participants, but on the broader community. We also know that in policy-change advocacy work, broader transpartisan coalitions have more strategic capacity and are better protected against political backlash.
In the pro-democracy space, light-touch bridgers–and here we include indirect contact and other communications-based strategies–can be a ready source of motivated participants. The vast majority of individual experiences with these approaches may be modest, yet some participants will be inspired to connect to deeper opportunities, including but not limited to engagement in the pro-democracy space. If pro-democracy opportunities are readily available to participants in lighter-touch bridgebuilding, they will be more likely to move in this direction, which is so vital to the current needs of the US.
We see opportunities to encourage collaborations across the spectrum of very light touch (indirect contact or perception gap work), to light-touch (relationship-oriented bridgers), to a voluntarily sustained transformative engagement across groups and/or to integration into local or regional pro-democracy hubs. Funding that intersection of bridgebuilding and democracy, and specifically funding the staffing and overhead that forming, sustaining, and evaluating these collaborations, the overall impact of both bridgebuilding and pro-democracy work could be significantly improved.
Concluding Thoughts
We want to see the essential work of bridgebuilding thrive! This means approaching it with “eyes wide open,” addressing the possibility of unintended effects and reckoning with the reality that individual transformation needs to be expressed in the broader socio-political space. It also means paying close attention to contact theory’s conditions of success, and emphasizing observable behavior changes when evaluating progress. None of these principles are unique to bridgebuilding; they are common across most social impact efforts. Our three-part series has barely scratched the surface of these complex issues, but we hope the condensed learning has been useful to busy bridgers and funders. There is no better moment to work together toward a just, cohesive unity in the United States.
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