Such a beautiful piece about healing polarities and remembering other as 'brother'. Here's an excerpt ...

Hands Across the Hills rose in response to the 2016 presidential election. Residents of our progressive MA town gathered to mourn the election results and then to organize — because mourning has limited social impact and organizing lights up the world. One suggested effort was to form a group to bridge political divides, which I chaired as I have decades of experience as an international peacebuilder in war-torn societies around the world. I immediately felt grateful for the opportunity as I knew it would be inspiring and intriguing to design and facilitate this project.

Finding participants in KY was a stroke of good fortune. A community organizer there named Ben Fink posted an article online that a member of our group discovered, and the rest is history. We formed a partnership and are forever grateful for his presence.

We structured our project with two weekends of three days each, first in MA and six months later in KY. Our website handsacrossthehills.org has detailed stories of our exchanges, which included homestays, dialogues, cultural sharing, music, dance, art and local sightseeing. We wanted the in-person exchanges to be long enough for some genuine relationship development and personal transformation, and short enough to accommodate participants’ family and work obligations. My gratitude overflowed at the generosity of our Western MA community in their outpouring of food, funds, venues, program ideas, enthusiasm, and all around support. Gratitude has been a thread throughout, and I know is now shared by all the members of those in the dialogues.

Although we have completed our two-way exchange, we remain connected to our KY partners and they have requested a return visit to MA in 2019, which we are currently exploring and shaping. This visit will focus on dialogue and also have a component on rural economic development, which is needed both in Letcher County KY and our Franklin County MA. We also will send teams from MA and KY to our local colleges, high schools, and religious institutions to talk about bridging and building citizen connections to counteract the fear and hatred that has grown in our country in recent years. We see the impact of previous talks and know that our project offers hope in very hopeless times in our political landscape. Just seeing us together from MA and KY is enough to provide hope, as we are not “supposed” to be together because of our opposing positions on social and political issues.