Connect with Service Year Alliance to learn more about the Bridging Divides + National Service initiative.
Bridging Divides: coming together across divides to listen and understand each other, to find common ground, build relationships, and to make collaboration the norm.
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A Nationwide Movement
Our Bridging Divides + National Service initiative currently engages corps members in 40+ programs located in over 20 states. Together, we are conducting the largest-ever evaluation to determine bridging efficacy and outcomes in national service.
Why Bridging + National Service Matters
Service years address urgent community needs. Through service years, individuals tackle some of our most pressing challenges, including providing immediate and long-term relief in the wake of natural disasters, helping students succeed in the classroom, helping military veterans and their families access critical services, and more.
Service year alums are ready to engage: Service year alums leave their service as more engaged citizens who are more likely to vote, get involved in their community, and feel confident about working with their peers to solve challenges.
Service year alums are ready to get to work: Employers increasingly seek skills that service year alums and “bridgers” bring to the workforce - skills that foster a collaborative and resilient work environment, including conflict resolution, active listening, empathy, and adaptability, and the ability to work effectively across teams, manage conflicts constructively, and engage with empathy.
1. Pre/post surveys
Take part in the largest field-wide evaluation ever conducted.
In partnership with Listen First Project, Service Year Alliance developed a field-wide evaluation tool that captures a true pre/post understanding of how the national service experience prepares corps members to be more civically engaged and workforce ready to work across lines of difference.
This evaluation tool is evidence-based and includes common measures including efficacy, belonging, and collaboration, to evaluate outcomes on a national scale.
Benefits to using our evaluation tool:
- Easy to customize and implement for programs.
- Takes less than 10 minutes to complete.
- State commissions, National Directs, or large programs can create additional filters to analyze by program, site, start date, and more.
- Individual programs can analyze their data as well as pulling in additional data points from other partners to identify key trends and learnings.
Ways to apply this data going forward:
- Iterate on program design and the corps member experience to enhance bridging knowledge and skill sets
- Showcase the value of additional learning and skill-building opportunities with stakeholders, including staff, corps members, board of directors, funders, and community partners.
In addition to the pre/post survey, Service Year Alliance collaborates with leaders in the bridging community to provide skill-building curricula, protocols, and resources designed for service year programs. These offerings are often available at no cost, and provide focused learning opportunities for corps members in your commission or program.
Explore the intervention options below, and consider joining our Community of Practice to connect with other national service practitioners and discuss implementation strategies.
2. Curriculum
Develop foundational Bridging skills using flexible curriculum options, including asynchronous learning platforms.
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Constructive Dialogue Institute’s Perspectives curriculum offers foundational bridging skills through six online modules and three peer-to-peer activities. The curriculum is free to Community of Practice members and can be accessed through phone, tablet or laptop, making it flexible for service.
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Braver Angels offers five 40-minute e-courses crafted by experts in communications and depolarization, including Skills for Bridging the Divide, Depolarizing Within, and Managing Difficult Conversations.
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Interfaith America provides foundational bridging skill-building through its Bridgebuilder Basics online curriculum. Skills for Bridging the Gaps is a blending learning curriculum consisting of four modules. |
3. Applied Practice
Facilitate conversations that engage corps members in bridging relationships by using a guided protocol from one of our five partners.
- Braver Angels focuses on bridging the partisan divide. There are multiple options for engaging with Braver Angels. We recommend 1:1 conversations which can be held in-person or online.
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BridgeUSA has made their group discussion plans available to our program and commission partners. Note that discussion plans are geared towards student audiences but can be easily adapted.
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Civity works with individuals and teams to make intentional relationship-building a personal practice. Civity hosts a “DIY Civity” portal that contains resources for individuals to put “civity” into practice.
- Living Room Conversations connects people across divides and within communities to build understanding through conversation. They provide resources on hosting a conversation, including a host toolkit and conversation guides.
- More Like US corrects dangerous political misperceptions of each other, at scale. Research shows that everyday Americans are more similar – and less threatening – across the political spectrum than those in the other party believe, a finding known as the “Perception Gap”
Get in touch with the Service Year Alliance team to learn more and gain access to these resources.
Bridging in Service and Beyond
In 2024, Service Year Alliance Alum Awards highlight service year alums successful in bridging divides across lines of difference and fostering positive change in their communities. Meet a few of our awardees:
Our Advisory Group & Community of Practice
Thank you to our Advisory Group members for co-creating the Bridging Divides Initiative. This group will continue bringing the right resources, perspective, and practices to the table to inform the national service ecosystem and support the developing of life-long bridgers.
In addition, our Community of Practice includes over 40 members, including state commissions, National Directs, and individual programs. We convene every six weeks to explore specific topics, learn from service year programs, applied practice partners, and other guests, and regularly debrief and learn from the overall bridging divides initiative.
Join our community to examine, create, test, measure, and spread effective practices that best equip corps members with the skills and motivations to bridge divides in our society. Get in touch with the Service Year Alliance team to get involved.
In 2020-2021 Service Year Alliance, with support from the Einhorn Collaborative, conducted a field scan and analysis to understand the impact of service years in developing bridge-building skills in corps members. The resulting report indicated that there was a strong belief among service year program staff that their programs tangentially engage in bridging work, and that their corps members are gaining skills and behaviors associated with bridging divides, but that additional support was needed to more fully understand and intentionally engage in explicit bridge-building practices.