I felt that it was a really great opportunity to be vulnerable with people that I didn’t know coming in. I learned a lot of really cool things from people that are my neighbors in this city that otherwise I wouldn’t have talked to them about.
Greater Cincinnati is a region where people of different faiths, backgrounds, and identities live largely parallel lives. Those divides have sharpened in the wake of the conflict in Gaza. The YMCA of Greater Cincinnati saw an opportunity to respond to the widening gaps in the community through a multi-strand initiative that could build real bridges across interfaith lines.
Between February and September 2025, the Y collaborated with local partners Equasion and Essential Partners to train facilitators in Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD), a research-based dialogue framework that helps people bridge differences and fix dysfunctional group dynamics to create culture change. The Y and its partners then hosted RSD sessions for Jewish community members navigating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, built a sustained relationship with the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, and convened a Welcoming Week Community Dinner that drew 175 people across faiths, identities, and backgrounds. Welcoming Week is an initiative of Welcoming America, a nonprofit leading a movement of inclusive communities becoming more prosperous by ensuring everyone belongs. By the end of the project, the Y had trained a cohort of staff capable of holding difficult conversations, built new institutional partnerships, and created a replicable model for large-scale bridgebuilding in other cities and communities concerned about similar divides.
Cincinnati, with a population of about 310,000, anchors a greater metro area that spans southwestern Ohio, northern Kentucky, and southeastern Indiana. While the 2.3 million residents of the metro area are predominantly white and live in more suburban communities, the region includes significant communities of color, immigrant populations, and a wide range of faith communities. In addition to a broad mix of Christian communities, Cincinnati has a substantial Jewish community centered in neighborhoods such as Amberley Village and a well-rooted and growing Muslim population in the Blue Ash area. The YMCA of Greater Cincinnati serves a broad cross-section of residents across this full geography, reaching individuals of varying ages, economic backgrounds, racial and ethnic identities, and faith traditions.
One of the things that I learned from hearing other people’s stories tonight was digging into the idea of really being curious. I think I’m a curious person, but pausing to be curious, particularly when I don’t agree or when conversations get a little tense, to wonder what’s going on behind all of that. I’ll be taking that away as something that I can work on to achieve.
In late 2024, the Y’s project leads began laying the groundwork to address the widening interfaith divides in the community. The team identified two key partners who could anchor this work with them in Equasion, a local nonpartisan civic organization built around interfaith dialogue, and Essential Partners, a national organization with deep expertise in Reflective Structured Dialogue. The Y started reaching out to both organizations in late 2024, while simultaneously recruiting participants from their own staff for the training planned for early 2025.
As 2025 kicked off, so did more intensive planning. Working with Essential Partners and Equasion, the project team finalized the agenda for a two-day RSD training, ordered supplies, and prepared to manage all the logistical needs. They brought in the YMCA of Greater Cincinnati’s Organizational Engagement leadership to begin planning Welcoming Week, which would rely on the Y’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to spread personalized invitations across the community. An ERG is an employee-led group that creates supportive communities where employees with shared identities, interests, or experiences can connect. The team also initiated conversations with the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati (ICGC), which sparked an ongoing and evolving relationship throughout the year. The combination of professional dialogue training, cultural visits, arts programming, and a large community event was designed to provide multiple entry points for bridgebuilding.
| Phase 1 · Late 2024 | Project leads identified Equasion and Essential Partners as anchor partners, began outreach to both, and started recruiting Y staff for the training planned for early 2025. |
| Phase 2 · January–February 2025 | The team finalized the two-day RSD training agenda with Essential Partners and Equasion, ordered supplies, and brought in Organizational Engagement leadership to begin planning Welcoming Week. |
| Phase 3 · February 2025 | Twenty-three participants from the Y and Equasion completed an intensive two-day RSD training led by Essential Partners. |
| Phase 4 · Spring–summer 2025 | Trained facilitators led an RSD session for 19 community members through the Judaism Inbound program at the Mayerson JCC, while planning conversations with the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati continued and evolved. |
| Phase 5 · September 2025 | The Interfaith ERG visited the Islamic Center, 18 members of the Multicultural Affinity Group visited the Weston Art Gallery, and 175 people attended the Welcoming Week Community Dinner. |
Organizers more publicly launched the project in February 2025. Twenty-three participants from the Y and Equasion attended an intensive two-day RSD training led by Essential Partners. In the months that followed, the trained facilitators were invited to the Judaism Inbound program at the Mayerson JCC to lead a Reflective Structured Dialogue training for 19 community members navigating emotions and conversations regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These were conversations that required both skill and substantial trust to hold effectively.
The Y also navigated through a significant change in plans. After a series of planning conversations with ICGC leadership, both organizations concluded that formal RSD dialogues were not the right fit at that time. The Y could have seen this as a setback and the end of discussions, but instead saw it as an opportunity for continued relationship-building. That sustained engagement enabled the Y’s Interfaith ERG to visit the Islamic Center in September, where they learned about Muslim culture and shared a meal.
Eighteen members of another ERG — the Multicultural Affinity Group — visited the Weston Art Gallery, rooting bridgebuilding in art, reflection, and shared exploration rather than a structured dialogue. They explored the exhibit Redacted by artist James Pate. After viewing the exhibit, they participated in an activity that prompted them to reflect on what has been redacted from their own lives and the world, and how they can be part of rebuilding those connections.
The centerpiece of the year was the Welcoming Week Community Dinner. 175 participants from across the Y’s ERGs and broader community came together for a cookout, where they socialized, ate, and then participated in facilitated values-based bridgebuilding activities together.
After each event, the team collected feedback using a consistent set of Likert-scale survey questions and tracked shifts in participants’ likelihood to engage across differences. Participants were asked to rate the following three statements on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree:
In the end, across the full project:
The Welcoming Week Community Dinner opened with a reminder that the people in the room were not really strangers.
The YMCA of Greater Cincinnati designed this project so that no two events would look the same. The Essential Partners training was rigorous and structured. Over two days, 23 participants learned and practiced a formal dialogue methodology that starts with communication agreements, moves through guided sharing rounds, and creates space for curiosity across difference. That training was the backbone of everything that followed.
The RSD sessions that came out of that training required a facilitated space for participants to share the experiences behind their beliefs, name where their values create tension, and hear from others across an intensely charged divide. Conversations such as the Judaism Inbound dialogue on Israel and Palestine are not easy to hold, but in this case, they were made possible by the intensive training.
The Multicultural Affinity Group’s visit to the Weston Art Gallery offered art as a bridge. Eighteen members of the group moved through the exhibit focused on truth, dialogue, and healing, engaging with artworks that challenged perception, and participating in activities that prompted them to consider how each has the power to make connections where there were once divisions.
The Welcoming Week Community Dinner was the project’s biggest event. The Y’s five Employee Resource Groups (Interfaith, Women’s Leadership, Multicultural Affinity, Pride, and Emerging Leaders) personally recruited community members to attend a dinner where 175 people ate together and socialized with neighbors they hadn’t previously known. Attendees participated in a handful of values-based bridgebuilding activities, such as pairing up with a person in the room they barely knew and discussing rounds of increasingly deep questions. Organizers relied on personal invitations to signal that this was not a generic community event, but a place to show up genuinely to connect, where each individual’s contributions were important.
Approximately 25 staff and volunteers supported the project across the events, of which 20 were full-time staff who volunteered their time outside of work for planning, outreach, and facilitation, and five volunteers who helped out with setup and breakdown at the dinner.
The Team Up Project sees differences as a strength. Using a Respect–Relate–Cooperate framework, programs can encourage participants to engage across differences around a common goal or value by respecting others’ identities and perspectives, building mutually positive relationships, and working together across backgrounds on shared concerns.
175 neighbors shared a meal and values-based bridgebuilding activities at the Welcoming Week Community Dinner.
For the YMCA of Greater Cincinnati, respect started with taking seriously what the community was actually navigating. Rather than design programming around general notions of interfaith unity, the team responded to real tension, particularly the deepening divides due to the conflict in Gaza, with intentional and structured approaches. The Judaism Inbound RSD allowed Jewish participants to voice their beliefs, along with the complexities behind them, and to hear others do the same. The ICGC conversations, even when they didn’t result in formal programming, were grounded in listening rather than pursuing a specific agenda.
The project provided several different settings and structures to build and grow relationships. Community members from a wide variety of backgrounds and identities sat at the same tables at the Welcome Week dinner. Members of the Interfaith ERG toured the Islamic Center and shared a meal. Staff spent an afternoon with art that challenged them to empathize and stretch. Each event was a different on-ramp to the same outcome. People who didn’t know each other, or didn’t know each other well, built something real.
The project was built on a foundation of cooperation. Equasion co-designed and co-led the RSD training. Conversations about values and priorities allowed the Islamic Center to shape the terms of its own relationship with the Y. The ERGs were true partners in making the Welcome Week dinner a success. The Y embodied its role of holding the space and bringing people in.
The Cincinnati project produced trained facilitators and new relationships that will outlast any event or initiative. A cohort of staff from the Y and Equasion now hold formal skills in Reflective Structured Dialogue, and some are already using those skills to navigate difficult conversations within the Y’s own staff around faith-based work. The YMCA of Greater Cincinnati’s relationship with Equasion deepened significantly through the project. The Y has established a genuine, sustained partnership with the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati that leaves the door open to structured dialogues or other collaborative programming in the future.
The Welcoming Week Community Dinner demonstrated that the Y can convene people at scale across differences, and the event’s success has already inspired plans to codify and repeat it. Survey data, collected consistently across events, demonstrated that experiences could and did move participants toward greater openness, and that could be true across a wide variety of formats like the ones that were part of this project and potentially others in the future.
The team already suspected, and the way these numbers held across very different formats confirmed, that there is not only one right set of activities for this work. There is only what’s right for a particular organization, its partners, and its communities.
The model the Y built in Cincinnati was structured around ERG-driven recruitment, trained facilitators, multiple event formats, and consistent measurement. This model is well-suited to any large membership organization that reaches people across lines of identity and belief. Public libraries, community foundations, and other civic anchors with pre-existing relationships across diverse communities are natural fits. The Welcoming Week dinner format, in particular, is designed to be adaptable and scalable, with flexibility that allows for adjustments to the agenda and relevant activities. The ERG infrastructure can be replicated wherever similar structures exist.
The event tonight was a much-needed breath of fresh air and a rejuvenation of spirit and hope, especially in a world that is so divided. The evening gave us the opportunity to explore techniques and tools to have respectful conversations, even when we disagree, that are centered and grounded in love and kindness.
There is no one right way to build bridges. Bridgebuilding can happen through structured dialogue, arts, cultural exchange, or a cookout. Each approach has its unique strengths.
While bridgebuilding may not always involve highly complex dialogues, having staff members who are deeply trained helps when those needs do arise. Training can strengthen the staff’s ability to hold difficult conversations both during planned programming and as needed in the future.
Full participation and the conversations before and after events confirmed a real hunger for spaces like these.
Rather than walking away when one approach isn’t working, pivoting can be an effective way to continue making progress. It can also help achieve some of the most meaningful outcomes that may not have been initially planned for.
The simplest approaches can create a significant impact. Sometimes all it takes is a personalized invitation and a small, intentional prompt for people to engage.
