Saadia Qureshi 
In April, Preemptive Love’s Community joined efforts with the domestic wing of Search for Common Ground, Common Ground-USA (CG-USA).
Our core mission and commitment remain the same: to reach across dividing lines to disrupt the ideas that lead to violence. Our work supporting Gatherings, Love Anyway workshops, pep-rallies, Speak Your Peace, and Community Conversations will continue. What changes is that we will be joining CG-USA’s innovative projects.
CG-USA fosters trust and collaboration between communities in conflict to heal division in American society. Like Preemptive Love, CG-USA aims to prevent violence before it starts by building inclusive and equitable societies. Whether we’re building social cohesion in the digital space to keep online harm from becoming real world violence, or we’re working with local leaders to reduce polarization and extremism, our peacebuilding projects aim to build community resilience to withstand conflict. Using their collaborative versus adversarial approach to peacebuilding, they have created a framework that helps people understand their differences while they collaborate to solve a shared problem.
The Community team is especially excited to learn from CG-USA’s project Reconstructing Reconstruction, an education initiative which aims to reclaim narratives from the Reconstruction Era to address the lasting impact of historical grievances in New Orleans. Similar to our workshops and gatherings, the Reconstructing Reconstruction project brings together diverse community leaders to engage in dialogues across differences. Through facilitated dialogues, workshops, and training, community members will gain the necessary tools to address historical trauma and create space for collaborative healing, trust-building, and collective action.
We are thrilled to leverage our strengths and passions to ignite and mobilize our collective peacebuilding communities to create a more equitable world. We invite you-our change makers, peacebuilders, and community members- to join us as we embark on this new journey together.
To learn more about Common Ground USA and join our peacebuilding efforts, visit https://www.sfcg.org/common-ground-usa/
