Tricycle Magazine’s executive editor, Phil Ryan, spoke with Beyond Us & Them founder and Executive Director, Jared Seide, about the organization’s mission and the manifold benefits of council (you can read the article on the Tricycle website or embedded below).
The interview explores the way council practice creates a container, a “structure of belonging,” that lends itself to open dialogue and healthy communication practices. The article touches on the breadth of our programs — in a variety of schools, with law enforcement agencies around the country and in 29 California prisons.
One of the goals of Beyond Us & Them is to “shift the paradigm.” As Seide explains:
“we’re living in a time in which the person we disagree with often becomes a monster, becomes the enemy, becomes somebody that you lose any sense of connection to, and in doing that, you set up the conditions for really atrocious things to happen. We desperately need to recognize the humanity in the other and really understand what it means to Other. We need a counternarrative to what we’re experiencing in the culture, in the media, and certainly in political discourse, that reminds us how much we have in common. And I think council is an enacted process and practice for that resonance to emerge.”
Want to learn more?
Learn about all of our Beyond Us & Them programs here.
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For more information on this and other Beyond Us & Them programs, please contact us.
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