New Building Bridges 6 Pdf

[Macedonio Heninger]

TheBuilding Bridges Action Days will offer 65+ crowd-sourced events planned by the community in a range of formats that allow for different levels of dialogue and collaboration including panel discussions, workshops, fishbowl conversations, trainings, and case studies.

The Village is an interactive space for networking and building bridges. It will be open alongside the Summit and the Action Days. Guests can learn about cutting-edge finance initiatives, watch launches and pitches, or simply have a coffee with a new contact in this space.

Building Bridges will feature a high-level Summit, over 70 community-led events, and a networking village. This international event aims to create synergies, support new initiatives, and make finance a key catalyst for change.

Strategic Religious Engagement (SRE) is the process of collaborating with religious communities and/or partnering with faith-based organizations to advance shared development goals. It encompasses collaboration to establish new or sustain ongoing development initiatives and can take multiple forms. SRE is an adaptive approach to development and humanitarian assistance that can apply to any sector or region depending on the local context, and it is most effective when it is built on partnerships that have been cultivated over time.

Faith-based and community organizations, both local and international, serve populations in some of the most vulnerable contexts in the world. These organizations are often the first in and the last to leave in times of crisis, if not already permanently embedded in communities coping with development and humanitarian challenges. As a result, faith-based organizations often hold positions of special trust and provide essential social support to communities in every region of the world.

In 2013 the U.S. Government adopted the framework of the U.S. National Strategy on Religious Leader and Faith Community Engagement, which encourages U.S. diplomats and development professionals to engage and deepen relationships with religious leaders and faith communities as they carry out their foreign policy responsibilities. Building on this strategy and prior legislation, the U.S. Government has engaged with religious actors around the world to advance mutual development and humanitarian objectives, a priority again underscored in the 2020 Presidential Executive Order on Advancing International Religious Freedom.

USAID is committed to partnering with and alongside faith-based organizations and religious communities to advance shared development and humanitarian goals worldwide. The Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships reaffirms this commitment and works to build bridges between USAID and faith-based organizations and religious communities. Learn more about the office and what we do here. Subscribe to our newsletter by filling out this form.

I spent weeks writing about DEI back in January, following the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay, which came with a full orchestration of gloating from the anti-DEI activists who had pushed for her downfall.

I believed then, and believe more strongly now, that organizations would maintain their commitment to diversity and inclusion because the talent pool from which they draw is increasingly diverse, and will only grow more so over time. And because inclusion is the only sustainable way to lead and manage a diverse workforce for the simple reason that those from outside the leadership mainstream are more likely to feel, and to be, excluded.

As someone who has been around these efforts since the beginning, I believe DEI could benefit from less focus on ideas and more on actions, less concern with what people think and more with how they behave toward one another. After all, inclusive cultures are formed by inclusive behaviors, not by politically correct thinking. So, to the extent that we have overweighted the unconscious bias part of the DEI equation, there is plenty of room to chart a more effective path.

That said, organizational commitment to DEI, even when some of its methods are flawed, has dramatically changed the workplace for the better. Organizations are fairer, and have access to more diversity of thought and talent, than when people were expected to slot into a specific demographic or pattern. People who formerly had to suppress what was best about themselves in hopes of fitting in can now bring what is best about themselves to their work.

As the ugly boasts from those seeking to upend DEI\u2013 \u201Cwe got another scalp!\u201D\u2013 began to grab less notice, I turned my attention to other topics. All the while knowing that we were not done with the campaign to undermine organizational commitments to building cultures in which the highest possible percentage of people feel they have a place.

So here we are at the start of April, and once again events are pushing DEI into the news in ugly new ways. The grotesque trolling by opportunists attempting to link the collapse of the beautiful and essential Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore to DEI gives an explicit shout out to the racism that lies at the heart of this malignant worldview. I guess by now we shouldn\u2019t be surprised by the effort to pin the collapse of a bridge hit by a tanker to the fact that Baltimore has a mostly Black political class.

The day the bridge collapsed, a friend sent me the Harvard Gazette\u2019s report on a panel about diversity efforts in higher education. Straining for balance, the article cited the panel\u2019s one strong proponent of DEI, Stacy Hawkins of Rutgers, and its one unremitting opponent, Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute.

Hawkins distinguished between university efforts to diversify students, faculty, and staff, and cancel culture, which seeks to suppress specific points of view. She notes that, while cancel culture understandably elicits outrage by denying people\u2019s right to say what they think, it has nothing to do with either a commitment to furthering diversity or the practices that build a culture of inclusion. Rather, it thrives on division.

Shapiro\u2019s statements exemplify this confusion by accusing DEI of undermining the kind of open inquiry and truth-seeking that has historically characterized higher education. Yet in fact, it is precisely this kind of repression that characterizes cancel culture. It has nothing to do with the aims of diversity and inclusion.

Leaving aside the obvious bad faith and bigotry of many anti-DEI activists, I do believe that the focus on unconscious bias that has been a big part of many DEI intiatives in the last two decades has played a role. After all, the thoughts that run through our heads are not really anybody\u2019s business. Nor is it particularly valuable or appropriate to spill them to colleagues in the misguided belief that doing so will benefit us, our teams, or our organizations.

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Developed to build bonds of understanding and trust between communities of color and law enforcement, Building Bridges is an initiative that brings students from St. Benedict's Prep together with members of law enforcement for a shared experience involving physical, mental, and emotional challenges, as well as team building and reflection. Facilitated by Victory Road Leadership Development Group, the program launched in 2021 with a group of Benedict's students and New Jersey State Troopers. Its aim is to become a national model that can be replicated locally, regionally and nationally.

"[Building Bridges] allows Troopers to see things through the eyes of high school students and vice versa, allowing those high school students to see things through the eyes of our Troopers," says Colonel Patrick J. Callahan of the New Jersey State Police.

Joplin Circles, part of a nationally-recognized program with proven results in more than 80 communities, began in 2013. Circles is all about building relationships. Together, everyday men and women figure out how to do life better. Community members help participants find better ways to budget, resolve conflict, and gain the skills needed for successful employment. The best part about Circles is the fact that participants are changing their own lives. No handouts are given. People are supporting one another through friendship and fellowship to make life better for our whole community.

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