Prabha Sankaranarayan: So, it's activities that get designed to build that trust, and they do take time. I think we move at the speed of trust instead of forcing trust to move at the speed of some artificial deadline.

Sam Fuqua: That's Prabha Sankaranarayan, and this is Well, That Went Sideways! A podcast that serves as a resource to help people have healthy, respectful communication. We present a diversity of ideas, tools, and techniques to help you transform conflict in relationships of all kinds. In this episode, we talk with Prabha Sankaranarayan about responding to conflict through early intervention, trust building and practical mediation strategies. She spent 25 years as a child and family therapist before becoming a mediator. She's currently the CEO of Mediators Beyond Borders International. One of their projects in the US is The Trust Network, a platform designed for early warning and response to potential conflicts.

I'm Sam Fuqua, co-host of the program with Alexis Miles. Hi Alexis.

Alexis Miles: Hi Sam.

Sam Fuqua: We're very pleased to be joined for this episode of Well, That Went Sideways! by Prabha Sankaranarayan. Welcome.

Prabha Sankaranarayan: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for in, the invitation. I am delighted. And we have a common friend in Mary Zinn, which is wonderful.

Sam Fuqua: Yes. A wonderful member of our team, Mary Zinn. Well, Prabha, I was interested, uh, to learn that you had been a therapist prior to, uh, transitioning to mediation. And so, I thought I might ask you to tell our listeners a little about your background and what that transition was like and, uh, what motivated it for you.

Prabha Sankaranarayan: Sam, I was one of those really fortunate people, and I say that after many years of counseling adolescents and young adults about careers. At 15, I knew that I wanted to be a children's therapist. I have been a passionate advocate for children's rights and, um, my first internship was at a head trauma unit at the Rehabilitation Institute in Pittsburgh. Once I came here for graduate school, I had been studying in India and then applied for graduate school here, got married, and came to the United States, and joined the child development program at Pitt. This is the program which has, um, some amazing people like Fred Rogers and Rex Spears and others, Nancy Curry as a part of the, the faculty of the program. But what I knew was that I wanted to work with children. In my internships in India, I had seen the state of mental health treatment, um, where adults with chronic mental illnesses were still in chains, literally. Um, and was determined that what I wanted to do was work with young children in a way that supported their growth and development. Um, you know, maybe my mother and my grandmother who were amazing child development specialists who had no training but did the most wonderful job of supporting us as children contributed to that.

Anyway, so I came to the US, did, did an internship at the Rehab Institute, at this head injury unit, and saw these young children with the vocabulary most adults don't have for medical terminology. Um, four- and five-year-old kids who were coping in all kinds of ways with extraordinary injuries and challenges. And that sparked my curiosity about what it is that makes it possible for kids to survive. What contributes to their ability to cope, to thrive, to have a sense of humor sometimes, through some of these awful things they were experiencing. So, I worked then for, you know, 15, 20 years, uh, with children who were children and families in which there was severe neglect, physical and sexual assault. Um, you know, I saw families who had come from other parts of the world, uh, children who were adopted, for example, from Ceaușescu, orphans, orphanages. If you remember those images, those children suffered extraordinary neglect, children who had lost family members, and gradually expanded my outreach to communities.

So, having worked with the kinds of violence that happens within families, it expanded to communities impacted by violence, and it had always had a systemic perspective. And so, seeing how we as a community can respond to what children experience became important. And then, after years, couple of decades of doing that, there were a couple of things that happened. Um, one was a growing frustration with only working with the impact of violence. What I really wanted to move to was preventing what happens to these children. And then, in 2004, 2005, I had a chance to go with a team of play therapists to Sri Lanka after the tsunami. That was one of those moments, you know, we spent three weeks there training these amazing men and women who were taking care of the children who were in these camps, they had been displaced as a result of the tsunami.

And again, again, what struck me was how extraordinarily they were dealing with what had happened. They were completely devastated. You could see it everywhere, right? Everything is destroyed. They've lost everything. They're in camps. And they come, you know, every day they would come because somebody was there to support them in how they could support their own children. And I met, um, five young women who were part of the Tamil Tigers and who had been returned as a part of the, uh, UNHCR negotiation. And so, that, they had been returned to the community. And so, I had a chance to interact with them. And these were young women who had been forced into the Tamil Tigers Civil War in Sri Lanka, the Civil War in Sri Lanka, who had fought, who had been subjected to all of the things that you might have read about, might imagine that young men and women are subject to when they are forced into war. That I think was, um, yet another moment when I thought, I really wanna do something that helps prevent the kind of violence we perpetrate, and focus on that. And so, shifting upstream became really important.

And then, you know, there were a couple of cases I had where, um, the families, I was doing custody work and realized that what people in some of those instances wanted was not therapy, was just a way to figure out how they could be good co-parents. And so, I started taking mediation training at that time and had some wonderful teachers. And, it wasn't long before I completely left the clinical practice and shifted into mediation. I took everything I could, restorative practices, elder abuse, family abuse, uh, custody mediation. I took, um, international mediation. I, I just did everything. Negotiations courses. Whatever I could find, I kept expanding to and realized that I was at that stage where, you know, there are intersecting circles in your life, and that all of my professional skills as a therapist were very, very applicable in helping build relationships amongst people. And, working at the community level, and then at the international level. And then I met some of the people who are founders of Mediators Beyond Borders. The timing was perfect and I became one of the founding members, and I have spent the last 15 years, 16 years, as a part of this amazing community of people with a shared set of values.

Alexis Miles: Well, to help people visualize what it is you do with Mediators Beyond Borders, can you tell us how pe, do people come to you and say, "Hey, can you help us?" And then just walk us through just briefly that process.

Prabha Sankaranarayan: We go where we are invited. And so, most of our work, in any context, any country, begins with an invitation. So, the first international project we did in Liberia began with a message with, with an email from, um, one of the former child soldiers in a refugee camp in Accra who said, "We need help. There are about 150 of us who wanna go back to Liberia. We are former fighters. We wanna go back in peace. Will you help us? And, we see that you're volunteers. We don't have money to pay consultants." So, so we responded. We responded as an organization and started at that point with identifying the context, doing the desk research, because we didn't at that yet, at that time, having it, we had just started, we had barely registered as an organization. Our teams, our members, were mostly US and European at the time. We had not yet expanded it to a global membership, and saw very quickly that we needed to. And so, we spent actually months doing a lot of partnership advisory building, partnership building, desk research, and a lot of learning and identifying the Liberian community, the diaspora here, potentially, um, and began that project by planning a training together. They wanted mediation training. It was something concrete. And so we could start with that.

And, even in the process of actually identifying what that initial training looked like, we were engaged in, uh, what does it mean to have different members of the community participate? Who are the different groups there? Uh, why is it important to have different groups participate together? So, training for us often is in itself a way of building relationships amongst groups. And so, it began in that way. It began as the initial training with the idea that we also always commit to staying until our partners, our local partners, tell us they're happy with where they are. And so, our exit plan always, which is why we don't keep establishing offices in different countries, we go where we are needed, we engage with a local partner. It is critical for us to have a credible local partner with whom we are working. Provide the support that we can create together, co-create that, and then leave. And so, we ended up staying in Liberia for over six or seven years, for about six or seven years. And, what started as the initial project that was a fairly robust, um, psychosocial and economic development and reintegration program, um, resulted in about 150 of them going back to Liberia from that camp.

And I'm really thrilled, I mean, there's lots more details you can find on our website, but I'm really, what I'm thrilled about is that they maintained a higher level of employment than the national average. And, um, we have not seen any reports and we stay in touch with many of them, any reports of the recurrence of violence by any one of them, which is really remarkable given their own identification as being at risk based on their own histories of violence. One of the partners who was a former child soldier himself, ended up, um, as the head of an organization, uh, the National Ex-Combatants Peace Initiative, who was a local consultant about this transition from armed fighters to peace builders, and um, and then came here and did his Masters in social work, and he's an international consultant and head of our Sierra Leone team. So, that was our first one.

Um, Kenya was similar. A Samburu chief in Kenya reached out to us and um, and said, there are 16 tribes. We need to figure out how to work together. We need to figure out how to get along, or we are gonna kill each other before the drought does. Kenya was facing a severe drought at the time. So, I made that initial trip. Met with Lantano, did an initial assessment, developed the partnership locally with them as a community, co-created what they wanted our support to look like, and then continued into the Warriors to Peace Builders Program in Kenya. And the other one was with the Somali Bantu community in Pittsburgh. The principal of a middle school, that's a community in which I had worked as a therapist, I had done a lot of work with the schools there and the families in that community. And soon after we started MBBI, I got a call from her and she said, "Look," uh, and she didn't know anything about MBBI, she thought I was still working as a therapist, and she said, "We're having all kinds of problems in this community. Our kids are getting beaten up. Um, these families are getting abused. They're getting called names. You look different. You talk different. You cook different food. Go back where you came from."

These Somali Bantu families happened to be from a camp in Kenya, the Kakuma Camp, that had a lot of people that given our very generous refugee policy at the time, we welcomed, but unfortunately we had done that, we had relocated them to Pittsburgh. You know, you can't integrate totally different cultures without preparing the soil in some way, and that had not really happened. And so, they were placed in a community that was depressed and recovering from the economic decline in Pittsburgh. And, the settled community was watching that these families suddenly had big televisions. The kids were wearing brand new tennis shoes. They had, you know, all of the things that they felt like they had no access to. And so, there were a lot of conflicts. We engaged a local group. Um, the local mediation center in Pittsburgh joined us. We engaged a volunteer group from the university, got a whole bunch of young adults to help work with these families and the community, and was extraordinary because in about 18 months, it was called the Third Side Project, in about 18 months, they were planning restaurants together, renewing lots that had been abandoned into gardens to grow stuff. So, all kinds of things were happening. That's, that's how that one started.

Alexis Miles: And when you say all kinds of things were happening, between the community that was there before and then the people who were relocated into the community.

Prabha Sankaranarayan: Exactly. So, between the settled community and the refugee community, what happens in the process of that kind of integration is really deep listening to understand what is leading to these conflicts, right? The settled community knew very little about the people who were coming in. The refugees who were being settled there knew very little about the community that they were being placed in, right? And then you have the language barriers. They had six months to learn English. The children learned it faster than the adults did, as typically happens. And so, there were all kinds of barriers. I mean, think of it as, if they had come in and there was a deliberate plan for we are getting new neighbors, our community is getting, and 150 people in a small community is not a small number. They're in your schools. They're in the grocery store. They're in your laundromat. They're everywhere, right? And so, we did a lot of deep listening with our partners. We would sit at every warden district meeting and hear, what are your concerns? What are your fears? What are your hopes? And spent a good amount of time doing that before we started designing interventions where they came together.

And so, at the end of that, what they started to say was, we really, I mean, things that happen when you really care deeply and are committed to what's happening, and you have people who are also leaders in the community - the business community was involved, the police were involved, the school districts were involved - and so, it allowed us to have that kind of engagement where they came together, finally, uh, over a period of time, but finally, were able to say, "We didn't know. We didn't know about you. We didn't know what you had experienced." And, the refugees were able to say, "We didn't know about all of the laws of this country." I mean, little things like, "We don't pay water, we don't pay for water in Somalia," so they would throw out the water bills, you know. Or, I would even say our, um, you know, child abuse and neglect laws. So, children who might, older children who might have been caretakers in their own communities could not be left alone as children in this. Forms of discipline that were acceptable and not acceptable, right? And so, those were the kinds of things that started to happen in the community as they became more aware of each other's expectations and cultures that led to what I would say, uh, was a very different phase in their integration into the Pittsburgh community.

Alexis Miles: So, it sounds like your organization has tools, mediation tools, you come in when, in, it, it, invited, teach people how to use these tools, stay around long enough to make sure they can use them effectively, and then leave. Is that fair?

Prabha Sankaranarayan: There's one other thing we do in the process, um, and that's an important one, which is to begin by asking what are the tools you already use, you know, because conflict is not new, right? Mankind has always had ways of dealing with conflicts. And so, when we ask, what do you already use, it begins with raising, to our awareness, of what exists. So, we are not just coming in and saying, here's what mediation looks like. What we are saying is, here's what you already do. Here are some of the things we know. How can we bring them together in a way that's meaningful for your context? So, in Liberia, for example, they use a circle process called the palaver process. And, we learned all of our decision making was in a circle, in a palaver. There are palaver huts all over West Africa and, and they said, this is what we do. And so, there were many decisions that were made in that circle, amongst all of us, where it was a form, I would say, if I was to describe it, it's a form of restorative practice where the community comes together to make decisions. Um, and that's what we did in that community.

Similarly, in Kenya, several tribes have some form of peace caravans that they have used effectively, and so we infused it, and they were able to say, so what, what ends up happening, Alexis, is, is really exciting moment when you realize it's really an integration, and that they have the skills and the tools that now we see as part of the universe of mediation. And so, there's a mutual learning that also takes place. So, our teams are always multinational, multiracial, really believing that that kind of diversity allows us to be more open to the possibilities. And so we, we don't go in and say, here's a textbook, read it, and you will become a mediator. No. It's very experiential. There's a lot of, you know, storytelling and dance and music and whatever is natural to the culture is infused into everything that we do. That's why the local partners are so critical, right? Even the research questions. I mean, even in designing surveys, we are very careful to make sure that in the translation, it's not just the literal translation, that it's meaningful in that context.

Alexis Miles: I like how you incorporate the knowledge and wisdom of the communities you're working in.

Sam Fuqua: It seems that so many of the examples you just described do have an element of trust, right? And in my experience, trust takes time. Um, can you, kind of, summarize how you, how you get people who may be in conflict or are headed towards conflict to, to trust, uh, and sometimes you don't have much time to try to do that, right?

Prabha Sankaranarayan: We don't. But you know what we learned over time and what we know, the body of literature we now have as conflict practitioners tells us is that when people are engaged in a mutually beneficial task, it is a way to build trust. So, we don't have dialogues for the sake of dialogues. They are purposeful. So, with the, you know, with the same examples I'm using, they started, in the Liberian context, the women started a permaculture project, which means that they had to come together to design on timetables for who was going to be working when. It was focused on an outcome and a project that would benefit both of them. So, it's designed for collaboration to be inherently necessary in, and trust building to be inherently developing in order for them to mutually benefit. And so, working side by side, playing side by side, making decisions together, were all the kinds of opportunities that afforded them the steps to building enough trust to say, we can bank our money together, which was a big step at the end of it, right? So, if we are going to use our savings collectively, we have to trust each other to manage that too. Um, so it's activities that get designed to build that trust. And they do take time, Sam. I think we move at the speed of trust instead of forcing trust to move at the speed of some artificial deadline. And that's true for what we've embarked on. I can't believe it is five years ago in the US now.

Sam Fuqua: Yes. Tell us about The Trust Network.

Prabha Sankaranarayan: The co-convener of The Trust Network is my amazing friend and colleague, D.G. Mawn, who is the president of the National Association for Community Mediation. We were watching in 2019, 2020, um, all of the indicators as conflict analysts that you don't want to see, of things we had seen in many different parts of the world happening here, and realized in that summer that, um, I was talking to Alice Nderitu, one of, uh, she's the, was the Deputy Director for Mass Atrocities and Genocide Prevention at the United Nations, who did a training on what were the indicators of the rise of authoritarianism, of the threats of mass atrocities, and, and she did this survey, she asked all these questions about whether people saw these signs and signals in their own communities. And as people answered yes to more than 75 percent of the questions, at the end of it, she said, this is what I used in pre-genocide Rwanda. You could hear the chins drop to the desks, right? And she said, what you need is an early warning, early response platform. You need to find a way to get civil society engaged in protecting community members and preventing violence.

And so, the partnership for us made a lot of sense because D.G. runs a coordination of 300 plus mediation centers across the country. So, if we were to look for a partner in any country, it would be a credible partner who's embedded in community. Well, if somebody came to you and said, you don't have a peace infrastructure, but here is what this one looks like. You don't call it a peace infrastructure, but you have 300 plus centers across the country in urban and rural places, some are state associations, some are local, and they are already embedded in community, they already are credible conveners because they have been working in the community, how about making them the centers for convening at the local level? At the same time, um, Dr. Joe Bach, who was at Kennesaw State University, came in, landed, and said, "We heard you're setting up an early warning platform. We are an international group of analysts who are doing social media and large data analysis of violence around the world, and we can see what's happening in the US. We are happy to partner with you."

In that moment, The Trust Network was born with the recognition that we were creating. It wasn't just that, it was the idea that the United States, given the state of polarization and division we were experiencing, given the rise in mistrust of our institutions, and of our neighbors, and of people in the community, and of our media that we were experiencing, we really thought we needed a systemic approach. You know, we are also not used to coming together across various sectors. So, we started with the idea of bringing together the peace builders and the bridge builders, as they're called in the United States. There's a growing peace building, bridge building community. It is really beautiful to see how it's grown in the last five years. And then, there are also the, um, social racial justice, environmental justice activists. So, we originally started our systemic design with conceptualizing that peace builders, bridge builders, and activists need to come together in, in order to create transformation, and realized very quickly that there is an enormous and robust sector that's focused on structural reform. Like, these are the people saying you need rank choice voting. We need redistricting to be done in this right way. We need to change our election laws. So, all the structural stuff was really critical. So, we identified that as another sector.

And then, because we are the oldest democracy, there are huge constitutional reform and legal reform actors, right? And so, we identified that as another sector and said, at the center of all of that is where this transformation needs to happen. So, that's how we formed The Trust Network. We were fortunate to have amazing support. The timing was just right. People were going, this is what we need here. And, you know, the head of the Alliance for Peace Building, people who had worked in the international arena, amazing people like Maria Stephan, Julia Roig, uh, Bridget Moix, I mean, these were all people who had worked all over the world doing this amazing work who were all turning their attention to the US saying we need to fix home. And so, uh, I also, you know, have to call out the amazing people who just turned and said, we will do what we can. We had a couple of volunteers. We had no money at the outset. We just said, we need to do this. And then within six months, humanity united and the Packard Foundation said, we'll give you some support, tell you, tell us what you need. And so, we formed that first platform that brings together people in these four sectors across the country. And, it's been an amazing experience, Sam, to watch the landscape change so beautifully.

Sam Fuqua: Are you describing the network's early warning, early action infrastructure?

Prabha Sankaranarayan: It is. So, there is an early warning, early action component, um, and that has to do with communities at the local level, having a way to, uh, prevent and intervene, to both promote social cohesion and pre, prevent violence and promote social cohesion. Yes. Initially, we started with just monitoring social media, monitoring la, you know, news monitoring to be able to identify what are some of the trends in the country. And we are not the only ones who do that. So, there are, you know, a couple of other organizations that do that internationally. The ISD is one of them. Um, ACLED is another. ADL does that now. SPCL does that. So, there are various groups monitoring. There are groups monitoring antisemitism. Groups mon, monitoring extremism, political violence. Groups monitoring Asian hate. Groups monitoring violence against the LGBTQ community, against the Islamic community.

And, what we wanted was really to develop a very holistic approach to say civil society monitoring is important, and so we added the civil society monitoring to the social media monitoring, which means that if I see a poster going up somewhere, if I see a whole bunch of post-its has happened in central Pennsylvania by a group that was writing threatening messages and posting it on the windshields of the Hispanic community there saying, "You're making too much noise. You're causing all this trouble. There are more of us than there are of you. Get out of here." These are small signs that don't rise to the level of a crime and may not be reportable to the police, but these are the signs that build in a community as early warning signs. And so, what Madhva, our analyst will say is an early warning system is the, is the right information to the right people at the right time to take the right action. So, sometimes it's prevention, but in the process of preventing violence, what you do are build local networks, right? Who are my partners? So, going back to my early childhood initiative days, I think about, our model is designed to identify who are our partners in the legal arena? Who are our partners in the peace building, bridge building context? Who are our structural reform actors? And, how do we work together in order to build communities in which we are compassionate, in which all people thrive, in which we can prevent violence? Identify the science for it and intervene.

I, I'll give you an example. You know, in the early days when we were largely doing social media monitoring, we knew that there was an event in Detroit that would bring two groups together at a certain point, um, I think it was Black Lives Matter and the Oathkeepers, if I remember correctly. As you might imagine, at that time, that would've been a very volatile situation if those two protests or marches came together at a particular spot. So, we were able to notify the mediation center leader in that community, who then activated her network, spoke to the chiefs of police, spoke to the mayor's office, spoke to the other community leaders, so that their intervention was to, for one, to change the route enough to avoid the clash, and to suffuse the area with police officers who were out there handing out balloons and in baseball caps instead of guns and vests. So, there was a total deescalation along with the rest of the community. People do lots of different kinds of things. They're holding story circles in one community where, you know, the language you have to use in different places really matters. So, they are building their shared safety as a community, and taking responsibility across, you know, political ideology, across all kinds of demographics, to say how do we build safety in our community? Um, so it's both of those, sam. It's an early, and so now there is a mechanism called the TrustNet360, which is a platform to record all of these events. And, what we are building into the platform is a communications tool so that people can also communicate what interventions they're taking.

Alexis Miles: So, as you know, our podcast is called, Well, That Went Sideways! So, can you tell us about a time either in your personal or your professional life when a situation went completely sideways, and what you learned from that, that you still apply today?

Prabha Sankaranarayan: Uh, if only there was just one. I was thinking about this. One example, I will say is a, a lesson I learned about community organizing a long time ago. In the, uh, years of developing, um, an early childhood initiative in my community, we were working in several neighborhoods, and it was a process that was quite inclusive. We thought we had engaged the key people in the community in the discussions about how to plan a program, how to implement a program, and were also partnering with a university who was gathering data. And, had got to a point where we thought we had answered a lot of the preliminary questions to help us move forward, and realized that we hadn't addressed the issue of ownership. You know, when you work in community, as you probably know, when people have a sense of ownership that they are designing and truly engaged in the process, it makes a huge difference in their level of engagement, their commitment to the process. And the question that came up was, who owns the information? It was early enough in my practice. I didn't have an easy answer for that. I thought, well, the university's gathering the data. Maybe they own the information. I didn't say anything at that time. That turned into a month's long process of discussion. And, uh, I would say that was one of the good sideways because I learned a valuable lesson in not having addressed it at the outset, that community ownership was something that we needed to address right at the beginning, became really clear.

And so, I will say, uh, when we went to Liberia, and this was like 15 years later, and started working in this community in near Tubmanburg, and they, you know, asked us, here is what we want. And we said, great, if, and they wanted to help us integrate some of the former combatants who had been living in that community, who had not been integrated, and they were having a lot of challenges as they were different ethnic groups. The minute we said, tell us who else needs to be in the circle. What do you want to see happen with any resources that come in? What I had learned was to ask the right questions in some ways and say, I'm not gonna make that mistake again. And thankfully, they were able to respond with exactly who they thought needed to lead the process. And, it was a women's project, and they ended up rallying all the men, all the male leaders, in that conservative community to be completely supportive. I thought that was extraordinary. But if we hadn't asked them who they thought needed to be there, and who they thought would object to whatever was happening, and that those were people we needed to engage with, I don't think we would've gotten very far.

Alexis Miles: Well, that's...

Prabha Sankaranarayan: I have more examples, Alexis, but go ahead.

Alexis Miles: Sorry. No, no, go ahead. Go ahead.

Prabha Sankaranarayan: Oh. Well, I was thinking of another one where, um, it was, uh, a case in India. I was working with a, as a consultant in India on a case for the World Bank, and it was in a community in the tea estates in the Northeast. And this is, you know, the point at which they had come, the community, the leaders of the community, the indigenous members of the community, as well as the heads of the corporation, had all come together. Which, if you know the history of the tea estates and their ownership and the levels of power and caste and hierarchy in India, it was an extraordinary moment. I was so caught up in the fact that it was such an extraordinary moment that in the pre-negotiations, one of the things we failed to secure was, um, ground rules about privacy and the use of social media. Now, you have to, you know, I beg forgiveness in that it was in the early years of the use of social media and we were not always thinking about it, but in the middle of this protracted discussion, this was just the pre-negotiations, right? What are the conditions? Who's gonna be in the room? They had taken the enormous risk of coming together, one group, without knowing who was representing the other group.

They had come in with such good faith that we really thought, you know, if we just sit here and negotiate what the terms of the discussions were going to be, what the terms of the mediation were going to be, we would be in great shape. They were there in good faith. They had come into the room. Well, about three quarters of the way, one of them saw a post that had been made by a person in another country about one of the members and what was going on that day. The company at that point said, "We're done," and walked out. And, I use that as a lesson in how many different ways we need to look at privacy and confidentiality these days to secure any space, and why that is so important. That one was really sad.

Alexis Miles: Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Is the trust network a membership network? If a person wants to become involved in it, what would they need to do?

Prabha Sankaranarayan: It's a great question. Just go to our website and join us because we are always getting asked, and this is happening more and more now, Alexis, is that, uh, it's, what people are beginning to realize is that they want to do something, and at the same time it feels overwhelming because we are at such a critical place as a nation. So, "What can I do?" is often the question that gets asked, and we say there are lots of things you can do in this growing, uh, landscape of bridge building actors and of activists and peace builders and bridge builders working together, you can build community at the local level. Bringing people together at the local level becomes really important. You can also share the tools that we have in The Trust Network, which comprise of the tools that come out of all of the practitioners across the country.

So, joining it means you have access to information. You can volunteer. You can co-lead a dialogue in your community. You can, if you are a mediator or a facilitator, you know, one of the things I see is this is really our time to bring our skills forward because every community needs skilled facilitators. And, building our civic muscle beyond the elections, you know, we are not going to vote our way out of the troubles we are in today. It's really gonna take all of us acting together as a community, and that means building, reweaving the fabrics of our community, differently. There's no going back to anything. There is an acknowledgement of our history, and a commitment to the future we want in which everybody thrives. That means working at the community level. And so, The Trust Network is one that people can join and we can connect them to lots of things that are happening locally that are amazing - community based maps, civic hubs that are forming, people are engaging in different kinds of activities at the local level. So, I, I can think about so many different things that anyone can do from the local level to the national level.

You know, at the national level, when you think about the National Governor's Association, they took on the Disagree Better campaign. I don't see why every community cannot have a Disagree Better campaign for their local elected officials. Can we model civic leadership? I just spent, you know, the last couple of days at a strong city summit, uh, where mayors from across the country, there were about 35 to 40 mayors, chiefs of staff, who were convening to talk about how they can prevent violence in their communities. And you would not know, it is a completely transpartisan network, you would not know what their political affiliations were. What they were committed to was building social cohesion and preventing violence in their communities. And so, if they can model transpartisan dialogue and disagree better even when they have to make policy decisions, wouldn't that be helpful for our communities? And then there are organizations like Braver Angels that are again, bridging across divides. Um, Urban Rural Action has uniters in several states. Living Room Conversations has, you know, models for what anyone can pick up and do in their own community, whether it's with your book club or your local library. Every community mediation center across the country has things that they're offering for volunteers to engage in. So, what we do is try and help connect people with a whole bunch of what's happening in their own community. And this collectively, this is not just The Trust Network, but nationally, because we are a part of so many different networks, there are resources we can connect people with. So, join us.

Sam Fuqua: Prabha Sankaranarayan, this has been a great conversation, and thank you for all of the information and insight. Really great to talk with you.

Prabha Sankaranarayan: You are welcome, Sam, Alexis. Thank you so much.

Sam Fuqua: Prabha Sankaranarayan is the CEO of Mediators Beyond Borders International. You can find out more about their work and about The Trust Network that they've established here in the US at their website, mediatorsbeyondborders.org.

Thanks for listening to Well, That Went Sideways! We produce new episodes twice a month. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, sidewayspod.org. Our site has information on our guests, interview transcripts, and links to more conflict resolution resources. And, we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter. That's at sidewayspod.org. Our production team is Mary Zinn, Jes Rau, Norma Johnson, Alexis Miles, Alia Thobani, and me, Sam Fuqua. Our theme music is by Mike Stewart. We produce these programs in Colorado on the traditional lands of the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations. To learn more about the importance of land acknowledgement, visit our website, sidewayspod.org. And this podcast is a partnership with The Conflict Center, a Denver-based nonprofit that provides practical skills and training for addressing everyday conflicts. Find out more at conflictcenter.org.