Bringing Peacebuilding Home: Five Early Signals from the Needham Resilience Network
Members of the Needham Resilience Network
A growing number of efforts to shore up U.S. democracy and mitigate political and identify-based hate and violence are doing so under the rubric of peacebuilding. They include Common Ground USA, the Horizons Project, and Over Zero. Practitioners have developed this approach over the years in volatile and violent settings abroad. It is no surprise that, as the situation in the U.S. begins to bear more of a resemblance to these troubled countries, American peacebuilders are looking homeward.
What do peacebuilders do? The Alliance for Peacebuilding, a network of 190+ organizations working around the world, describes their multifaceted roles as follows:
“Peacebuilders analyze the causes of violent conflict, violence, and fragility and consider what is driving them and what is preventing them. Peacebuilders then develop and implement programs before, during, and after instances of violent conflict, addressing the drivers of such conflicts and violence, while also strengthening resilience to build sustainable peace.”
What might a peacebuilding approach look like when applied in an American context? What are the keys to making it work–and pitfalls to avoid? To answer these questions, it is helpful to consider some early signals from a promising peacebuilding effort in Needham, Massachusetts: the Needham Resilience Network.
The origins of the Needham Resilience Network
The Network took shape in 2022 through the initiative of civic groups and leaders in the town. They sought to respond to a growing sense of unease and a lack of belonging felt by many town residents. Needham is a relatively well-off suburb of Boston. However, between 2016 and 2020, the town experienced a 350% increase in reported hate-related incidents over the prior five-year period. The incidents took many forms, e.g., graffiti scrawled on a school, offensive Facebook posts, or slurs shouted from a car. Most of the episodes targeted members of the African-American, Jewish, and/or LGTBQ+ communities.
Then, in January 2020, Needham’s police department drew criticism for wrongly suspecting, detaining, and handcuffing Marvin Henry, an African-American and father of four, while responding to a report of shoplifting. This incident then took on even more salience in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police. Over the next 18 months, Needham, like many other communities, experienced Black Lives Matter protests, expressions of long-simmering frustration and anger, and a further erosion of social trust.
This all occurred amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the threats it posed to the health of community members, their social cohesion, and their capacity to govern themselves democratically and peaceably. Needham’s civic leaders and town officials recognized the need for better early warning and response systems. Hate and bias incidents and global pandemics were not the only tests their community would face in a future marked by accelerating climate change, technological disruptions, etc. The town would benefit from new and better civic infrastructure to prepare for these challenges—and then discern and respond to them in a timely and resilient way.
The Needham Resilience Network (usually referred to locally as “the Network”) emerged from this period of social unrest and ferment. As the Network’s website documents, its participants and “leaders (formal and informal) span the full spectrum of political, business, faith, identity, health and social action organizations in Needham, as well as official Town departments (Town Manager, Select Board, Police Department, Public Schools, Public Safety).” The Network’s community map, in turn, illuminates the broader civic landscape in which it operates.
The Network’s website specifies its initial purpose as follows:
“From 2022-2024, our focus will be on ‘Well-being and Social Cohesion in Needham,’ with the aim of increasing health, safety, belonging, and equity for all. Our goals include: amplifying our shared local identities and values, shedding light on the range of lived experiences that exist in Needham (in relation to health, safety, belonging, and equity), and addressing a documented rise in local identity-based hate incidents through prevention and rapid response.”
A reflective practitioner thinks globally and acts locally
I first learned about the Needham Resilience Network from my friend Nichole Argo, who helped start it up and continues to serve as a co-director. Nichole has a PhD in political psychology and has spent most of her professional life working for global and national entities on conflict resolution, violence prevention, and peacebuilding. Most recently, she was Director of Research and Field Advancement at Over Zero, which as noted above, now works both internationally and in the U.S. “to prevent, resist, and rise above identity-based violence.”
Earlier this year, I posted my reflections on the illuminating work Nichole had done with Over Zero colleagues to map the growing crisis of belonging in the U.S. When I discovered Nichole is practicing in Needham, where she lives, what she has been preaching globally, I was curious to learn more. In what ways might her experience as a volunteer civic leader in the Needham Resilience Network be informing her views on what peacebuilding requires in the U.S.?
Nichole and I recently had a wide-ranging conversation exploring this question. As we were wrapping up, I asked her what lessons she might share with civic leaders in other U.S. communities contemplating similar efforts. She responded with the following five points, which I have lightly edited for brevity.
1. You really can’t skimp on relationships
“The first thing we learned is sort of ironic. Obviously, the Network is about relationships, right? It's based on a theory of change in which the relationships you hold, especially with people across any form of difference, change your perceptions and understanding of that group, your appreciation for your shared values and interests, and your potential to co-create solutions. But when you build something new, you tend to think programmatically–you're thinking: timeline and planning and curriculum and outputs. So we vastly underestimated the investment we would need to make in building relationships with everybody to make this work. I'm fairly certain that, anywhere in the country where people are trying to undertake this work, this will be the case. My advice: double your estimate for how long this will take! You really can't skimp on relationships.”
2. Local funding and support is critical
“This lesson is more strategy-oriented. Local funding and support are critical. When you're starting a new initiative, even if people are all in, they need to see that others are all in, and all in for all of us. We were fortunate to get funding through a local foundation and a hospital because of their focus on well-being and community building in Needham. We also had in-kind support from the town of Needham–a place to meet, some communications outreach, etc. This is really important. We know from intergroup contact research that whenever you are bringing people together across differences, certain conditions make it more effective. One of them is meeting again and again. Another is having a common goal and purpose, and establishing equality and equity within the group. It is also critical for participants to know that they are getting support from local systems and institutions. I have often reflected on how helpful it has been for people to see this quiet form of support coming from within their own community.”
3. Make time to build the skills needed for the work itself
“We knew that our curriculum needed to include skill-building, but we also had to deal with time constraints. We have been meeting for just one and a half hours each month, which means we have ended up doing little bits and pieces of skill-building over a long period of time. We didn’t originally ask for or have the funding to do it differently, but in our future cohorts, and in programs elsewhere, I would advise front-loading both the skill-building and the relationship-building. Maybe it's two days locally or an overnight somewhere in which people come together for eight hours each day. Consider it a base camp where you're learning the basics: what does belonging mean in a civic context (for individuals, systems, structures), how to communicate to understand versus persuade, deep listening skills, developing an agreement to guide your conversations across difference. If we could have done all of that in one intentional setting, building one piece upon the other, we would have more effectively established the skills early on, and it would have enabled us to get into the common goal-seeking more quickly.”
4) You might need to pivot
“Building a network focused on belonging means you have to be ready to co-create at all times. If you are building a network or council of diverse leaders like this, you go in with your vision, skills, and focus. Then you listen to everybody. Then you might need to pivot. We quickly realized people were sitting on very different levels of knowledge about important local matters. We needed to get to a common understanding about what we have since come to call ‘The State of Needham.’ Instead of getting right into designing rapid response protocols for hate incidents, we decided to step back and look at the community from all of these different perspectives. We had to get to know each other and our lived experiences on these issues. As we did this, we began to emerge with a shared sense of who does what in town–and why. How and where do things work (or not)? Where are there equity issues or other problems? What are our shared values, goals, priorities, and ways forward on them? That took eight months, and it was not on our original agenda. We didn't see it coming, but I am so glad we pivoted to do it.”
5) There are disagreements that aren’t going to be resolved. That is okay!
“As anyone who does bridging work discovers, if you stay with it in one community long enough, then you have to go past the ‘let's get to know each other across differences’ stage to the ‘let's actually start to heal our divides and the wrongs that have been done and clear up the misunderstandings that we have about each other’ stage. This isn’t always warm and fluffy. There are disagreements that aren't going to be resolved. That is okay! Sitting with that reality can be really uncomfortable, especially at first. But we’ve learned two things. First, we don't have to come to a consensus on every issue. Second, we are often less far apart than we thought–in intention if not in policy. Because of the work we have done together as a group, month after month, we can disagree and yet be good. We can still do things together and champion one another. This is just the expectation you need to establish. Like, oh, we disagreed. But when we met again this month, you still asked me how I was doing, and I know how much you also care about my community. When you do that successfully, you realize, ’Hey–we are going to be alright!’ It's amazing, the trust that you build in each other.”
Nichole and her colleagues would be the first to agree that the Needham Resilience Network’s job is far from done. Indeed, in some respects, it is just getting started. The Network’s most recent monthly newsletter outlines the plan for the next six months. It will culminate in an early 2024 vote to adopt and roll out a communications plan and protocols to prevent hate and bias incidents and respond to them when they occur. The proof of the Network’s value will ultimately lie in the successful implementation of this and subsequent initiatives. That said, Network participants have steadily been building a sturdy and resilient foundation from which they can address hate and bias incidents–and other challenges Needham will encounter in the future.
