Nealin Parker, Executive Director of Search - USA Talks with Heidi Burgess

Heidi: Hi, this is Heidi Burgess. I'm with Beyond Intractability, and I'm here today with Nealin Parker, who is the executive director of Common Ground USA, which is part of Search for Common Ground. And thank you, Nealin, very much, for taking the time to talk to us.

Nealin: I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Heidi: Well, great. Thank you. Can we start by you telling us a little bit about what Search is for those of watchers who don't know Search?.

Nealin: Yeah, I'd love to. So just to start, I spent about 15 years doing peacebuilding internationally before coming back to the United States.  So Search is the world's oldest, largest, fully dedicated peacebuilding organization. It works, usually, in countries that are recovering from civil war or other violent conflict and has an intent to end violent conflict around the world. I first came in contact with them when I was working in Liberia, Kenya, and Afghanistan, and was just deeply compelled by the work that they do.  So their programming is obviously distinct in each of the countries where they work. It's locally driven, which is one of, I think, the hallmarks of its success. And so you'll see programming in Liberia and Kenya that was based on radio shows and media programming. And very distinct programming in Afghanistan.  That program actually continues through today and is working on, for example, opening up spaces for women to continue in the humanitarian sector and other places as a contribution to bringing women into the peacebuilding process. So you'll see something different in each place.

But one of the things that I saw from being in multiple countries was a unifying feature of Search's staff, actually. What I saw was that there were people who, to describe in sort of metaphoric terms, had walked through the darkness and hold onto the light. And what I mean by that is that it wasn't a, kind of, "if we all hold hands, we're all going to be okay "approach to conflict. It was a very gritty and very informed kind of approach that said the outcomes of adversarial approaches to conflict leave too much on the table. And we see another way forward, a kind of win-win that involves transformation. And it doesn't look like each person gets the thing that they start with. It actually looks like engagement with relationships and through those relationships coming to different conclusions and outcomes than you might have imagined to begin with.

So I was really compelled by the work. And when I started to feel more and more red flags in the United States, I returned to the United States and actually begged Search to start a program in the United States.

Heidi: Wow. Okay. And what was their initial reaction? Was it positive immediately?

Nealin: It took a couple of years to get there. And I don't think that it was a philosophical misalignment because actually, Search for Common Ground has had an original vision. The founder had an original vision of having 50% of work in the United States and 50% of its work in other countries. And certainly, it would be wrong to imagine that conflict is something that hasn't existed within our own country for years and years and centuries.  And I think it's also really quite powerful that one of the world's most iconic peacebuilding movements is a homegrown US movement — the civil rights movement is what I'm referring to there. But there are multiple that have grown up in the United States. So for all of those reasons, it makes lots of sense for there to be a US program and for there to have continued to be US programming throughout the history of over the last 40 years.

But the way that the programming unfolded, there was just much more that was happening within the international community than there was in the United States. So I think it was one of those go big or go home moments. Shamil Idriss, who is the CEO of Search globally, wanted to make the largest investment in the United States since the founding of the organization. And that took some time to build.

Heidi: I see. Well, that's great. So tell me first how big you are and then what you're doing.

Nealin: Right now, how big are we? I guess it's hard to by which measure. We're only about 16 staff right now. We were founded in 2021, and it's 2024 for anyone who's listening to this in the future. And so we were founded at the very end of 2021, actually.  So in early stages, we have programs and staff in Louisiana, Texas, and Pennsylvania. We have staff around the country, but that is because we live in the future and you can have hybrid teams. And actually, one of the values of Search and one of the methodologies is that you very intentionally hire staff across as many differences and intentionally across key divides in the country.  And you build a team with that kind of multi-partiality, that kind of difference in lived experience. And this can be everything from age and economics and ideology and race and religion, gender, sexuality. You're just really trying to inform all of your choices as much as possible from go with as many different perspectives as you can.

So being able to hire across the country and bring in various geographies in a country the size of the United States has been a real asset.

Heidi: How did you recruit people? Did you just put an ad on the internet or word of mouth? Or how did you get your team?

Nealin: Yeah. I mean, so I'm assuming, Heidi, that you're well familiar with the fact that peacebuilding is not a largely known term in the United States.  And one of my experiences, both in terms of strategy and in terms of recruitment, is that there is actually an international system around peacebuilding. And peacebuilding is a known term in the international field. And there are people who have careers that are peacebuilding careers. But, if you are a homegrown peacebuilder in the United States, you might call yourself a bridge builder.  You might call yourself a community builder. You might call yourself a social justice activist. You might call yourself a democracy defender. You might call yourself a teacher. There are a lot of words that you might use. You probably won't use the word peacebuilder.

So one of the things that we wanted to do, to begin with, was not to hire a lot of internationals who were familiar with and comfortable with the international terminology, which, largely, I've come to understand that I understand the tools of peacebuilding in a really broad frame. And I think of a lot of different levers that we might use because I'm familiar with what it looks like to work in a post-conflict context with, often, a large presence of the United Nations peacekeeping operations, and then civil society connected with that. It's not that that's the only model. It's just that that is a model that I am familiar with. And so I make assumptions about what falls in the category of "peacebuilding" based on that view of what we are talking about. And I think of everything from how you build out a national government's budget to how you de-escalate in an armed protest as fundamental to what "peacebuilding" means.

That is not the case, again, in the United States. The kind of homegrown context for that sees the President's budget as very distinct from immediate de-escalation and violence prevention. So a lot of what was fun about that hiring was using that as an opportunity to translate from the international concepts and terminology to the domestic reality and to try to identify the people, but also the words, that resonate in the United States.  And I feel like a lot of what my kind of broader fieldwork has looked like has been around trying to knit together groups that have distinct histories and language and cultures and see their work as distinct from each other and kind of create ways for those groups to understand their work as all weaving together for a mutually beneficial purpose.

And that mutually beneficial purpose has also multiple names, but one of them in the short term that we spend some time on is thinking about "resilience." How we go through hard times and emerge on the other side of those either stronger or more connected, more capable of withstanding a future crisis and more capable of building towards a positive future that is not reactive, but is a more proactive build.

Heidi:  It's interesting. It strikes me that, maybe I'm being too pessimistic, but the word "resilience" strikes me as assuming that the future is going to have lots of crises in it and it doesn't have the forward-looking component of how we can make it better. It's more just how can we survive, which may be true and correct and accurate, but I hope that — and you alluded to the notion — that we're also trying to build something better.

Nealin: I appreciate you making that comment because one of the things I said is in the short term, and I think that's an important qualifier. But I will also say that it's been helpful for us to make an assumption of turbulence in our future. And the reason it's been helpful is because I think largely, if you're looking at the trends for societal health, we have a lot of indicators that things are not going in the direction that we would like for them to have. And as those indicators, as we have some deterioration around those, and by that, I mean trust in the fundamentals of democracy, trust in each other, trust in media and truth. All of these things are helpful if you are trying to get a sense of either how resilient or just how healthy a country and a society are, you can measure these things. And actually, Search does use something called the Peace Impact Framework.  It's not just Search's, but it measures different buckets of heath. And since we are largely moving not in the direction we would hope for those indicators, it is the case that you always have crises. That's just a truth. There will be crises in any society.

The question is how dangerous, if you will, are those crises? How likely are those crises to metastasize into something more negative? I think about this the way that I think about the risk of forest fire. So if you have a drought and you have a very dry forest, then any match that falls, can start a fire. It's not that you would not have matches in a wet forest. But if you have matches in a wet forest, you don't have to worry so much. If you have matches in a dry one, it's a bigger deal. I would argue that right now we are not in a wet forest. I would not argue that we are right now in a raging fire. Kind of I don't see that.

But, what I do see is that we are getting drier and that we are in a place where things like mis- and disinformation have a much richer home, and we are willing to listen to those things. And I think mis- and disinformation is a good small encapsulation of crises, because that kind of  uncertainty that you experience -- thinking "maybe they are evil, and I just wasn't thinking about it that way." All of those feelings are components of why mis- and disinformation can be compelling in amplifying distrust and increasing risk of violence. But they are also part of that world of if there is a crisis, then you find yourself in a kind of scary moment where you don't have a lot of information and you're not sure what to fill it with, and you fill it with whatever polarization or other narrative exists.

But the positive thing is that if we only exist in steady state, if we assume that we will always go the direction that we are headed right now, and that's where interests are aligned, is for us to continue on the path that we are, then there's really no way out. And a crisis gives you an opportunity where people say, "Actually, I didn't mean to get here." And violence, in some cases, plays a role of taking people who thought they were bought in to an idea and a concept and a way forward and gives real pause. And you can have real realignment with groups that were otherwise really willing to continue walking down this path who think this is actually much more radical than I was prepared to be part of. So by treating crises not as a fully negative thing, but rather seeing them as part of what will unfold and imagining how we might capitalize on each one to build out further infrastructure and ultimately to, ideally, have one that is a turning point is part of the way that I make sense of what is happening now and the opportunities that come.

Heidi: I've got lots of philosophical questions and comments about that, but I'm thinking it might be helpful to jump into some specifics and find out what you're doing in a few of the locations where you're working. And then we might get a better image of how this philosophy works and plays out. So tell us what you are doing on the ground – you said you were working in Pennsylvania, and I don't remember the other states. Just choose a state and tell us what you're doing.

Nealin: Wonderful. I do want to not fully gloss over your philosophical questions because I will say that you and Guy are both people who push for clarity. And this is hard. And in some ways, for me, at least, I would say humbling and uncharted work. And that I do it living on the shoulders of so many giants, but, it feels as much an art as a science. So I don't think that I have all the answers. And I do think that it is in conversation and kind of the rubbing of thought edges together that one gets to a cleaner idea.  So please don't hold back on the pushing back is what I would say.

Heidi: All right. Well, I'm hoping that we'll come back around. But I want to make sure that we get to some of the specifics of what you're doing.

Nealin: Great. Great. Well, let me start with Texas then.  In Texas, we have a partnership with the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network and specifically a Southern Baptist evangelical pastor named Bob Roberts. And we are working on a project there that has iterated into a new project focused more on rural areas. It is looking at belonging within the evangelical Christian space.

So often, there are external groups that are telling people how they should be. And that's a very closed way to think about what does a community need. So the evangelical community, in some cases, you know it's very robust, very rich, a lot of community within, but also, has been at different times isolated, either politically or culturally from other parts of the United States. And so what we wanted to do with MFNN and also American University was work on creating a handbook for pastors who are trying to do a couple of different things. One is they're looking at divisions within their own communities, but also within their own flock. They stand at the pulpit, look out at the congregation and they see that there are people who have been friends for a long time, and they are starting to that fabric is starting to fray. So how do you deal with that? But how do you deal with that in a way that is true to that tradition and that emerges from within the context and language and needs of pastors in that space?

Secondly, how do you deal with community members that have been more vulnerable to more extreme language — language or messages that say that you can only solve your problems with "the other" through violence or through more aggressive strategies.

But again, while there are tools that might talk about radicalization, those tools often emerge from outside of the communities that they are talking to. So we went in a very different approach and actually were responding to a request from Pastor Bob to try to think of what was at the heart of those vulnerabilities. And that's where we came to work on belonging and work on community within that faith tradition. In Louisiana...

Heidi: Stop a sec before you go to Louisiana. I'm curious with the Texas program, was that initiated when this pastor came to you and said, "Hey, I think I need some help," or?

Nealin: Yes. And I have to say so much of this lives with the vision of Pastor Roberts and how compelling he is, how proactive he is, how much he cares about his faith, the community of Southern Baptists, and his sense that some things were happening that pastors weren't taught to deal with or equipped to address, and that they were equipped to address so many things, but needed extra in this space. So that's why he came to Search.

Heidi: How did he know about you? Were you active in the area already? 

Nealin: Well, Multi-Faith Neighbors Network is also a global endeavor in addition to being local. Pastor Roberts does work internationally and came into contact with Search through that. So that's how we had that original connection.

Heidi: Ah, okay. All right. Louisiana?

Nealin: Louisiana.  I'm just giving you a couple of examples and trying to go across different programs to get a little bit of an idea. So in Louisiana, we are partnered with a group called the Plessy and Ferguson Initiative. It is the descendants of the defendant and the judge in the Plessy and Ferguson case, which was an extension of separate and unequal for another 50 years in 1892 until Brown versus Board of Education. So the judge who decided we will continue separate and unequal, and the defendant who was desperately trying to get that to change. Generations down, Phoebe Ferguson, and Keith Plessy meet each other in New Orleans and decide that they want to write a new chapter for their families and for the country, that instead of being Plessy versus Ferguson, is Plessy and Ferguson.

It's a pretty incredible story and a pretty incredible partnership. And so we are working with them on a program called Reconstructing Reconstruction, which works on racial healing through memory and building out new markers, but doing that with a process that is broad, encompassing, and brings in the community to try to, in many ways, recreate the inspiring story of them and their families in writing what the next chapter of our country is and uses memory as a way to not only try to memorialize unifying and important parts of our history, but also tries to use that as a catalyst for further action.

 And in Pennsylvania, actually, and in Texas, we have a program where we bring together state leaders from about as broad a coalition as we can. People whose constituencies might not want to be in a room with each other, but who they, themselves, have a sense of the real importance of decreasing tensions and the risk of political violence around the elections and around other events and actually just sort of like it's a standing program. It's intended not to just be a one-time thing. As you know With trust, you can't really build it cyclically and then disappear. So we are bringing together state leaders on a longer time frame to try to build that trust across differences and intentionally also across divides for multiple purposes, for instance, the prevention of political violence, the opportunity for de-escalation, should escalation occur, and creating a natural DNA or kernel for healing, depending on the directions that feel most salient over the next years.

Heidi: One of the things that strikes me as really special about Search is that you've been able to —our term is "scale up" —  what you do, particularly through the soap operas and other media efforts. It's been much more than one-on-one kinds of things, small-scale dialogues. Most of what you're describing here sounds relatively local, small-scale. But I'm wondering if there is a plan to then go bigger, to take it so that it grows beyond Pennsylvania and Texas and Louisiana.

Nealin: Yeah. So I, and Search, believe in kind of iteration and learning. It's a natural fit for an organization that works in turbulent societies and turbulent moments in countries. One of the things that you would and should see in early days of a Search program is a huge investment in learning. So just because something works in another country, does not mean that it's going to work in the United States. Or it may work in different ways. So trying to figure out what does faith engagement look like? What does it look like to engage around issues of race? What does it look like to invest around elections? What does it look like to work on policy? What does media work look like? All of those pieces of the work that we do But one of the very first hires we made, after program staff, was a person working on monitoring, evaluation, and learning. And that was not an accident. That was because that's just a really, really important part of figuring out the early days of Search programming.

You're right to say that Search is invested in bringing things to scale and that media is a really important part of that. So over the fall is going to be the first time that we engage in a broader media campaign.  And that's going to use the best learnings from media programming globally, but also our experience over the last couple of years here and, hopefully, bring together, kind of elevating our countervailing identities, norming within various communities, which is true that nonviolence is vastly more preferred than more violent or even adversarial approaches in some cases.

And so sorry, to be clear, when I say "adversarial approaches," that's the sloppy use of language. What I mean is harassment and threats. I mean, we hear a lot about these things, but there's a very small percentage of our society who thinks that that kind of behavior is acceptable. And just reminders of where we have agency and hope. That, in this case, is going to be our first, as I said, large media campaign.

Search has done a huge number of deeply creative approaches to this work, everything from soap operas to reality television and competitive survivor type things, using narratives to infuse that into kind of blockbusters, the themes and narratives of how we can solve our differences across in a more enduring way with transformation than with purely adversarial approaches.

So all those, I think, are places that we are in the process of moving towards. But I said before, there are differences in the United States. Media is very different in the United States. And when Search did Talking Drum Studio in Liberia, it was one of a very few shows. It was the Walter Cronkite of Liberia radio, where you could create a program, and it would be the program that was playing on the available radio waves across the country.

That is not the case in the United States. So thinking about how we break through using the tools of media that we have, how to invest in social media, how to invest in streaming— Netflix or Prime — or what are the places where we're going to reach the people?  We are also thinking about who's the audience that we're trying to reach and what are the messages that we want to send to those audiences?

So in the United States, even when we're thinking about scale, we have to target it. And one of the reasons we have —and I know that you know this — but one of the reasons that we have a programming around elections is because it's very hard to predict where you're going to have spikes of political violence. And I don't mean political in the sense of partisan violence. I mean political violence and political tensions in that kind of broad sense of including hate crimes and violence and things like that.   But one of the things that you can count on is that there will be increased tensions, increased polarization, and not just across partisan lines, but across a whole bunch of divides around elections. And so you can target that time frame as a period of higher risk. And even if you aren't working on elections specifically, if you are working in that time frame, then you know that you will be targeting a period of time when you are likely to have higher risks and through that higher impact.

In terms of geographies, we built something in two states in partnership with Over Zero. We are working in Arizona and Ohio. They are working in Arizona and Ohio with other partners in that same cohort,. We have reached to Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. So we built things at the state level because the United States the largest country I've ever worked in as a peacebuilder. And that really matters.

The reason we chose a state-level approach for our largest program and that we built it intentionally in partnership with other groups and in coalition is because a state is big enough for broad impact and small enough to, at least theoretically, and we're working on the reality of this, to reach to the local level.

And so when you're thinking about scale or when Search thinks about scale, changing culture is one of the pieces. Changing institutions and policy is another way, and influencing markets is a third. But there are ways to try to make whatever dollars in programming you have go a little bit further by either targeting geographically or temporally or to specific communities and specific divides in ways that can increase the impact of what you're doing almost at whatever scale you're working. there are ways for you to think about what you're doing to try to hit the higher risk and more impactful moments.

Heidi: It reminds me of John Paul Lederach's famous peacebuilding triangle. And for people who don't know that, because it was in his Building Peace book 25, 30 years ago. I don't know how old it was, but it's still really relevant. And he puts a triangle in there with three levels, top-level leaders at the pinnacle, which is narrow. It doesn't include very many people. Grassroots, which is wide, down at the bottom ,where most of the people are. And then there's the middle level, which he said is the most important group because they can talk to the top and they can talk to the bottom. So they're working vertically as well as horizontally, so across divides horizontally and between divides vertically. And it sounds to me like that's exactly what you're doing.

Nealin: Yeah. I think if anything I say can be likened to or connected with John Paul Lederach, then I feel like my work here is done, and I can go on break.

Heidi: One of the other things that jumped out at me as you were talking is that we've been in lots of Zoom conversations with a number of networks who are all trying to do similar things to what you're doing. And we're hearing the complaint over and over again. that "we can't get conservatives involved. It's just progressives talking to progressives." So I was really struck when you named all these states that you were working in, and most of them were southern states and red states, at least we assume they are red states. So you've got to be successfully getting conservatives involved. Do you get any pushback? And do you get complaints like, well, "people who work on peace are progressives, and we don't trust those people."

Nealin: Yeah. Okay. So I'm from a pretty red part of Virginia. I'm from the Appalachian Mountains. And like so many people in this work, I have a family that really spans across the political spectrum. And what I will say is that language  — again, I know that you know this — but language lives within the context of the people who say the words. And so while we may not imagine that peacebuilding has a connotation, the people who use the words "peacebuilding" are a set of people. And those people live largely in a higher-educated white, left, urban environment. And if those are the people who use that word, then it's going to have that association. And so the question is, what are the words and what are the missions that have the same shared values across these different groups?

And I think that we live in a time of turbulence, where language is going to just have a pretty short half-life. And what I mean by that is that words that we think are good words to use right now are going to be politicized and polarizing. And they're not going to be useful in much shorter periods of time than when you're not dealing with turbulence. And they're going to naturally start identifying with one group or another. And that's hard. That's hard because you can say, "Today, you know, I'm trying to build unity, and that might sound okay." And four months from now, that might sound not okay if the word "unity" is something that is regularly used by one politician and one political party and not regularly used by another politician and another political party.

And the word "democracy defense" lives in the left in a stronger way, in the same way that "mis- and disinformation" is language that lives on the left. "Fake news" is language that lives on the right. "Pride in country" is something that lives more on the right. And I think that we can kind of be grumpy about that. And that's fair. Bbecause it's really hard to talk to each other when we can't even find vocabulary that doesn't live in this polarized place.

But there is a way to cut through that. And what we have largely found is that the way to cut through that is to tack local and to tack human. So it is not helpful if you are trying to open a specifically political space to enter the conversation of political violence, thinking and talking about January 6th. Because that is a moment in time that has been, I would say, maybe even weaponized by many people to try to focus the blame on conservatives. And even people who are actually entirely opposed to violence and to people entering the Capitol and everything that happened that day will, at times, really resist a conversation that has that as an entry point because their assumption of what has just happened is that they've been set up to have a conversation where we can all conclude that they are the problem.

So instead, if you talk about safety of local community members, it is, I think, disproportionate in terms of impact of conservatives who are running for office in terms of threats and harassment. That's not something that's happening just to the left. That may even be something that's happening more to the right than it is to the left.  And it's certainly pretty isolating because there isn't the same community to talk about that in the same way. So if you tack to what are the experience of local leaders and what kind of community do we want to have, separate from whatever nonsense is going to happen at the national level, who are we? And how do we want to build something that leaves less space for that chaos? That's a much more compelling story for everyone to be part of. 

Heidi: That relates to one of the philosophical things that I was thinking about when I said I was going to veer away from there. Sure enough, we've come back full circle. I was really moved and changed considerably. I think it was in 2020, just coincidentally, at the Alliance for Peacebuilding meeting, which was known as PeaceCon 2020, I think, by a talk that was given by the South African ambassador to the United States, a guy named Ibrahim Rasool..

He talked about what they learned in South Africa and how they went about dismantling apartheid in South Africa and what that might have to say about what we were doing about race in the United States. And he laid out a seven-step plan for reconciling race in South Africa, fully admitting that this was not a fait accompli, lots of problems still. But he reflected and I listened and thought to myself that I agreed that things are a lot better than we expected. Those of us who were alive during apartheid really expected that it was going to end in a horrible bloodbath. And it didn't. Yeah, there were deaths and things aren't super rosy in South Africa, but they're a lot better than they might have been.

And the thing that really struck me about his talk is he said, first of all, that "you had to start with the end." And what he meant was that you needed a vision of what you wanted South Africa to be. And that's just like what you just said, that you need a vision of what the local folks want their community to be. And that's what I was thinking about when I was talking about resilience being just "getting through". I was thinking, "You've got to have a vision. You've got to have a positive vision."

And one of the other things that Ebrahim said that was just really moving for me is he started with the story that the ANC, the African National Congress, which was the main black party, started with the assumption that the line was, "South Africa belongs to everyone who lives here." And my head immediately jumped to the notion, what would the United States be like if we were willing to accept that it belonged to everyone who lived here? And when I say that, I always say I'm not making a comment about illegal immigrants. That's one aspect of that, but I'm thinking much broader. Because right now in the polarization in our society, we've got a lot of people on the left who would just as leave that the right would somehow or other disappear, either move away or figure out that the left was right after all and convert. And the right's thinking the same way. And obviously, it's not going to happen. So if we were to accept the fact that, yes, there are lots of people, 50% of the population, it looks like, who don't agree with my values, but they're Americans too. So we've got to figure out a way to live together. That would be incredibly powerful.

And his point was that was where they started at South Africa. And then they figured out how to build a society around the notion that it belonged to everyone who was there. And it just strikes me as if we could get Americans to the point of realizing, yeah, everybody who lives in Boulder, Colorado, that's where I live, so that's why I'm using that, belongs here. Or, everybody who lives in Houston, Texas belongs here in Houston, Texas. And let's try to build a city, a town where everybody can thrive. That would be a very different place than the place that we're building. And I just think it's a really powerful image. And I love the fact that you seem to be going the same direction.

Nealin: Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of head nodding that obviously doesn't transfer to a podcast. But I fully agree with that. And it has been important to me, and I think to our work, that we hold that vision, even as we acknowledge steps along the way. And South Africa has a huge amount to teach us about the end of apartheid. It also, I think, has a huge amount to teach us about before the end of apartheid. Because right now, we don't have a national reconciliation process by which we would all assume that the future looks different than the past. That's something that we get to create right now. We have to strive to create right now.

We're headed a different direction. And so we have to build out momentum and champions and a strategy and cultural support and individual journeys and career trajectories and all kinds of really important pieces that mean that when there is that turnaround, the ingredients that are in place at all these different levels from the grassroots to the grass tops to the leadership are situated in such a way that what we write in that next chapter is an America that does belong to everyone who lives here.

Heidi:  Wonderful. I have a feeling that we just scratched the surface. I would love to go deeper on a whole bunch of things, but my clock says we're one minute till noon. Is there anything that you really were hoping to touch on that I didn't ask about?

Nealin: Given who I assume is listening to this podcast, I would just say that I have a huge amount of gratitude for the work that you have been doing, often for generations, by various names. And that I think i think that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. And that in this next year, there will be a huge need for what we do, but there will also be a lot of resistance and a sense of peacebuilding being either irrelevant or ineffective in this moment. And so I wish you and us all a steadfastness and a bravery as we walk through this next year.

Heidi: I fear that you might be right. I'm hoping that you're not, but we will see. I certainly agree that we're likely to be looking at difficult times. And I like your notion. It's echoed by Peter Coleman also that crises open up the door for opportunities. And I think November 2024, almost no matter what happens, is going to be a turning point, no matter how the election goes. So putting ourselves in a position to be standing up afterwards will be great. I want to thank you tremendously for your time!