Listen First Project Mission
Listen First Project serves as the backbone organization for the bridging divides movement toward social cohesion and collaboration. We serve our Coalition of 500+ organizations dedicated to bringing Americans together across divides to build understanding, trust, relationships, and solutions. Listen First Project provides the coordination, community-building, amplification, assessment tools, and access to emergent insights so our bridging movement partners can achieve greater impact together.
Listen First Project is animated by the research-based conviction that the interpersonal bridge-building field can, and must, have a much greater impact by working together. The problem of toxic division is far too wicked for any one organization to combat.
Our overarching strategy is to elevate the impact of the movement to bridge divides in America — internally through relationships, communication, collaboration, collective strategies, goals and measurement; externally through co-created, collective campaigns designed for mass scale with representative balance.
Listen First Project was founded in 2013. In 2016, we saw a need for an organization to focus on connecting and organizing the disparate bridging field pieces and catalyze a greater collective impact. So, rather than continue developing our own programming, we built a Coalition (now ~500 partners) and co-created collective campaigns such as National Week of Conversation. We now serve as the backbone organization for the Bridging Movement Collaborative, a collective leadership effort of the ~100 top organizations from the broader Coalition who are most invested in collective impact and are working collaboratively to erase toxic division from our civic culture while building productive civic engagement.
In that backbone role, we manage not only internal collective strategy but also public facing collective breakthrough initiatives such as National Week of Conversation, the Bridging Divides Badging & Microcredential Program, and the Better Together Film Festival. We also house field-wide strategic initiatives such as the Bridging Movement Goals & Measures Program.
Listen First Project’s operational focus is to serve five core functions…
Coordination: Collective impact backbone role focused on coordination, alignment, management, and support of partners around Collective Strategies and Collaborative Initiatives.
Community: Cultivating community, culture, and connections among the 500 organizations in the #ListenFirst Coalition and allies across civic sectors. (Monthly Coalition Calls, Partner Onboarding, Dot Connecting, Sector Roundtables, Annual Gatherings)
Amplification: Elevating the movement and partners' work in media and among other key stakeholders including funders, politicians, journalists, and everyday Americans. (Conversation.us, National Week of Conversation, Monthly Movement Bulletin (incl Best Things), Storytelling & Media Relations, #ListenFirst Friday Inspirations)
Assessment: Tracking and maximizing impact by holding the broad landscape view of and capturing data on the movement's progress. This includes intervention level impact measurement using our SCIM tools. (Bridging Movement Goals & Measures Program)
Insights: Generating, compiling, and distributing insights to enhance the work of movement partners. (Marketing Intelligence Hub, Toxic Polarization: The Latest Numbers, Field Playbook on Engaging Conservatives, Everyday American Motives for Participating, Science & Perspectives on Toxic Polarization, Hope for Bridging Divides (Participant Testimonials))