The ‘Better Together Film Festival,’ a Tongue-in-Cheek Tour of Our Divides, and Other News

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Every week in Philanthropy Today, we’ll feature articles, podcasts, essays, and other noteworthy reporting and discussions about America’s divides, philanthropy, and strategies for change. We’ll collect these items of note and periodically update this page. Here are 10 to kick things off. (Note: Some items require a subscription to a news outlet or publication.)

Email TheCommons@philanthropy.com with recommendations for items to include.

1.

Philanthropist and organizer Leah Hunt-Hendrix is touring to promote Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, her new book with Astra Taylor. Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian in which they describe how a “shallow, professional, and often philanthropically funded model of ‘advocacy’” is hurting democracy. And here’s a podcast interview with Hunt-Hendrix from the Review of Democracy.

2.

CoGenerate, which works to close generational divides, is out with a qualitative analysis that shows how young leaders — nonprofit leaders, organizers, writers — see the power of working with older generations. They also talk about polarization. “Disagreement is a productive tool,” says Thanasi Dilos, co-founder of Civics Unplugged. “But young people aren’t learning it because most of the conflict we see is online.”

3.

Ken Hersh, CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, offers tips for moderate Republicans in his “survival guide” for the 2024 elections in the Dallas Morning News (subscription required). Also: The center’s Strategerist podcast features a discussion of efforts by more than a dozen presidential centers to affirm the principles of democracy. Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, is among the guests.

4.

The Better Together Film Festival, a co-production of several organizations that aim to bridge divides, rolls out in communities nationwide April 15-21. Featured films include “Black, White, and the Greys,” “Dialogue Lab: America,” “List(e)n,” “Public Enemies, Private Friends,” “Purple: America, We Need to Talk,” and “Undivide Us” focused on efforts use conversations to help people find common ground.

5.

Conor Dougherty of the New York Times reports on a “surprising left-right alliance” promoting construction of apartments and duplexes in single-family neighborhoods. The somewhat strange bedfellows include the liberal Open Philanthropy and conservative Mercatus Center. “Some issues become a horseshoe,” said Cody Vasut, a Republican in the Texas House of Representatives. “We have different views of government, but sometimes we arrive at the same conclusion.”

6.

The Free Press — the news and podcast outlet founded by ex-New York Times writer and conservative Bari Weiss — recently launched “Ben Meets America,” a series of semi-comedic videos and essays in which correspondent Ben Kawaller interviews average Americans as “an antidote to the idea that we live in a hyper-polarized society destined to hate one another.”

7.

Ali Noorani, program director of U.S. democracy at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, introduces readers of his Substack column to the late activist Edith ‘Edie’ DeAngelis. “Edie taught me that tension is the energy that resides within healthy conflict, much less a healthy democracy,” Noorani writes. “It is the space where opposing forces — or sides of an argument — are in enough friction to develop new solutions.”

8.

The Wall Street Journal’s Faith Bottum writes of how neighbors in a Texas panhandle community rallied to save homes and lives from a wildfire: “It’s a spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized: a self-organizing community rising up to answer the need created by a natural disaster.” (Subscription required.)

9.

The Substack Connective Tissue features a conversation with sociologist Aaron Horvath of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Horvath argues that philanthropy’s insistence on measuring impact is weakening democracy: “We forgot about the important community and democracy stuff [that organizations do] because we got so obsessed with using nonprofits to get stuff done. There needs to be some corrective effort, where we actually find ways to fund and develop the meaningful civic infrastructure that upholds democracy.

10.

Arash Azizi, a historian of 20th-century social and political movements, argues in the Atlantic that progressives on the far left are hurting their cause by refusing to build coalitions with others who defend democracy and basic civil rights. “American leftists … have spent decades mired in niche subcultures of activist groups — they are marginal and yet still spurn coalitions that risk adulterating their purity.” (Subscription required.) (Philanthropist Rachel Pritzker, chair of the Democracy Funders Network, makes a similar argument in her Commons essay about her evolution from “partisan warrior” to democracy-builder.)

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