In our season finale, Travis Rejman explores how reverence and grace can transform public discourse and community-building efforts. He reflects on the importance of fostering trust and relationships within communities before moving to action. Travis’s insights into the nuances of collective identity and shared responsibility remind us that reverence is not just an individual practice but a collective endeavor.

Transcript

Travis

I think that there’s something about reverence that has to do with a sense of humility, a sense of gratitude that is particularly lacking in our public conversations these days. I usually feel reverence when I feel like I’m connecting with something that’s bigger than me, that there’s a sense of

Ceasar

I’m really excited that tonight we have Travis Resman, old friend who’s, well, he’s not old, but he’s a friend. The friendship is old. The friendship is old. The friendship is old, and it’s really wonderful. I met him a number of years ago when I moved to Chicago for a little bit, and he’s the head of the Golden Institute. And in that position, he and I have done several different kinds of projects and worked together. And it’s just been really exciting. Welcome, Travis.

Travis

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Ceasar

Good to have you here.

Ayushi

I will kick us off with a bit of a reading. Today, I and Dave, our incredible engineer behind the scenes, have picked Self-Portrait by David White, a poem. “It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many Gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned, if you know despair, or can see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world, with its harsh need to change you, if you can look back with firm eyes, saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your short defeat. I have been told in that fierce embrace, even the Gods speak of God.”

Ceasar

Nice. Thank you, Ayushi. Of course. So, I’m going to put something out there. So, this is not like 20 questions, Travis. So, I’m going to put this out there and I think each of us can- Generalize. I’m kidding.

Ayushi

Hahaha

Ceasar

I think each of us can respond to it, you know. We can just kind of play with it from experiences that each of us have. So what I want to start out is, like, a story about when’s the last time you actually experienced this feeling of reverence.

Ayushi

Travis, do you want the hot seat or do you want me to go first?

Travis

Nah, go for it.

Ayushi

think the most recent moment I can think of was on Sunday morning. So yesterday, I guess yesterday, and I was walking around outside with my tea as I only get to do on the weekends. And I noticed that my jasmine plant was dying. I was very sad that it was dying. And then I realized that it wasn’t actually dying. It had just been taken over by the dropping of a neighboring fig tree. And figs are these cool trees that actually start as bushes before they develop trunks. And so this fig tree was using the trellis to crawl where the jasmine should have been crawling. And something about this intermingling of this beautiful smelling white lavender flower along with this fig was just really magical to me. And I went from being like, oh, my jasmine is dying. I’m a horrible gardener to, oh, wow, this is really cool. And just kind of thinking about that interplay and how that kind of takes place in the natural space all the time. So I think that was my most recent moment of awe and reverence.

Travis

Yeah, I think actually my most recent experience with reverence was actually the last night. Yesterday afternoon, we had a gathering of the Chicago Peace Fellows and they’re a bunch of neighborhood level leaders from the south and west side of the city where violence is most intractable and they came together for just a day without a real agenda. There was no workshop. There were no speeches. We just hosted something like a cookout or a picnic in the park over on the west side and we had dozens of fellows show up and watching them interact with each other in a way that wasn’t about I don’t know how to put this but utility wasn’t about something that you need in the moment something about the connectedness to each other and valuing that and just breaking bread and of course, they were also doing things that have utility. They were making connections. They were sharing notes, but just the fact that the group is about more than that. That’s about who we are together. It’s about caring for each other. There was just a moment where I was coming around the corner and I just saw all of these people chatting with each other in such meaningful ways and introducing them to their kids and their spouses and partners. I just sat there kind of an off for a moment of what it means to build community in those kinds of spaces.

Ceasar

in the town that I live in, or the city, I’m sorry, it’s a city, called Brockton. We moved there two years ago. We were watching the, reading the kind of local news. And there was this article about these two guys, both of them black, who were trying to start a kind of local craft beer place in downtown. Now, downtown Brockton is a place that’s like, just been abandoned in some sense. And there are things there, it’s just not a vibrant downtown, but they’re part of this effort to kind of start to make things different. And we’d read about it and it’s like, okay, they’re trying to get this permit. They’re trying to raise this money. They’re trying to do this. They’re trying to do that. And it opened finally, and Friday, we went there. And it was absolutely amazing because this place was full of mostly brown and black people. Young, from I’d say, young middle, you know, 15-year-olds to older adults, all sitting in different kinds of conversations and just talking with people, mingling together, connecting with each other. And I realized that in a city that’s going through a transformation, and it’s a different kind of transformation, you know, when you think of cities like Boston, are you, you know, San Francisco and others, you know, you’re looking at the gentrification that’s happening and people being displaced. Well, Brockton’s a place that people got displaced to. So they’re rebuilding, right, something, right? They’re creating something out of that. And to realize someone has created this kind of new space, right, for people to gather and to meet and to connect with each other. And, you know, I’ve been to lots of, you know, craft beer places, and they’re transactional and they’re, you know, they are what they are. But this was something very different, and it had that sense of reverence to me. And I think it became what it was about. And they have a big sign on the wall that says something to the like, this is a place of community. I think it says something like that. That’s the big thing, kind of like on the wall. So in that community, you know, in that sense, there’s reverence, you know, that building of it. Aisha, do you mind if I take this dip into the next question?

Ayushi

Yeah.

Ceasar

because something is just kind of pop for me, which is, you’ve talked about it, always in relationship to nature and what you saw in that whole notion of nature. And you think about a lot of our spaces, some people are really lucky to have nature around them and some don’t. And you talked about it, you know, also Travis in terms of this gathering of people who have the connection, but it’s just being there and being able to use the space of a park to come together. And I’ve just talked about this space that was created as I’ve been used here. I guess the thing for me is I’m wondering, okay, so we each have these examples, but why is it that in the public sphere, in our civic spaces, this sense of reverence feels so hard to actually grab hold, to take hold, to be there, to have it feel like that. What’s going on?

Travis

That’s a really interesting question. And I think our public conversation these days is obviously very divisive. But it’s also really focused on things that different groups want. There’s a sense of competition in our current conversation that has overshadowed conversations about shared responsibilities or communities. And I think that there’s something about reverence that has to do with a sense of humility, a sense of gratitude that is particularly lacking in our public conversations these days. I’m not sure exactly what’s driving that, but I feel like those things are in our intention and they come at the expense of each other. I know I personally feel reverence, the other kind of things around reverence that I feel or things like gratitude, things like awe, things that are bigger than me, things that might last beyond my lifetime. And very little of the public conversation is actually about that.

Ceasar

Are you saying this just for yourself, or is there a notion that you have that reverence is really to those things that are kind of everlasting, larger than us, that are life-giving, or is there a reference just in the minutia of life? Can it be there too?

Travis

Yeah. You know, I thought a little bit about notions of reverence as I was thinking about jumping on the call today. And I was just reflecting on my own experience. When do I feel that sense of reverence? And it’s almost always around questions that don’t have to do with the particular utility that something or the transaction that someone can do for me. Or for my community, it’s valuing something beyond that day-to-day utility. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have reverence for day-to-day moments, small moments. But it’s about that moment being an expression of something larger. I usually feel reverence when I feel like I’m connecting to something that’s bigger than me, that there’s a sense of community or important principle or truth at stake. That’s usually when those moments of reverence really come up for me. I also feel awe, and they’re related. You know, you see a beautiful piece of artwork or hear an amazing piece of music or just get that sense of awe when you’re out in our relationship with other people. So I don’t have a great definition for you or anything like that. I was just reflecting on my own experience about it.

Ceasar

You know, I was thinking, Travis, you’ve done a lot of work in different parts of the world, really bringing groups together and really in dialogue to find their own path through something. I know there was work you did in India that was really, I think it’s in India, really related to the co-lending work. You’ve done work in Haiti around security issues and women building security processes. You work in Bogota.

Travis

We work together, actually.

Ceasar

we did some work together. And actually, I wanted to evoke Bogota for a moment, because I actually think there was a vision about the importance of reverence that made this possible when you actually created an opportunity to bring both the victims and perpetrators of violence together in conversation, child soldiers who had actually been part of violence in a particular community, and then bring them back to that place, and to start that conversation together. So, how does reverence fit into how you even think about the possibility of doing that?

Travis

Oh, that is a, that’s a huge question and a kind of a tough one. Um, to, to set the stage, I mean, we were meeting with folks who had demobilized. Most of them were former child combatants in either the FARC or ELN, some paramilitaries as well, but the civil war in Columbia is a unique context because people were demobilizing, people were returning to communities, even though the conflict was still going on. And so, you know, you have decades of civil war and people trying to return to communities in the midst of that. And we worked with a group, the Foundation for Reconciliation there based in Bogota, that was kind of the home for that kind of conversation between what they would call victims and victimizers, people that were victims and perpetrators of violence. And I think that the, the work there does relate to this question of reverence because it requires a sense of humility in the conversation. And we just saw these absolutely magical moments of people that would meet regularly to talk about their experience. How did they get caught up in the fighting? Um, what was their experience like? What was it like to demobilize? What was it like to return home? What was it like to try to go find a job or return to your church or temple and you know, sort of reenter a society outside of conflict. And often in these rooms, you would have people that were displaced, people that lost loved ones to violence, sitting in conversations with folks who were active in that fighting, sometimes on opposite sides. And one of the, the conversations that was particularly meaningful to me were these two folks who had to mobilize, but they were fighting on different sides of the conflict and didn’t figure that out until maybe six or seven workshops or meetings or conversations in, when they were talking about what it means to reconcile, what does it mean to come to terms with both what you did and what was done to you, the friendship and camaraderie and mutual understanding between these two former combatants that figured out through their conversations that they were actually fighting literally against each other in the same territory on two different sides of the conflict, but that they were both victims of the context was just an amazing moment for them, but also just a moment to listen into. And it, it forces you to think a little bit more broadly. Think about your role in the world with a little bit more humility and how we can all get caught up in things that yes, we do have personal responsibility. We do have agency, but there are also, there’s just a context in the world that that is difficult to understand bigger than any of us and that we need to struggle through that together.

Ayushi

I’m just imagining you Travis, in this space, watching six, seven workshops go by and watching these people, various people in conversation who may not even yet know their own differences in background or similarities. I can’t imagine that it was easy for you or your team to even facilitate those kinds of conversations, let alone it being like a series of conversations that would come to some sort of meaningful end. I’m curious how, if at all, you create the space for people to make that leap and bridge that disconnect between, you just said, their agency in the situation, but also the context that is sort of larger than their life and seeing themselves as one small piece of this larger puzzle and therefore approaching not with maybe anger or frustration or disappointment, but actually approaching with grace. How do you even begin to facilitate that kind of dialogue? How do you create space for that kind of reverence to be present?

Travis

Yeah, so I come from a kind of a community organizing background. That was how I first got started. And the word that you used grace is something that has motivated and haunted me over the last 20 years in this work, because I look around today and I see shockingly little grace that we have for each other. And Cesar, to your earlier question about, you know, why is it so hard to find reverence, I think part of it is that we have so little grace for each other in our conversations as a public. And unfortunately, that’s not unique just to us here in the US. That seems to be a growing issue around the world and communities that we’ve worked with, but one of my very first experiences as a community organizer working with diverse religious and spiritual communities was in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. I worked for an outfit called the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Amazing history going all the way back to 1893 in Chicago, Columbia and Exposition and all of that. But my job was actually just really block to block level in Rogers Park and one of the most religiously diverse, demographically complex neighborhoods in Chicago and therefore in the world. And we had a truly horrendous experience where it was back in July of 1999, where on Sabbath day, there were Jewish neighbors who were walking to services and a man by the name of Benjamin Smith drove up in his car and opened fire. He shot five adults and one child. And then he drove from there to Skokie, which is the town, predominantly Jewish town next door, where he shot the beloved coach of the Northwestern University basketball team, Mr. Ricky Birdsong. He continued to drive off. He shot other people of color over the next couple of days before he took his own life back down where he went to school in Indiana. And he was a member of this group called the World Church of the Creator, which was this Christian extremist group. And it was amazing that four days after that shooting, there were 800 people who came together in Indian Boundary Park, which is kind of the primary park in that neighborhood to stand in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. And part of what made it so astounding to see were folks that were, you know, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, American Indian, every community that you can think of was there to stand in solidarity. And one of the gentlemen from the local Muslim center, Wahach Ahmed took the mic and said, we need to stand in solidarity. Our Jewish neighbors were not shot four nights ago. We all were. And it was just this unbelievable sense of solidarity. And when we were kind of getting ready to leave, there was just a quick kind of snap decision that was made in the group that they were going to walk together, march together down the street to make sure that the Jewish neighbors were able to go to services in safety and feel that they were well cared for as part of the neighborhood. And so that happened. And as we were walking back, one of my Catholic neighbors, Frank, wasn’t the most articulate person generally. He said, you know, who we are together is just as important as what we do together.

Travis

And it’s always kind of stuck with me as a perfect way to talk about this work and what it means. We’re better at talking, I guess I’ll put it that way, about how do we drive towards agreement? How do we drive towards what to do? We’re less good these days at talking about who we are, why we would want to do things and doing that work to build trust and community, which is really what makes getting things done possible in the first place.

Ceasar

Wow. I didn’t know a little bit of that neighborhood. I didn’t know that story. It’s quite something. I lost my list of questions, Ayushi.

Ayushi

I’m not even paying attention to those anymore, I’m just so enthralled by Travis, it doesn’t matter.

Ceasar

Well, when you were telling the story about what was happening in Bogota, you kind of touched on this, but I was going to ask you, you have this other project going on in Chicago now, the Peace Fellows, right? You say that, you know, reverence really is tied to the notion of humility. Reverence and grace are something that have kind of fallen to the wayside. And here you are working, you know, in two really tough parts of Chicago. How are the Peace Fellows, if that’s the vehicle, how are people really bringing this notion of humility and grace back into the work of trying to reduce violence? And can you? Does it work?

Travis

Now that’s another big and tough question to answer. I will say that part of why the Peace Fellows are so powerful as a collective is that they are the folks who are closest to the issues. They have the most at stake in making progress on the challenge of gun violence in the city. They are at this point 74 alumni strong and we spend a lot of time talking about how to toggle back and forth I guess is the best way to put it between building trust and doing things together. And so we’re really intentional about that because it’s not usually a question of what needs to happen. I think we all kind of have a sense of what needs to happen. There are policies we can pursue to make it harder for folks to get guns and handguns in particular. But the question of motivation, the kind of motivation it would take to make change on issues that have been decades in the making to really get at the root causes that drive violence, a sense of social isolation, a sense that folks are just cut out from society and that society doesn’t care about them, racial disparities in wealth and income, historic disinvestment, these huge, huge issues that are gonna take a long time to solve. We know kind of what steps to take but it really boils down to having the motivation and the trust and the sense of community to do that work for the long haul, the kind of time commitment that it’s gonna take to actually address some of these root causes of violence. And I think that building that trust is really the glue that enables us to stay together when times get tough, when you take a couple of steps back, when you realize that some of the things you’re fighting for around justice, racial justice and economic justice, environmental justice are gonna take longer than our lifetimes. It’s really that investment in that sense of who’s included. When we talk about the community, that’s really the heart of the work. If you’re trying to tackle something big and tough like gun violence prevention or in Columbia, what it means to really reintegrate after a civil war or in Haiti, what does it really mean to prevent gender-based violence in the future? Those kinds of big tough questions require a different kind of approach to really build that base of trust and capacity for change.

Ayushi

I think it’s really interesting to me as we’ve been having this conversation is, sure, we started with the word reverence, whatever that might mean. And we’ve come into a place where we’re really talking about, like you said, the who, right? We’re talking about the people more so, and the trust between people, right? And the solidarity between people as opposed to talking about the sort of what, the like end goal or end state. And what’s striking to me is that that’s sort of the billion dollar question for the US right now too, right? I mean, among other countries, I know we’ve talked about other sort of contexts outside the US, but there’s been such a break of trust among various constituents, various residents. And I use the word residents intentionally because it’s not just citizens, right? It’s people who reside in the political boundary of the United States and that that erosion of trust is, it seems based on what you’re saying is sort of like it is that root before any other kind of reverence or humility can be created is even just identifying the who in that narrative. And I’m curious, what does it take for us to build trust with people that have a very different lived experience or very different sense of reverence and anyone else, right? Like what does that even look like? I mean, sure, like a vigil is a horrible thing, right? Like a march, like, yes, there are moments, but beyond those isolated moments, like what does it take for neighbors who might have completely different lived experiences to be able to speak with respect and generosity to each other?

Travis

That’s a great question and just kind of pausing for a second to reflect on it because it’s one of those things where I’m not sure actually if there’s a way to work on building trust and community, for example, that leads to reverence or if reverence kind of predates that or is one of the tools that’s at our disposal as humans that make it possible for us to have the humility we need to do that. My guess is that reverence has been around for a really long time and it’s probably one of those attributes we have as humans that make it possible for us to have that perspective, to have that humility to be able to engage in those kinds of conversations. My guess is that it kind of works in the in the reverse.

Ayushi

that we need to actually cultivate a sense of reverence for each other before we can include the other or trust the other in that conversation.

Travis

I don’t know if I would go that far or not. Maybe they’re just co-emergent. I feel like there’s something…

Ayushi

I mean, we’re all thinking about it out loud, yeah. I’m just thinking out loud here, so.

Travis

Yeah, I think they’re somehow co-emergent, but in the same way that it seems as best as we can tell from our sacred texts, from our temples, from our traditions and cultures, humans have had a sense of reverence, a deep respect that goes beyond the transactional for a very long time. And that maybe is a tool or an insight or a feeling that we can draw upon to have the humility and grace that we need to build solid relationships in a diverse and complex environment.

Ceasar

I was thinking, another interview we had, we were talking about issues of kind of reverence and other words that go with it like grace and you’ve introduced humility. So instead of going kind of intellectually about this, I’ll just kind of put myself out there, which is, you know, I think of this notion of reverence and I think about it as an approach that I have toward humans and our living things, but I have to struggle with the notion of if I really believe or act as if everyone or everything is worthy. Are they? I’m just wondering, do you have that struggle? How does it show up? If you do, how’s it showing up for you?

Travis

I do have that struggle, I really do. And today’s environment, our ability to have conversations as a society is so thin and painfully divisive that I too wonder if it’s reparable, I don’t know. I choose to hold on to the ideal that I want to live in a world where everyone is valued, where we recognize and take action to make possible the fact that everyone can contribute. And I would love to live in a world where no one gets cut out, where the answer is if somebody is problematic, we don’t kick them out of our church or temple, we don’t send them to jail, we don’t cut them out. I believe that the best vision of the future is a place where everybody can contribute and no one gets left out, no one gets left behind. That’s a hard thing to hold on to when you deal with sort of the day-to-day reality of folks that are really frustrating.

Ceasar

You’re being kind when you say really frustrating. What do you mean by that?

Travis

I’m trying not to curse. My mom might listen to this. It’s very hard to have grace in those situations. This is kind of an odd segue, but I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about shame.

Ceasar

Shame?

Travis

And, you know, reverence, you know, has lots and lots of attributes, but one of them is respect or deep respect. And one of the opposites of that is a is a sense of shame. And for the longest time, I’ve thought that shame was kind of like a cancer. It’s just this thing that humans shouldn’t have, because it’s almost always in my lifetime been weaponized as a force against people that are different, people that are cast out, people that, you know, the mainstream doesn’t like. But watching the conversation in our national dialogue, and where, and again, not to be overtly or explicitly political, but like in the Trump administration, his shamelessness about things made me realize that shame actually does serve an important function for us to hold up community norms. And, you know, he’s far from the old only offender, but he’s the one that comes to mind at the moment. But anyway, there’s something about shame and respect that I can’t put my finger on. In some ways, the opposite of reverence is not really disrespect. Exactly. It’s more like narcissism. You’re concerned only for yourself, only for this moment, only for transactions.

Ceasar

Have you had the experience where, like, your sense of reverence or grace has actually fallen away?

Travis

When I was young, I was just fascinated with religious and spiritual stories. I grew up in a Catholic family. I went to a Catholic school, or at least occasionally. I went back and forth between Catholic school and public school for reasons that weren’t entirely under my control. But anyway, when I moved to Chicago and I started at DePaul University, I actually went in to study comparative religious studies in their theology department. And part of why I wanted to do that was because I saw so many, obviously, to me at that time, ridiculous things. How could you possibly believe in, you know, I don’t know, a miraculous story of a virgin birth or, you know, these in some ways anachronistic thousand year old traditions that didn’t quite seem to match up with what was happening in the world today. There was lots of stories that any of us could share about folks that are in religious communities that really aren’t healthy. But one of the things I was truly surprised to find were so many religious people who had actually thought about all of the problems I was complaining about much more deeply than I had already and how insightful they were and incisive in their critiques. Of traditions that they were nonetheless still part of. And it kind of reminds me of, I guess, the feeling that lots of young people, myself included, had when stories that you grew up with, like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus or things like that kind of fell apart. And there was this moment of anger. I have been lied to. Right? This complete loss of reverence. And only later, and not for everybody, but for me, did you kind of rediscover, OK, so that story wasn’t literally true. But what was the story of Christmas and Santa Claus bringing gifts really about? It was a way to talk about the gifts that we can give each other and watching my own kids and nieces and nephews kind of experience that joy and mystery made me understand it in a different way. So anyway, I think that we we fall in and out of reverence as our perspective changes. There’s kind of a sense of there can be the what they would call the first naivete that, you know, you believe then that falls apart. And there’s kind of a second naivete where you critique what that was. And there’s something on the other side of that sometimes where you can see the story in its fullness in a different way.

Ayushi

I love that criticism and reverence and them being potentially really closely tied actually.

Ceasar

So, Ayushi, you said, oh, it made you think of a lot of things.

Ayushi

As you were sharing your stories, I think Ceasar knows this, but Travis, I didn’t grow up in a home with organized religion and it was actually very intentional. My parents both come from families of religious refugees who were forcibly displaced. And so they were very actively trying to raise a household without any kind of organized religion. So we celebrated everything. We had a very consumer Christmas. We had Easter egg hunts. We did all kinds of random. We went to temple, all kinds of things. And I was thinking about more day-to-day forms of reverence and when that’s fallen away for me as opposed to the adolescent faith-driven versions of it. And I was thinking about how, actually fairly recently, I had this experience where reverence for some very particular spaces at work that I actually considered sacred, places where I felt comfortable bringing more of myself and where I felt like that vulnerability was reciprocated by colleagues. I felt the reverence for that space slowly unfurl. I don’t want to say a fall away, but come under scrutiny, begin to unfurl for me for a variety of different reasons that were frankly beyond most of our control who were in that group. So the reason our reverence began to unfurl was because members of that group felt like they were no longer safe to be their full selves in that space. And the reason I shared this particular story of when reverence fell away or unfurled for me was because it seems to tie into what you were saying, Travis, earlier about exile or inclusion and also the ego, narcissism. And what’s interesting is, is it silly that because I as an individual and my coworkers as individuals felt unwelcome that our reverence dissipated? Is that even fair? If reverence is supposed to be a thing of the whole as opposed to a thing of our ego, then should it have mattered that I was lied to or that this space wasn’t as safe as we thought it was? I don’t know, but that’s just what came up for me as you were sharing.

Travis

I don’t know how to put this, but not everything at all times deserves our reference.

Ayushi

Maybe it’s okay to fall in and out of reverence.

Travis

Yeah, I think it is and I think not everything is not everything and every action is worthy of honor, respect and reverence. Hopefully, that’s not a permanent thing. If folks or institutions or groups fall or falter, hopefully, there are some ways to repair that and restore that so that they can be the gifts that they should be in the world. All of us make mistakes and aren’t always at all times worthy of group respect.

Ceasar

you know, Travis, we’re at the hour. We said we wouldn’t keep you more than that. I’m going to ask two things. I’m going to ask Ayushi to give you our closing question. But before you answer that closing question, can you give us the thirty-second kind of definition of what the peace fellows are? Could you refer to it? But yeah, just so our listeners will know what it is.

Travis

Sure. Boy, I’m trying to think of how to do that in 30 seconds. If it’s okay, it might be two highly related 30 second things. Okay. So, the Golden Institute, the institute that I’m proud to serve as Executive Director for, that I worked with Diane Golden to found has been around for 20 years now, coming up on our 20th anniversary very soon, and most of our work is international. We currently have 150 Golden Institute Global Fellows in 40 countries across the globe. But about four years ago, we were invited by the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities to bring that kind of peer-to-peer community of practice approach to community building home to Chicago to work on the issues of gun violence. And so, the Chicago Peace Fellows is a year-long experience for cohorts of around 20 neighborhood-level leaders to learn and work together as a community of practice to tackle the root causes of violence in Chicago.

Ceasar

Thank you.

Ayushi

What are some tools or reminders or ways of being modalities of practice that you might use to not only fall in, but also, I guess, in this case, fall out of reference throughout your work?

Travis

Yeah, I think it’s really kind of boils down to having real relationships with people. Things that go beyond the transactional of our day-to-day lives. Having a conversation with a person or an organization that’s about who they are rather than just what they can do for you. I’m very lucky that I work at an organization that values that, values people for for who they are, and is committed to creating a world where everyone can contribute. And so, yeah, I feel I feel very lucky and grateful that I get to do this work with people that I care about. It goes beyond the transaction.

Ayushi

Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you, Travis, for being here. It was an honor to meet you and to be in conversation with you for this last hour.

Ceasar

Yes, thanks. Thanks, Travis.

Travis

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here and great to see you, Ceasar. Nice to meet you.

Ayushi

Thank you all so much for listening to that episode of season three of We Who Engage. This conversation would not have been possible without sound production and editing by Dave Lushansky and Jeff DeWine. A huge thank you also to our team who supported us throughout COVID, Eli Epperson, Ana Perez, Nick Sprague, Mo Bradford, and Patricia Iregas.

Ceasar

Yes, and we also have to send a big thank you to the Silverberg family for their support for our launch event, which we’ve never done before. A belief in disbelief that was held at the MIT Museum, who really stood out for us to give us that space under short notice. And we also have to give a really big shout out to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, who’s been a supporter of this work from the very beginning and will continue to do so.

Ayushi

Thank you all for listening.

Ceasar

Thank you.