We Support Bridge Builders
Civic Health Project funds, promotes, and connects the heroic work of nonprofit leaders and teams who are dedicated to reducing partisan animosity, fostering social cohesion, normalizing bridge-building, and improving civil discourse and decision-making across America. Individually and collectively, these organizations are inspiring Americans to embrace less divisive, more cohesive norms, beliefs, and behaviors.
Our grants are sized and timed to support recipient organizations at critical inflection points, as they aim to scale, measure, or otherwise increase the impact of their work. In addition to funding individual nonprofits, Civic Health Project also incubates strategic projects that are designed to amplify awareness, improve reach, encourage collaboration, and accelerate learning across the entire bridge-building field.
Grantee Spotlight
American Exchange Project
Founded in 2019 by David McCullough III, The American Exchange Project is a national non-profit organization attaching travel and adventure to every high school diploma in America. AEP sends young Americans on a fully-funded trip to an American town different from the one in which they grew up.
All Bridge Builder Grantees
Meeting of America
Meeting of America is an unprecedented endeavor to decrease the painful, dangerous division in the country by gathering millions of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs to recognize shared humanity, values, and concerns then find a way forward together. The experience begins with small group conversations on a custom online video platform built to enable real, respectful exchanges that inspire and unite Americans.
Those who choose to participate in all three one-hour conversations are invited to establish a new kind of community, a place of belonging and identity outside warring tribes. Those inclined to move from building trust to taking action will work together as an unlikely coalition to fix things they broadly agree are broken.
America Talks
In June 2021 and April 2022, thousands of Americans matched on political differences conversed one-on-one or in small groups, face-to-face, on video. Each conversation provided a repairing stitch to America’s frayed social fabric, as participants shifted perspective from “us versus them” to “you and me.”
Millions more Americans were inspired by these conversations, which were amplified via news media, social media, influencer campaigns, live streaming events. America Talks served as the headline event kicking off the 2021 and 2022 National Week of Conversation (NWOC), which provided additional ways for Americans to connect across differences in mutually respectful, constructive conversations.
Mismatch
Middle school, high school, and college classrooms across the U.S. today are navigating a complex political, cultural, and media landscape. In pursuit of deeper knowledge about important topics and issues, students and teachers must sift through vastly divergent viewpoints and make sense of rancorous interactions. Facing these challenges, educators seek to deepen students’ skills in media literacy, critical thinking, and civil dialogue.
Mismatch is an online conversation platform from AllSides for Schools, purpose-built to foster human connection and respectful dialogue between students in different parts of the United States. Like a modern-day “pen pal” program, Mismatch matches students across distance and divides, and guides them through structured, meaningful conversations with one another on a range of important topics. The platform makes it easy for classrooms across the U.S. to find and match with each other, choose one or more topics to discuss, schedule meet-up times, and connect on video.
Weaving Community
The COVID-19 pandemic, devastating to so many Americans in so many ways, also reminded us that our social fabric has long been frayed and weak. In Spring 2020, the Weave Project and the National Conversation Project launched #WeavingCommunity During Crisis – a six-month social and community campaign – to help Americans heal divisions and create the firm footing of connection that would allow our nation and democracy to thrive during and after the pandemic.
The online campaign, which generated nearly 100M impressions and reached nearly 20M Americans, provided a powerful counter-narrative to feelings of isolation, anxiety, despair and fear. Campaign messaging, events, and actions reminded people of our shared humanity and the value of showing up for others, to see and be seen.
