Love Democracy?
Hate Politics?
Join Rotary!
COURAGEOUS COMMUNITIES + THRIVING CLUBS = HEALTHIER DEMOCRACY
Join us and bring your friends!
Learn, practice, and share proven tools to bring your community together.
Showcase Rotary as an antidote to division and a hub for goodwill, friendship and action!
“We’re in it together to stay together!”
HOW CAN I TAKE ACTION?
Worried about division? Excited about Rotary's growth potential? Ready to take action?
Our 2025 workshops bring together more Rotarians and especially non-Rotarians ready to cool down the divisiveness in our country, learn some evidence-based bridging tools and collaborate across differences through hands-on, positive, and effective work.
WHAT'S A "COURAGEOUS COMMUNITIES" EVENT?
Co-produced by Rotary and Courageous Leadership, and targeted specifically for your community, participants learn highly effective tools to create goodwill across differences and bridge divides. And, participants experience the camaraderie and connection of Rotary and Rotary’s work. And these events speak directly to the 93% of Americans who want less divisiveness.
We can co-design public events of 1, 2, or more hours, during club meetings, in the evening with wine and cheese, on the weekend for a longer training, as part of a large, regular Rotary event (like conferences and assemblies). The possibilities are endless! Let’s get something in motion together.
WHY ROTARY?
Rotary is one of the few groups in the United States that continues to have a high level of trust, where people from many backgrounds and perspectives build bonds while achieving results together.
Courageous Communities combines Rotary’s "Service Above Self” model with Courageous Leadership’s proven constructive conversation and collaboration methods. You and your Club bring your skills at mobilizing people to do high-impact projects. Together, we invite Rotarians and non-Rotarians to team up and take action on a local issue of shared concern. (What American’s report they’re the most interested in doing, in terms of bridging divides.)
WHY COURAGEOUS LEADERSHIP?
Courageous Leadership’s programs are built on solid social science, and have helped people build trust in each other and our democracy. For close to two decades, Courageous Leadership has helped people recognize invisible systemic influences and subtle social cues for fear and stress that can lead to dehumanizing, avoiding, and lashing out. We train people to act with compassion, ethical courage, and ingenuity. Our evidence-based tools have been used with clients including Salesforce, Microsoft, Hewlett Foundation, The Center for Domestic Peace, GE, Pfizer, Kaiser Permanente, Columbia University Medical Center, and the Australian Government. The Rotary project falls under our Courageous Democracy initiative.
“Your work is brilliant and so very important. Your message and approach is a vital path forward to greater peace, understanding and healing on a personal and societal level. Thank you for your leadership and generous spirit.”
“Yes, it was helpful at work and in political conversations, but the best part was it’s been great with my wife! Learning to really listen has changed my marriage.”
Learn More Below
PROVEN MODEL
You can help expand the reach and impact of the successful “Courageous Communities” program pioneered by Berkeley Rotary, District 5160, and Courageous Leadership. Together, we developed and tested a science-backed strategy for:
Respectful & effective conversations & collaboration across differences.
Decreased distress & increased hope & motivation.
Increased understanding of how to overcome divisiveness & polarization.
Using these skills at home, in community & at work.
Social Fitness Training™ to better understand & respond in challenging situations.
Compassion & courage to transform conflict.
We delivered evidence-based, skills-building programs for constructive collaboration across difference to 500+ Rotarians and friends of Rotarians from 40+ Clubs, in a series of events around Northern California.
Courageous Communities participants leave more:
Hopeful,
Confident in their abilities to engage across differences,
Capable of creating goodwill,
Committed to increasing their conversations across differences, and
Interested in building relationships and working together.
DEMONSTRATED IMPACT
Third-party research by Jonathan Haidt’s Civil Politics, showed the “Courageous Conversations” program yielded some of the highest results of any of the many “bridging divides” programs they had evaluated, with statistically significant increases in:
A sense of belonging,
Willingness to work across difference to achieve common goals, and
Motivation to bridge differences
An internal evaluation of the initial Rotary “Courageous Conversations” showed that:
94% of participants want Rotary to continue to develop these sessions;
92% learned important information; and
86% will behave differently in the future because of the training.
“These are some of the, if not the strongest results we’ve seen in any of the programs and groups we’ve assessed.”
A recent TEDxTalk provides a glimpse of the methodology.
Meet the Team
-
Brooke Deterline
FOUNDER
-
Ken White
EXECUTIVE CONSULTANT
-
Donald Proby
EXECUTIVE CONSULTANT
-
Ryan Lamberton
EXECUTIVE CONSULTANT
-
AddieRose Maye
Executive Consultant
Our Advisors
Van Jones
CNN Political Contributor
CNN
Bradford "Brad" Howard
President and CEO
Howard Tours
Liz Joyner
Co-Founder & ED
Village Square
Duf Sundheim
Mediator
Republican Party Chair
Lori Grange
Strategy Officer
Hewlett Foundation
Fred Collignon
Professor Emeritus
UC Berkeley
A special thank you to the Courageous Conversations Rotarian Team:
Dan Thomas, Fred Collignon, Grier Graff, Jane Louie, Michael DeWilde, David Campbell, Anne Pardee, Ken McCroskey, Steve Beckendorf, Kathy Clemens, Joanne Dickerson-Harper’s, Helena Meyer-Knapp, Trudy Triner, Pamela Doolan, Maxim Schrogin, Suzanne Bragdon
Resources
The United States of Anxiety
Courageously Promoting Peace
Bridging Divides for a More Courageous Democracy at TEDx
We partner with Dan Thomas, who leads Berkeley Rotary’s Civil Discourse. We are happy to connect with colleagues at Living Room Conversations, Greater Good and Braver Angels around collaboration on program delivery and followup.