With so much political polarization in our world today, with the advent of social media echo chambers, and with the presidential election that took place in the US this November, anyone who's been online recently knows that politics has become quite heated. Insults are routinely exchanged rather than discussing pressing issues facing our nation, which has halted the progress of our society and led to the most unproductive Congress in history.

 

To address this, Bipartisan Bridges aims to bring together regular people from both ends of the political spectrum to foster civil dialogue and facilitate the creation of meaningful connections between both Republican and Democratic party members.

 

Our project is modeled off of a previous initiative: in the 1990s, an organization named the Public Conversations Project carried out a series of confidential roundtable dialogues on the topic of abortion between three pro-choice and three pro-life leaders. These women were firm believers in their respective sides, and the intent of the conversations was not to change any one side's perspective; instead, it simply aimed to foster civil discourse between two groups with opposing viewpoints and widen perspectives in an effort to combat hatred and polarization.

 

By the end, all participants described the experience as "life-changing" --- and more than that, the bonds between the group were so strong that they had become best friends. When I first learned about this story, I was shocked. I had seen how heated my relatives' conversation on book bans had become just a few weeks prior, and the overwhelming success of the Public Conversations Project piqued my interest immensely. I wanted to know more: was the project still going on today? Could it somehow be implemented on a wider scale? How could I participate? Perhaps I could volunteer for the organization, or even engage in the conversations myself?

 

The topic was so fascinating and so full of potential in our immensely divided world that I decided to search for answers. Unfortunately, the organization that ran the Public Conversations Project is no longer active in facilitating these kinds of dialogues. While other organizations exist with similar programs, I am specifically interested in the Public Conversations Project's long-term approach and emphasis on establishing bonds between a small group of people over extended periods of time rather than jumping straight into debate topics, elements that are often lacking in other programs. Additionally, the group of women worked together to create an op-ed on their experiences, bringing the results of the experiment to a larger audience and increasing its impact -- this is rarely (if ever) included in other programs, as the short-term aspect of their dialogues makes it nearly impossible to complete; however, I believe an essential measure of the success of these types of initiatives is their ability to impact more than solely the participants.

 

With Bipartisan Bridges, modeled off of the successful approach of the Public Conversations Project, our team aims to bring together a group of six high school students -- three Democrats, three Republicans -- with diverse backgrounds over a period of 8 weeks to debate and discuss a variety of integral issues facing the nation. The project will be conducted with 8 in-person meetings, one per week (there will be a total of 10 hours of meeting time through those eight sessions). Meetings will be recorded and edited to create a video series to highlight the group’s progress; all participants will also be co-authoring an op-ed on their experience during the program.

 

Uniquely, Bipartisan Bridges will focus specifically on the young adult age range, a novel approach centered around youth to foster lifelong skills that will serve to improve collaboration and communication for the next generation.

 

Our team firmly believes that people with completely separate opinions on issues can still be best friends, and that’s the ultimate goal we would like to accomplish with our project. By capturing the group’s journey on video, we aim to share the transformation and wholesome relationships that come from the project with the rest of the world — hopefully inspiring regular, everyday people to strike up a conversation with the next person they come across who disagrees with their point of view rather than resorting to hate.