For more than a decade, across the Central region of the US, and beyond, the Compass Culture, Climate and Courage Team has been engaged in the work of bridge-building. We’ve helped groups build bridges across cultural divides like race and ethnicity; we’ve supported bridge-building across historical divides that were constructed decades ago, maintained due to a lack of awareness, and then ignored out of fear of making them worse. Our work has helped communities build bridges that span opportunity and economic divides, gender divides, educational, political, even religious divides.
These bridges are built through stories shared in ways that develop trust.
We bring individuals and communities together to tell their stories, the big stories of their cultures, traditions and shared experiences, and the small stories of their loves, challenges and losses. Through all of this, Circles of Trust© have been formed, differences have been navigated, and traumas have begun the healing process. This is the work of CircleBridge, a framework for transforming relationships and systems within organizations or communities. Sure, much of our work has happened within education, but we’ve also brought the CircleBridge approach to gatherings as diverse as communities of faith, prison inmates, and family groups.
Beginning with the telling of stories, we move through the challenges of listening deeply, turning to wonder concerning our differences, and choosing to show up fully to the circle while ensuring the circle stays open and welcoming to every other human being gathered there.
Through this process, organizations identify their guiding principles, their own Touchstones to come back to again and again and identify the voices that have gained the experience and gravitas to be considered the wise voices of their elders.
Transforming schools, businesses or non-profits doesn’t have to begin with a high-dollar consulting agency. It can begin simply by sitting down together and learning how to listen, share, grow in awareness of how our histories may still be coloring our future together in ways that hold us back from the transformation we know our organizations need.
CircleBridge is not one thing. CircleBridge is not a way of getting a set of helpful outside ideas. CircleBridge is a way of uncovering and enacting the intuitive and human ideas your organization or community already has: the ones that simply need a safe and courageous circle in order to surface.