Hahrie Han
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Hahrie Han’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think their instinctive reaction sometimes is for people to say, like, well, you know, we're an environmental organization, so we don't have that same kind of, you know, spiritual grounding that's going to be able to make our work possible, which is true. But there's no reason why an environmental organization can't create the same kind of community that a church does, you know.
And so that is, to me, a choice as opposed to, you know, something that has to be the way it is.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a universal preschool program. You know, as I put my political science hat on, it's very hard to kind of like causally unpack the extent to which – you know, what that sort of precise effect was.
But what I will say is that, you know, hundreds of volunteers from Undivided got involved in Issue 44 and then basically volunteered at the, at a level of, you know, somewhere between kind of two to 10 hours a week in the sort of 12 weeks leading up to the election.
And that's a level of volunteerism that is just having looked at a lot of the data on a lot of these kinds of campaigns that is just very unusual to see. You don't see that level of commitment. And, you know, what they're doing is they're doing things that you normally do on political campaigns or knocking on doors or calling voters or getting people engaged, you know.
And, you know, the fact that it was neighbors talking to neighbors means that You know, we know from the data is that it's much more likely to be effective than having an outside vendor from Washington, D.C., like calling voters in Cincinnati, telling them to get involved in this ballot initiative or something like that.
So we can't estimate the precise effects, but we know from other research that those kinds of locally driven volunteer efforts tend to be more effective than ones that are not.
Yeah, so a couple things that I'll say is, first is just, you know, so Undivided started as a program within the Crossroads Church. They have spun off, since spun off, to become their own independent nonprofit, and they have brought the program to other churches within the U.S., but they've also brought it to other, they also developed a secular version that they've taken to other workplaces.
And so, for example, some of the people I interviewed was a police force in a suburb of Cincinnati that invited Undivided to come and essentially run the six-week program with a coalition of people from the city that was a group of people, officers from the police force, but then also some city council people and other civic leaders.
And they all did this program together and they report it as having been pivotal to kind of opening conversation about race within their city. And so we see it in even like very unusual places like that. That's a small suburb of Cincinnati. So it's not scale in the sense of reaching like tens of thousands of people, but it's a different kind of entity that they've been able to reach.
So that's one way to think about it. The other way to think about it is that I think the principles of undivided can be scaled in a variety of different ways.
And one of them is just that is thinking about this kind of fractal structure that we talked about, that so many of the political organizations that we have right now go directly from like the national organization to the individual organization. And it's like a one to many set of connections they're trying to make.
But in a one to many set of connections like that, you can't have the deep impact that you want, the transformative impact that you want, you know, on that many people, right? You're necessarily limited by the number of people you can reach.
But if you create a structure that kind of operates like this fractal, then you can knit lots of different units together because each of those units is a self-governing unit that can stand on its own. And so I think there are structural elements like that that help us think about scale in ways that are replicable outside of just the context of undivided.
And just to kind of loop it back to the earlier part of our conversation is when we were talking about the...
um, some of the kind of, you know, lessons about democracy and what this means for democracy as a whole is, you know, if you accept the Madisonian premise that humans are not naturally born with the skills they need to make democracy, that we need these kinds of settings to sort of help us reach our quote unquote better angels, that a one to many structure is not going to give us the kind of experiences that we need to help us reach our better angels.
We need some kind of fractals, um, set of experiences like that. And that's one of the things that we know through other data has really become less and less common in the structure of American civic life.
Those kind of fractal experiences, you know, that like you tend to have a lot more organizations where you have a centralized staff that are trying to reach lots of people at scale because we have a technology now to do so. But but those kinds of experiences aren't creating the kinds of experiences that help us develop the capacities we need to actually make democracy work. Right.
So those are the kind of things where it's like we've gotten good at getting people to do a thing. We're not very good at getting people to become the kind of people who do. It needs to be done in a democratic context.
To me, that's an open question. I'm actually really curious about that.
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