Solutions-Focused Community Book Club

As an activist and author, Mia Birdsong’s work is centered around building more equitable, just, and healthy communities. In her new book, How We Show Up, Mia talks about how building these strong communities requires all of us to rethink our relationships with the people around us.

It seems counterintuitive that living the “good life”–the well-paying job, the nuclear family, the upward mobility–can make us feel isolated and unhappy. The author discusses that we are already kept apart by injustices relating to gender differences, poverty, racial inequality, differences in values, political belief, religious and spiritual differences, but the real disconnection is with the choice we often make to be independent of others without realizing that we are an interdependent species.

We asked participants how they showed up in their community. Click here to learn more about what they had to say!

Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in Wembley, in West London after losing his beloved wife. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries.

Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library for the summer when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a list of novels that she’s never heard of before. Intrigued, and a little bored with her slow job at the checkout desk, she impulsively decides to read every book on the list, one after the other. As each story gives up its magic, the books transport Aleisha from the painful realities she’s facing at home.

When Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha passes along the reading list…hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too. Slowly, the shared books create a connection between two lonely souls, as fiction helps them escape their grief and everyday troubles and find joy again.

What do you have on your reading list? Click here to see what our participants told us what they are currently reading!

Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own built-in curiosity.

Partisanship is up, trust is down, and our social media feeds make us sure we’re right and everyone else is ignorant (or worse). But avoiding one another is hurting our relationships and our society.

In this timely, personal guide, Mónica, the chief storyteller for the national cross-partisan depolarization organization Braver Angels, takes you to the real front lines of a crisis that threatens to grind America to a halt—broken conversations among confounded people. She shows you how to overcome the fear and certainty that surround us to finally do what only seems impossible: understand and even learn from people in your life whose whole worldview is different from or even opposed to yours.