The Othering & Belonging Institute

The Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) at University of California, Berkeley is a hub for researchers, community leaders, policymakers, communicators, and other stakeholders committed to realizing a world where everyone belongs. The Institute advances research, policy, ideas, and narrative work that examine and remedy the processes of exclusion, marginalization, and structural inequality – othering – in order to build a world based on inclusion, agency, fairness, justice, and care for the earth – belonging.

OBI’s Bridging for Democracy Project is a partnership to develop strategies through which U.S. power-building organizations meaningfully bridge across racial, ideological, and urban-rural divides to strengthen democratic norms at a time of deep social fragmentation and dehumanization. The premise of this project is that to maintain a pro-democracy supermajority, the power-building sector must strike at the heart of anti-democracy forces’ strategy – the cultivation of fear, cynicism, and dehumanization – by building relationships and and shared narratives with constituencies that may not agree with them on many issues, but that can share commitments to democratic practices.

The Bridging for Democracy partners are combining the method of deep canvassing with empirical research and testing experiments to develop and model approaches to “long bridging” with diverse constituencies vulnerable to anti-democracy strategies. The project spans five states where politics of racial, ideological, and geographic division have been particularly acute: Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada. In each of these states, project partners will identify constituents that fit the profile of long-bridge targets; review existing research on effective and ineffective outreach strategies; design and carry out original research where knowledge gaps exist; run deep-canvassing door-knock programs focused on listening and building relationships; capture lessons from deep-canvas conversations; and combine lessons from research and deep canvassing to add up to durable narrative strategies.

The aim over 18 months is to have up to 300,000 deep-canvas conversations. Project partners recognize that a goal of 300,000 deep-canvas conversations is at once both highly ambitious and also not (by itself) enough to safeguard democratic norms, even if all conversations went well. But to think about reaching a scale that would achieve the latter goal, the power-building field needs a prototype as a starting point. That is the role that this project serves: to develop models, lessons and tools that can serve as examples across the power-building field.

All of OBI’s Civic Engagement project work is carried out through a multi-sectoral and multi-scalar set of partnerships, spanning fields of research, strategic communications, community organizing, labor, and philanthropy, and at national, state, and local levels. OBI’s national core partner group includes Make the Road Nevada, Workers Center for Racial Justice, Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Chirla, and others.