As we turn toward the close of the year, I’ve been looking back on the moments that give me hope. Not abstract ideas, not headlines—but real conversations with real people. These three keep coming back to me.
1. “These questions were next level.”
At a Potluck Project event in Kirkland, a leader who has been to more interfaith gatherings than he can count pulled me aside. He said our questions were “next level”—not because they taught him more facts about other traditions, but because they opened a door into the lives and hearts of the people sitting with him.
“They helped me understand in my bones just how similar we all are,” he said.
That’s the Potluck Project at its best: helping us move from ideas about each other to relationships with each other.
2. “Most people are really kind.”
After a Let’s Go Together gathering, one of our security team members walked me to my car. Before I said goodbye, he asked me for a hug.
He’s a man who has been in some truly dangerous situations—yet he told me that talking with people is what scares him the most.
“Tonight you helped me face my fear,” he said. “And I realized most people are really kind.”
Moments like that remind me why this work matters. We’re not just helping communities come together—we’re helping people find courage they didn’t know they had and a healing they haven’t imagined.
3. “Is this a sunset or a sunrise?”
Over the last eighteen months, I’ve been in many Zoom rooms with leaders from Better Together America, The Rippel Foundation, Braver Angels, the Mediators Foundation, and others who care deeply about renewing democracy from the ground up. These are people who see the challenges clearly. None of us are naive.
In one meeting, after a long discussion about the state of our country, someone asked:
“We’re watching something shift… but is it a sunset or a sunrise?”
There was a long silence.
One by one, each of us said: It’s a sunrise.
And we said we felt called—each in our own way—to help make that true.
A year of growth and courage at PTU
This year PTU didn’t just update our mission statement. We grew into it.
Gathering Neighbors. Growing Trust.
It’s more than a slogan. It’s a way of building the kind of civic life where all of us can belong and contribute.
- Our media continues to lift up good-hearted people from many traditions who are already shaping a better world.
- Our Local Practice tools are giving people real experiences of seeing one another as human beings and discovering they can do more together than they realized.
- Our Public Leadership and Civic Renewal work is helping form a statewide network of people strengthening civic muscles that have grown weak.
PTU has changed as much in this one year as we have in the last seven—
in depth, in reach, and in courage.
And we’re just getting started.