Belonging is Structural, not Sentimental: From Passive Acceptance to Active Co-Creation
Nichole Argo, a social psychologist and lead researcher on the Belonging Barometer, argues belonging actually rests on three distinct pillars — social connection, psychological safety, and agency. That third pillar becomes the episode's central idea: belonging without agency isn't really belonging at all, and communities that only extend a passive welcome — "the doors are open, come on in" — without a credible path to real influence are offering something thinner than they realize. This episode also pushes back on a common assumption that hyper-local belonging is optional in a connected, mobile world, arguing instead that proximity and shared place remain essential because they're what let people actually show up for each other, and that diverse, cross-difference relationships — not comfortable homogeneity — are what make people feel more at home, not less.
The second half of the conversation turns from concept to practice through the Together Up Institute, which Argo founded on the premise that strong communities don't emerge by accident — they have to be deliberately designed and built together. They treat relationship-building itself as civic infrastructure: not a "soft" nicety alongside governance and problem-solving, but the literal connective tissue underneath it. The conversation surfaces a recurring lesson from that work — that connection can happen quickly, but trust takes time, repetition, and a willingness not to skip the slow relational work in favor of programming outcomes. Argo closes with a practical reframe for listeners: move from being merely non-exclusionary to being actively "curiously kind" — seeking out who's missing from the table, asking about the values and experience underneath people's positions rather than just the positions themselves, and treating belonging not as a program but as a way of life.
Dr. Nichole Argo is the Founder and Executive Director of the TogetherUp Institute. Dr. Argo has long worked at the intersection of science and practice. From 2018-2024, she served as the Director of Research at Over Zero, a nonprofit working with leaders to build resilience to identity-based division and violence.
Prior to that, she led research/ implementation teams on national and international projects, such as: the unrolling of the gacaca process in Rwanda; messaging and outreach related to HIV-prevention in Kenya; the efficacy of a paralegal program for tribal leaders in South Africa; and, motivations for political violence in Africa, the US, and Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. In 2022, as a pilot project designed to counter local-level polarization and distrust and build local belonging and engagement, Dr. Argo founded the Needham Resilience Network, a model for institutionalizing relationships across diverse leaders so that they may bridge local silos, tool up in skills to communicate across difference, and engage in a process for co-creating inclusive solutions to local problems.
Nichole’s recent publications include: The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in the US, The Science of Polarization and Insights for Bridge Building, and several essays on how to communicate across differences that involve sacred values. She sits on the Permanent Monitoring Panel for Conflict and Polarization at the World Federation of Scientists. She has published in leading political science and psychology journals and holds degrees from Stanford, MIT, and the New School for Social Research.
Be sure to follow Nichole and TogetherUp on LinkedIn and to check them out online at https://togetherup.org/
People Mentioned
Monica Guzmán — Journalist and author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times (2022); Nichole cites her line that "the people who are underrepresented in your life are overrepresented in your mind." https://www.moniguzman.com/
Organizations Mentioned
TogetherUp Institute — Nonpartisan organization founded and led by Nichole Argo, dedicated to growing a national movement of Americans connecting across differences; home of the "Civic Works" model discussed in this episode. https://togetherup.org/
Needham Resilience Network (NRN) — A local civic-government partnership in Needham, MA, co-directed by Nichole Argo, that brings leaders from diverse community groups together to build relationships and co-create solutions to local problems; referenced as an early pilot of the Civic Works model. https://togetherup.org/
American Immigration Council / Center for Inclusion and Belonging — Co-publisher, with Over Zero, of The Belonging Barometer. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/center-inclusion-belonging/
Over Zero — Violence-prevention nonprofit; Nichole was director of research there when she led the team that created the Belonging Barometer. https://www.projectoverzero.org/
Research, Data & Concepts Cited
The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America — A 10-item measure of belonging developed by Over Zero and the American Immigration Council's Center for Inclusion and Belonging, first published in March 2023 based on a nationally representative survey of nearly 4,905 U.S. adults (December 2021 data). Measures belonging across five settings — family, friends, workplace, local community, and the nation — using three pillars: social connection, psychological safety, and agency/co-creation. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/
2025/2026 Belonging Barometer update — A more recent national survey update discussed in the episode (47% of Americans in the "ambiguity zone," 14% in "exclusion," agency identified as the weakest dimension of local belonging). Likely corresponds to the American Immigration Council's Belonging Barometer 2026 release. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/belonging-barometer-2026/
Shawn: Thank you so much for making time to be a part of this. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you.
Nichole: Likewise, and thank you so much for inviting me. I think the work you're doing is excellent and needed.
Shawn: Thank you. As you know, this podcast is really a reflection on the way people are shaping the places they're a part of. But I want to start by flipping that and asking: what is a place that has shaped your life?
Nichole: Sure. Trying to answer this, I think almost every place I've been has shaped my life in some way — when you look back at your experiences, you walk away with "here's what I learned here, and here's what I learned there." But I'll answer with the places I was in during my youth, because that's formative and laid the foundation for everything since.
I grew up in two places in Iowa that shaped how I understand human relations and my role in the world. One was Decorah, Iowa — a tiny town, about 7,500 people now, set in the rolling hills of bluff country in the northeast, on the border with Minnesota, where my extended family settled when they came to the United States from Norway. It was settled largely by Norwegian immigrants and farmers who knew who they were and where they came from, but were also genuinely excited to be here. I grew up surrounded by a tangible sense that people could bring their heritage fully with them and still be deeply invested in being American — this underlying idea that America is an extraordinary potluck: people arrive with their histories and traditions, and those differences become a quilt.
Decorah also taught me something about reciprocity, because it was farming country, and farmers understand that eventually everybody is going to need someone else — the weather turns, your crops fail, your equipment breaks, and you help each other. You raise barns together, you share what you have, you build what's needed in a community. Even now, Sean, should your car break down driving through Iowa, hope it happens there, because there's a decent chance someone won't just stop and help you get to a mechanic — they'll invite you to dinner. I think that kind of generosity carries into everyday interactions even today: information isn't just exchanged for its own sake, there's a sense that people want you to leave a conversation a little better than when you entered it. That's not something I've felt everywhere.
The only other thing I'd add is that even though we had a farm connection in Decorah, I actually grew up day-to-day in Cedar Rapids, an urban center of about 130,000. That gave me a different lesson: community doesn't just happen. My great-aunt Gladys helped raise me, and she was an extraordinary community builder — a leader in the Republican women's organization, in her church, in Altrusa, an international nonprofit that does service projects, and in all kinds of civic life. Our house was constantly full of women in big bold hats — that's how I remember it as a little one, coming in for coffee, card games, committee meetings, conversations about what needed to happen in the community. I'd help serve coffee and tea and listen from the edges, and every once in a while someone would ask what I thought. From a very young age, I understood that our life on Earth was about being involved in community — a joyful duty, even. You notice something's needed, you gather people, and you build it.
Shawn: Wow. So where you've ended up in your work wasn't a radical departure — the seeds were there. You're a sociologist, you just didn't know it yet. Even at a young age you were observing the ways of human life and community. That's really beautiful to think about.
Nichole: Memory is always a little suspect — now that I'm a social psychologist, I can go back and find the pieces of everything I've learned reflected in it. But I do think it runs the other way too — research is "me-search," and you go to the world with these assumptions, and for me they still drive the work. It's that difference between people being a contribution rather than a threat, and the idea that humans are fundamentally interdependent — we are literally all one, we have to be — and that strong communities don't emerge by accident, we have to design and build them together. That informed my work. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, but I think they're connected.
Shawn: I love that. And I love the Belonging Barometer project, which you were a lead researcher, writer, and designer on — we'll link that as a resource for listeners. I'd love an overview of that project and the scope of the research involved.
Nichole: Sure. The Belonging Barometer grew out of a partnership between the American Immigration Council's Center for Inclusion and Belonging and a nonprofit called Over Zero, which is focused on violence prevention — I was the director of research at the time. We were talking with organizations working in vastly different areas, from community development to public spaces, education, bridge-building, violence prevention, and the word "belonging" kept coming up. People believed belonging mattered to the outcomes they cared about, but there wasn't agreement on what it meant, how to measure it, how upstream it was — it was almost a gut intuition people didn't have language for.
I led a small team to create the barometer, and we did three things. First, we looked at what every discipline had to say about belonging — political science, sociology, psychology, education, sports, everything. Second, drawing from that research, we built a practical 10-item measure that could capture the complexity we saw in the research while staying simple enough for a community organization or practitioner who'd never thought twice about measuring belonging to actually use. Third, we tested it through a nationally representative survey of American adults — almost 5,000 people — measuring belonging in five settings: family, friends, the workplace, local community, and the nation. It was actually a huge study, because we also included measures related to health and well-being, democracy, civic life, and intergroup relations, which made for a pretty long survey. We wanted to demonstrate not just how much Americans belong, but how belonging connects to outcomes.
Shawn: People tend to think about belonging as soft or squishy — sentimental, and not that sentimental is bad, but as if that's all it is. This project has a much more robust sense of what belonging actually is. How does the frame you used compare to how people typically talk about belonging?
Nichole: You're a hundred percent right that the warm fuzzy — sitting around a campfire with friends and family — is real. It falls into one of the conceptual pillars we drew from the literature: social connection. Do I feel emotionally connected to this setting, whether family, workplace, friends, local community? Am I welcomed and included? Are my relationships as satisfying as I want them to be? That piece has rigorous measures in the social-connection research world, and it matters for belonging.
But what makes belonging more complex and multifaceted are two additional pillars. One is psychological safety: am I valued for who I am and what I contribute? Can I be my whole, authentic self? Can I express an opinion, even one that differs from the dominant worldview, or think out loud, without worrying I'll be rejected or face social costs? The other is agency, or co-creation — which, especially in newer waves of research and for local, place-based settings, looks critically important. Do I understand how this place works? Am I treated as less-than or as an equal? Can I influence the decisions that affect me?
Together, those three pieces set a really high bar for belonging — sometimes even hard to reach in family life. You could have friends and social connection but still hide important parts of yourself to fit in; we hear those stories all the time. You could feel welcomed and valued but have no meaningful voice in decisions shaping your life. You could have influence over decisions in your community but still feel profoundly disconnected from the people in it. It's not simple, not just "do you like me, do I feel warm and fuzzy" — it's closer to: am I connected, can I be fully myself, and do I have a meaningful role in shaping things here?
Shawn: The subtitle of the Belonging Barometer is "the state of belonging in America." So — what is the state of belonging in America? What are some of the major themes, as you've processed it, of where we are nationally?
Nichole: The most important thing to say is that we're in a much more ambiguous place than people might think. In the original barometer — data from December 2021 — belonging was strongest in our closest relationships: about 60% of Americans met the threshold for belonging in families, 57% with close friends. But moving outward into institutions or public life, the numbers dropped: 36% for belonging at work, 32% for the nation, and 26% for local community — about one in four people. Importantly, most of the people who didn't meet the belonging threshold weren't reporting outright exclusion.
There are really three categories. Most people were in what we call the "ambiguity zone" — ingredients of belonging were there, but others were missing. In local communities, for example, 60% were in ambiguity and 14% were in exclusion — exclusion being roughly a one to 1.6 rating on average across the ten questions, where things are genuinely bad. The middle zone, ambiguity, is where you have some pieces and not others, which turns out to be pretty easy to land in.
We've seen that pattern show up again as the barometer's been used elsewhere and over time. In Colorado, the first state to use the barometer statewide, belonging was substantially higher than the national sample — almost 62% met the threshold statewide, 68% at work, 53% in local communities. Even so, ambiguity remained: 41% in local communities were in the ambiguity zone, and only 6% in exclusion, which is really promising. I'd caution against directly comparing Colorado and national numbers, though, since the surveys differed in timing, administration, and question order, which do matter.
But the recurring pattern is that Americans aren't feeling completely rejected on average — some groups experience that more than others — but there is a large amount of partial or uncertain belonging. The newest sample, from 2025, reinforces that: 47% of Americans are in the ambiguity zone, and 14% — fairly consistent at the national level — are reporting exclusion. I think that's both concerning and hopeful. Ambiguity is not alienation. People are saying something closer to "I'm partly connected, but I'm not really sure what my place is." That means we have something to work with.
Shawn: I kind of feel like if you're not somewhat concerned and somewhat hopeful, you're not really paying attention. If it's all negative, you're missing so many beautiful people doing beautiful things, so many signs of life and vibrancy. If you're just whistling along thinking everything's fine, you're missing that there are real gaps in belonging with real impacts on our economy, public health, all these major indicators of well-being. Given the kind of work I do — neighborhood-based revitalization, place-based social change — I'm especially curious about the local-community domain of your research. I've heard people justify not needing to cultivate belonging at a local level because they have access to communities all over the world through their phone, or they can drive thirty miles to see friends — that belonging means something different in a highly connected world. How would you counter that, and make the case for why belonging at a local, neighborhood level actually matters, even with that kind of access to a global community?
Nichole: Great question. The Social Connection in America survey came out in 2025, and here's how I'd answer it: if people aren't connected to place, who's going to take care of place? You want place to be taken care of, because someday you might have kids in these schools, you might find yourself in a hospital, your neighbor might need help and you'll want to be able to help, or vice versa. It's true that in a hyper-connected world we can find places that fit us and fill some of our needs for belonging, but that can't solve all the problems.
Maslow's students have actually reformed the pyramid, and belonging is now the foundation — because if you don't belong, it can be much harder to find food, safety, or water. Belonging is like oxygen; it's a human need. It's great if my affinity group is chess players scattered around the world that I connect with online, but without local proximity, I don't have a support network, I don't have a reminder of what's real, a way to engage in creating change and feeling agency. At the end of the day, how will things actually work?
Shawn: There were a couple of aspects of the barometer that I loved because they speak to a side of belonging I don't hear enough about — the agency side. Part of belonging to a place, not just to affinity groups spread out globally, is being an active participant in shaping it. In the work I do, I'll hear people speak to the value of belonging and agency as related but separate things, and part of me wants to say there's actually no belonging without agency — think about a sports team: if I belong on the team but have no role to play, no voice that's heard, I don't really belong. So I'm curious — as you were researching and shaping this more robust understanding of belonging, what made it clear that agency is core to what it means to belong?
Nichole: I really love what you just said, that they're not separate. It goes back to the warm-fuzzy piece: belonging isn't just "do people here care about me," it's also "do I care about here." Once a place matters to you, you're more likely to think about your relationship to its future, and you're motivated to take action — that's how we take care of each other, how we build good communities. Agency has played a fundamental role in this research, and we actually have a new piece coming out soon that speaks to this more precisely — I don't want to say too much, but it's core and central. It might be one of the most consequential and overlooked ingredients of belonging.
The barometer asked questions like: do I understand how this place works, am I treated as an equal, can I influence the decisions that affect me — we called that co-creation. The more we've measured it, the more important it looks. The 2025 research identifies agency as the weakest dimension of local belonging: only about a quarter of respondents said they felt able to influence local decision-making, and agency scores are consistently lower than psychological safety and overall community belonging across multiple waves. In a November–December wave, only 19% — about one out of five people in their local community — landed in the belonging category on agency specifically. That says something important about local civic life: a lot of communities are pretty good at inviting people to meetings, asking for input, saying "we need to dialogue." But that's not the same thing as creating a credible pathway for people to help shape what happens. Communities that go beyond just being welcomed are probably the communities of the future — how do we get real participation?
Shawn: I'd hope the humanistic, moral case for that is enough on its own, but you can also build an economic case: our economies are stronger when people not only feel socially included but actually have power, voice, influence. If I'm influencing a space, I'm going to spend my dollars there, spend more time there, fight for the good of that space. Public safety, public health, our economies — it all gets better. I love how you frame it as building credible pathways. I've heard elected officials say more than once, "we're not excluding anybody, anyone who wants to walk into this meeting is welcome" — and everything about where the meeting is, what time it's held, what public input actually looks like, is not a credible pathway. It's the bare minimum of "we didn't lock the doors." What does it mean to deliberately build space where belonging can realistically happen for people in a community?
Given that you're not just asking the ten barometer questions but drawing correlations to other outcomes — what were some of the findings, as you did that analysis, that surprised or encouraged you, or affirmed assumptions you went in with?
Nichole: The clearest finding was that socioeconomic status was consistently associated with belonging across every setting we measured — family, friends, workplace, city or local community, nation. We can't say causally that it's because of socioeconomic status, that would require a different kind of study, but it's always associated, and more strongly than anything else. People who perceive themselves as socioeconomically better off relative to the average American generally reported more belonging, and people who perceive themselves as worse off reported less — it's a very strong, consistent relationship, more consistent than I expected, given how much local place-based work exists to buttress and provide social support.
I personally think agency may be a big part of that story. Think about what it takes to participate fully in life: what time are the meetings, what would you even be allowed to say, is it worth spending thirty minutes on a statement that gets cut to one minute and followed by ten others, is anyone actually going to reflect on and talk about it? If you're working two or three jobs, or working overnight, you're not going to make it to begin with. When do you volunteer for a board, when do you develop the relationships that help you understand how institutions work? There's a deeper psychological component too — who sees people like themselves leading? If you're in public housing, are you seeing mayors who came from there? Are the people on the board legitimately and authentically part of that community? Who walks into the room already feeling like an insider, and who's assuming their ideas are legitimate contributions?
I grew up with an incredible single mother who was on welfare for a long time, and I had the worst case of imposter syndrome for many years. The important point isn't that I had it — it's that my colleagues, largely, didn't. How many conversations did we have about the merit of ideas, our similar grades, all the things — when the real question is, why would one person walk into the room questioning whether it's okay to be there, because of their experiences and the cues in the environment around them? The data don't tell the whole causal story, but they make me think differently about economic inequality — not just as unequal access to money or material resources, but as profoundly related to inequalities in how people experience themselves as belonging in the communities around them.
Shawn: I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding on the right, left, and middle around poverty or economic disadvantage — a mindset that it's about a lack of resources, whether that's basic sustenance, housing, healthcare, whatever the system, that fundamentally misses that this has more to do with a lack of power, a lack of agency, a lack of belonging, a lack of a right to be. Even in the more social-justice-oriented movements trying to address economic inequalities in housing, public health, education — which, yes, please do that work, it's the industry I'm in — it can be done in a way that feels mechanistic rather than human: like there's just a missing component in an engine, and once we install it, everything will work. It's like, no — even if you get safe, affordable, stable housing for everybody, if your voice doesn't matter to what's shaping all of that, the psychological piece you're describing still matters. I think our answers to solving economic disparity will stay pretty flawed until we get at what it actually means to belong in a place. I'm so curious about that outcoming research on agency — I'd stand in line for it.
Nichole: Sean, you'd be our first. We'd say, come in for coffee, we want to hear your thoughts.
Shawn: Before we get to Together Up — what you're founding and leading now — was there anything else from the research you wanted to touch on?
Nichole: A couple more findings I think are pretty profound, related to what you were just describing. One is part of the agency pillar — we asked about feeling treated equally or less-than, specifically about experiences of indignity in everyday local life: interactions with law enforcement or elected officials, voting, shopping. 21% said they felt treated as less-than when interacting with local officials, and 20% said the same about local law enforcement — about one in five. What's striking is that those experiences were associated with lower belonging not just locally, but nationally, at work, and among friends and family. That suggests — though again, this isn't causal, it wasn't an experiment — that experiences of dignity or indignity reverberate further through our lives than we imagine.
There was also a finding that gave me hope: diversity in our relationships was associated with greater belonging. In the original national barometer, people with more diverse friendship networks reported greater friendship belonging. Since then, we've seen the same pattern in Needham, Massachusetts, where people with more homogeneous social networks reported less local belonging, and in a new survey in Pleasanton, California, where people who interact meaningfully with others from different racial, ethnic, or political backgrounds reported more local belonging. There's something about being part of a more diverse social network that enables you to feel more at home in a local setting.
Shawn: That's added evidence for why belonging at a neighborhood level matters — because if you're just self-selecting into communities that look like you, whether online or by driving to find them, you'll actually experience less belonging. You'd think it'd be the opposite — deeply embedded among people just like you should feel relaxed and at home — but it's the experience of crossing that border of difference that actually makes people feel more at home. I see that even in my own family — the parts that live in environments where they're daily confronted with real difference have a very different level of fear or anxiety about the state of the country than those who don't encounter it as often. When you confront it, you see it, you befriend it, you feel belonging with it. It makes me feel more hopeful about who we are and where we're going.
Nichole: There's a quote from Monica Guzmán that captures this: the people who are underrepresented in your life are overrepresented in your mind — but not accurately. You end up assuming their intentions, desires, or behaviors based on national fear-mongering narratives instead of seeing the complexity of a real person. It's not enough just to be connected; we need to be connected to people who aren't exactly like us, and connected to the institutions in our communities.
Shawn: And Together Up is doing exactly that work — literally forming rooms, getting people into space, facing those differences. Tell us about what you're up to.
Nichole: You're the master of segues. The truth is the Belonging Barometer led me to a practical question: if we know belonging matters this much, how would we build differently? I started the Together Up Institute pretty much by accident, because I got really involved in my own community while it was going through a period of stress. That led to the thinking: take these principles of belonging and ask what they mean for how we design and bring people together at the local level.
Our flagship work is something we're calling Civic Works — we're still testing it. The basic idea is simple: most communities have plenty of organizations and leaders, but they tend to operate in separate worlds — local government, faith communities, schools, businesses, immigrant communities, young people, elders and longtime residents. Usually those groups get brought together around a particular issue or decision. Civic Works does the opposite: we create a standing, permanent network of roughly 25 to 30 people representing whatever that community looks like. They spend time building relationships across those lines, learning skills for community leadership and navigating differences, and then they actually work together on something the community cares about. It's not another committee — we think of it as civic infrastructure, connective tissue.
We've been piloting this in Needham, Massachusetts, and Pleasanton, California. In Needham, across multiple cohorts, one cohort took on mental health and emotional well-being, and we saw members go back to their own networks — the Indian community, the Asian community, the police department, town hall — and change systems and policies, run education and awareness campaigns. Trusted leaders became certified in mental health first aid and designed programs for their own communities, and they held a big "Needham Thrives" festival that brought everyone together. In Pleasanton, about 30 ambassadors meet monthly, deliberately selected so the room represents faith, business, youth, government, and so on. At six months, the most commonly reported outcome was relationships across difference — the breadth of people's social networks had vastly expanded, in ways people say simply couldn't have happened without the network. We're seeing people who'd previously sat at the edges of civic life begin to see themselves as contributors, and organizations that had existed in the same city for years without knowing each other finding one another, and new collaborations that weren't even on the network's original agenda starting to take off.
Bottom line: relationships aren't the soft stuff that sits alongside governance and problem-solving — they're the literal infrastructure underneath them.
Shawn: I've worked with a group that reflected on this same "hard infrastructure vs. soft infrastructure" language, and how the social, civic stuff often gets filed under "soft" — which in our brains can register as less important. I've started thinking about it differently: hard infrastructure is like a bone — if it breaks, that's bad, but we can fix it. Soft, heart-level tissue going bad is what actually worries me more. There's a reframing needed around the profound impact when that soft infrastructure is weak or sick. I love that the work you're doing weaves this in deliberately — it doesn't just happen, it has to be structurally built. As that work begins in these communities — are there pieces that turn out easier than people expect, and pieces that are harder?
Nichole: Great question. Hands down, the easy part is getting people to come, and getting them to come back — retention. We've seen this four times now, and we're about to launch a demonstration project in ten additional communities. People are hungry for connection, particularly outside their silos — but they don't want it to feel contrived, they don't want to walk into a conversation explicitly about their differences. They want to get to know people, they want to barbecue, they just don't always know how. Once you create the structure and the right conditions, you see this tremendous joy of encounter. I try not to overuse the word "spiritual," because people relate to that word differently, but sitting with someone you didn't know anything about, and might have had a whole bunch of assumptions about, and really connecting with them at a human level — that's a profound thing.
Shawn: It is sacred. Whatever your understanding of holy or sacred or spiritual is — and I'm open to all definitions — those moments are genuinely sacred.
Nichole: People feel that, and they say it. They love discovering one another, and the reciprocity, the feeling of "let's build something with this," is genuine and big. In that same vein, it's also easier than expected to draw out people who don't think of themselves as civic leaders. We call these cross-sectoral networks "networks of networks," because everyone in the room is a hub of some kind — you could be the grandmother in a neighborhood that everyone's connected to, you don't have to be a formal leader. People who've never thought of themselves as leaders, once they're in a setting with real psychological safety, step forward without much trouble — even introverts. We've watched people find their voice, watched young people say "I have an idea for the community, and it's different from what you're talking about, tell me what you think." Once the relationships exist, you don't have to program everything that happens next, because it builds on its own — people bring their networks with them, and you don't have to go looking for volunteers, you get a hundred through the youth sports league.
What's harder is everything that comes afterward. This might be most useful for program designers thinking about doing this in their own neighborhoods: you can't skimp on relationships. When you're planning something, you're estimating hours and a timeline, doing all the project-management things — but there's a difference between enjoying someone over dinner and having enough trust to disagree with them, share power with them, make a difficult decision together. Connection happens quickly; trust takes time and repetition, you're proving it to yourself and others as you show up. You see this in a single family, even — the ups and downs, the complicating factors of relationships in daily life. Relationships require what they require, and you don't get to choose when or schedule it. But that's also the most beautiful and sometimes the most difficult piece of this work — every community is its own ecosystem, with its own politics, institutions, wounds, and power structures. You can't just drop a well-designed program into place and say "go."
Shawn: On your website, there's a video of the Needham Resilience Network where one of the women says something like, "we had this two-year cohort, and we spent the first year just learning how to listen to each other." That falls exactly into the "harder than you'd expect" category. It's one thing to value difference and diversity, to want to be in the room across those lines — but the actual skill set of listening and engaging seems underdeveloped in us, and there's not much in our cultural milieu encouraging the cultivation of deep listening. Even with adults, giving ample space and time for the basic skills of communication and listening feels like it should be easier than it is.
Nichole: That was a dramatic learning for us — we pivoted an entire program and added six months of curriculum at the network's request. It wasn't that people didn't want to, or didn't know how, to listen — we can all learn and practice listening every day. It's that as they started listening to one another — this community had started from a crisis, some people didn't even want to be in the room together at first — they realized something big. I'd say about 80% of the people in the room would have told you, "I didn't understand what others in the community were doing. I thought I knew, but now I'm learning they're doing all this other stuff I had no idea about." And can I know about that now, so we can make a plan going forward together?
So we added six months of what we called a deep dive into Needham, and had all these different identity groups, organizations, and public offices bring their data. Everyone at the end of that session said, "I had no idea." I had my sacred values, I was fighting for this, doing that — I just needed to listen.
Shawn: That's fascinating. I love that belonging as a way of life is what you're advocating for. As a final word — advice or guidance for people listening: an individual person may not feel like they can convene a network of networks, but maybe they're feeling that sense of being in the ambiguity zone, or they see people around them in the exclusion zone, and they want to start making belonging more a part of their own way of life, weaving it in at even a hyper-local level. Where would you say someone should begin, and how do they shape that into their own life?
Nichole: The good news is there's so much we can do, even as individuals — but when we say "belonging as a way of life," we're trying to push the idea beyond programs, and beyond individuals too. Most of this field focuses on teaching individuals the heart-sets, mindsets, and skills of belonging or bridging, and organizations think about how to create belonging for their employees or the people they serve. But imagine if those principles were embedded across an entire local ecosystem — in how a community governs, builds, communicates, celebrates, educates, makes decisions.
A few pieces of that, and each applies to individuals too. One: we'd hear leaders consistently speaking in the language of a bigger "we," rather than mobilizing by dividing a community into good and bad people, us versus them — and residents would hold them accountable for that, insisting a leader argue a position on its merits, not assume "the them" is all one thing, and deliver things better. Public meetings would look different — instead of a microphone at the front where people argue for three minutes, we'd design a process that lets people actually feel heard and welcomed, and get curious about the values and experiences underneath people's positions instead of just the positions themselves, because that yields new pathways or options. We'd ask about the strengths and weaknesses of each position, not just the strengths of our own. Science knows these are ways of bringing ideas together. And voice wouldn't just mean being allowed to speak — it would mean having a meaningful ability to shape outcomes. There's a lot more we could say here about schools, libraries, policymaking, culture — who's in the photographs in city hall, whose history is being told, what traditions are honored.
But for the individual, I don't think the goal is to try to be kinder — it's to be more curious, or "curiously kind," as I sometimes say. Seeking out the people who are missing at your table, in whatever way you can. If I'm an organizational leader, I'm trying to get different people on my board — make sure the people who aren't there now are there. If I hold a position on something, I'm going to seek out someone with a different position, and I want to hear — not really what their position is, but why, and where there's overlap in values, and how we might square that circle. Building, not tearing down. I think we can all do that. And the communities we build when we do it aren't just kinder, fuzzier places to belong — they're more intelligent. They have community intelligence that represents the full range of assets, risks, voices, and potentials, which means they're more capable, more innovative, better-performing, and more resilient. We have the evidence for that.
Shawn: I think we've settled for "I'm not being deliberately or overtly exclusionary" — we're happy to just not actively do anything, and we settle for the ambiguity. What I'm hearing from you, from the Barometer's work and Together Up's work, is that we should be trying to aggressively move toward belonging — that there are credible pathways to get there, at a personal level, opening ourselves up with curiosity to "other," but also, whatever role we play professionally, publicly, or socially, leveraging that role to not settle for "I'm not exclusionary," because that just leaves communities in ambiguity. What if, in whatever role we're in, we deliberately push toward this active belonging? That's the hopeful piece for me — seeing people like you leaning in, saying, "I'm not settling for ambiguity, I'm going for this assertive, direct pursuit of real, robust belonging."
Nicole, I'm so grateful I got to meet you and benefit from your research — I randomly found you on LinkedIn, read your research, and reached out, and I so appreciate you responding to a random stranger. I've appreciated this conversation so much, and I'm so looking forward to more of the research you all are doing coming out, and sharing it with whoever I can. I'm just fascinated by the work you're doing. Thank you so much for this.
Nichole: Thank you. I'm so glad you reached out — learning about the work you're doing in different communities has left me inspired too. I think we have a lot to learn together, and hopefully many more conversations.
Shawn: I hope so. Thank you so much — it's been really great.
Nichole: Thank you. Take care.
Shawn: You too.