To make equity, justice, and community work for everyone, Sidwell Friends is focusing on active listening, how to have difficult conversations, and storytelling.

How can a small community, especially one as diverse as Sidwell Friends School, come together and bridge yawning differences that separate people by class, experience, race, values, and more in this time of growing social and political divisiveness?  

The answer, explains Natalie Randolph ‘98, the School’s director of equity, justice, and community (EJC), is to embrace the power of storytelling. “The brain learns through stories, and people make decisions based on their emotions, not on facts” she says. “So, in order to make equity, justice, and community at Sidwell Friends work for everyone, we need to focus on active listening, how to have difficult conversations, and storytelling.”

With that in mind, Sidwell Friends has embraced bridge building as a theme for its EJC programming. Randolph was inspired by a program called Bridging the Gap, created by Simon Greer who has been involved in social change work for more than 30 years and is an integral part of Interfaith America, Eboo Patel’s Chicago-based international nonprofit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation.

In 2020, Oberlin College launched a project called “Bridging the Gap: Dialogue Across Campus in a Time of Political Polarization.” It offered a team of 10 Oberlin students the opportunity to build dialogue skills with Greer, who served as the facilitator, and then to apply that practice with students from Spring Arbor University, a conservative evangelical college in Michigan. 

“Oberlin and Spring Arbor found great success adapting the Interfaith America program to higher ed,” says Randolph. “One of the guiding principles of Bridging the Gap is for students to develop the skills to truly listen, be heard, understand, and seek common ground without attempting to change the minds of others. So, I thought, why not try it here at Sidwell?”

Although Sidwell Friends School is incredibly diverse with nearly 60 percent of its student body self-identifying as non-white, Randolph says that the school needs to figure out a better way to have difficult conversations. “We all have our biases and, despite good intentions, we cannot be competent in everyone’s culture. Sharing stories that show our differences rather than trying to explain our points of view seems like a much more effective way to open minds and better understand where people are coming from,” she says.

In June 2024, Sidwell Friends hired a facilitator from Interfaith America to conduct the first Bridging the Gap training with a group of 20-some members of the School community, including administrators, principals, psychologists, and two trustees. Since that initial training, Randolph and Interdivisional School Counselor Dr. Richard Griffith have trained 40 parents, 20 students, and 10 more faculty and staff members with the goal of training many more and having this practice become an integral part of the entire school community. 

In addition to several trainings already on the calendar, Randolph and Griffith are securing a date to have students trained in Bridging the Gap present what they learned to other students, adding layer upon layer of knowledge, understanding, and practical application.

The group trainings include partner work, learning how to tell a story, and a lot of intentional listening. Many of the activities begin with prompts. To practice telling a story without communicating a strong opinion, the first prompt might be something like “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” Randolph shares two stories from this prompt that helped a pair better understand each other’s perspective. One person said that he grew up eating pork and beans—basically baked beans mixed with cut-up pieces of hotdog. To him, that was how you ate a hotdog, so no, a hotdog is not a sandwich. His partner was from another country where there were no sandwiches, per se, rather most meals entailed mixed vegetables and meats in spiced sauces into which you dipped bread. To help her assimilate at school in America, this woman’s mother put those meats and vegetables between two pieces of bread, so for her daughter, meat in between bread—like a hotdog in a bun—is a sandwich. Obviously, this is a benign example, but starting with it helped the trainees become more familiar with the Bridging the Gap practice so they could move onto more heady statements like “social media has improved communication and connection among people” and “choosing only to live and spend time with members of you own religious, ethnic, and other identity group is a form of segregation.” Statements and prompts like these help the teller of their story explain where they fall in agreement or disagreement.

“This work is never going to be over. Change happens slowly and Bridging the Gap is not a silver bullet. But by knowing why people think what they think and do what they do because they have shared their thoughts through the context of a personal story, we can all learn that although we may not agree, we can respect each other’s points of view,” says Randolph. “We want to be a school where everyone has the tools to talk about and deal with challenges like COVID or horrific events like the murder of George Floyd.”

The Bridging the Gap program resonated with Randolph, a former science teacher, because she has always been fascinated by the brain and how it works. “It’s interesting that the feeling of belonging activates the same part of the brain as it does for physical pain. So, if you don’t belong, it hurts. Belonging, after all, is a survivor’s tool,” says Randolph. “By sharing our stories and actively listening to those of others, we are activating the parts of the brain that deal with empathy and understanding and it is those qualities that are going to make change."