What if building peace across our differences starts with just one relationship?

Liz Joyner is the founder and president of The Village Square, a nonprofit out of Tallahassee, Florida that for nearly two decades has brought people who don't think alike into the same room — and helped them build trust across their differences. In this conversation, Liz shares the practical, human-sized tools she's learned for bridging divides in our own lives and hometowns.

She explains why there's no substitute for direct contact with people different from us, how a single cross-cutting friendship can change the way we see everyone we disagree with, and her "rings of a tree" approach to building diverse groups that actually hold together. She also makes the case that peacemaking works best when it's local, proximate, and — refreshingly — not  ...