What would compel a left-leaning Asian-American from Hawaii working at IDEO in California to quit his job, drive across the United States, and live out of his Prius while inserting himself into communities where he might not belong, or even be welcome?

“I wanted to understand for myself firsthand why our country is so divided by actually talking to people,” said Scott, one of this year’s GATHER Fellows.

So far, Scott’s quest has taken him to the Rocky Mountains (Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana) and the Twin Cities (Minnesota), where he’s been since September. His plan is to head to North Carolina, then the Gulf Coast in Alabama, and finally spend time in Arizona, before he ends up back on the West Coast. But that could change; he’s been reading the proverbial road signs along the way and letting the journey dictate the destination.

That’s a lot of miles to put on a car. And even more, a tremendous amount of personal perspective to be challenged and transformed.

“So much of what we see in the media focuses just on our divisions, focuses just on the problems, on the doom and gloom,” he said. “I think it’s really important that we also share another narrative of how people are actually trying to solve the rifts that exist in our society.”

For Scott, the journey started out as a personal one.

“I was a closeted gay person until I was 20,” Scott shared. “I felt a lot of shame for who I was, and a lot of that shame came from messages and narratives that I heard from the religious community growing up.”

He was fortunate to have a supportive family, but he still felt immersed in the messages from some members of the faith community which made him feel like being gay “wasn’t right.” The wounds of the messaging he had absorbed throughout his life were so deep, that he had an internalized hatred toward people of faith. “I was basically parading around as this person who wanted to be really inclusive and love everyone, and at the same time, I was actively discriminating against people who were religious.”

Through hard conversations with a friend, he realized he needed to do his own healing by recognizing his biases and introducing more nuance into the way he sees people with a religious background. He began immersing himself into different spaces, meeting faith leaders, learning about what guides them spiritually. It was then that he began to work through his feelings and come to a place of connection and understanding.

The personal is political, and the climate in the United States leading up to the 2016 election and beyond has been fractious. Scott spoke of a Reuters/Ipsos poll indicating that one out of every six Americans has stopped talking to a friend, family or loved one because of the presidential election. Yet, he strongly believes there’s value when diverse perspectives come together to solve a problem.

“We need to be able to connect with our neighbors for our wellbeing and to strengthen our relationships and democratic institutions,” he said. “When an extreme weather event rips through a community, your neighbors are the people you’re going to rely on to make it through.”

Scott’s initial plan was to go from city to city, town to town, documenting his journey for various publications. But he realized it wasn’t sustainable. “I was living out of my car and moving constantly. I was not taking very good care of myself mentally or physically.”

He also realized he’d be more effective in getting to a place of understanding if he could spend time in each location, immersing himself in local communities and culture. He taps into his vast network to make connections in order to find people to speak and share experiences with.

His itinerary, which now has him rooted for about three months at a time, is both geographic and issue-based. Scott has spent time with folks who were gun advocates. He went on hunting trips, something he never thought he’d do in his life. He spoke for over an hour with one man, asking him questions about his relationship to guns, when he first fired one, and how his grandmother introduced him to gun culture. By the end of the conversation, the man thanked him for respectfully listening—“it feels like no one does that anymore,” he told Scott—and they discovered they actually had common ground, even though that wasn’t how the man had first presented.

“There’s a time and place for advocating,” Scott said, “but in this moment, I’m really trying to listen. I’m really just trying to understand.” One of the things he had never realized was that many hunters have a deep respect for the environment and maintaining habitats. “They’re environmentalists, though they might not describe themselves that way. It taught me that language really matters.”

In Minnesota, Scott is bringing a community of faith and LGBT leaders together. He is creating a short film documenting these conversations, hoping that this video will lead to a series of additional videos that each focus on a different issue at the root of the divides in the United States. This is forming the basis of his journey around the country.

“One way we’re going to tackle divides in our country is by exposing ourselves and others to counter-stereotypical information,” he said. “Using videos to present counter narratives that challenge the assumptions people have about others and bring more nuance into conversation leverages the power of storytelling.”

In North Carolina, Scott plans to explore the divide between rural and urban communities, something he’s been writing about for Grist magazine—where he’s a columnist. While in Alabama, he wants to explore and counter southern stereotypes, and was inspired by a friend from there, a climate change activist, who has worked to find common ground with her father, a pastor for a mega-church network in the south who is a climate denier (though in 2019 he has started to include clean water and reducing plastic use into his sermons). His final stop in Arizona will take him on a pilgrimage to study the history of Japanese internment camps and juxtapose that with how communities are dividing and bridging around the topic of immigrantion.

Philosophers tout the journey, rather than the end goal, as being the primary focus of any major undertaking. And while Scott is changing minds, and changing himself, in this process, he does have a larger goal: He wants to shift societal behaviors. He cites others who are doing similar work in a range of settings—like Living Room Conversations, Better Angels, and Millennial Action Project. “There are so many people who are working on bridging differences like I am, and I think we as a collective are all hoping for shared impact.”

If his work sounds familiar to those in the Seeds of Peace community, it’s not entirely a coincidence that he found his way into the GATHER Fellowship. Before leaving his job in California, Scott was creating an event called ‘Gather.’ While doing research, he came across the application for the Fellowship. “I was reading the copy and it was like, ‘Are you trying to make a project come alive, looking for community, looking for resources and support,’ and I was like ‘YES!'”

It also happens that he had been researching organizations that bridge differences and divisions and was intrigued by the Seeds of Peace Camp. “When I saw that the organization putting on GATHER was Seeds of Peace, I was like, “That’s so serendipitous.'”

Scott acknowledges that doing change work can be very lonely and difficult. He’s experienced moments on his trip where he’s wanted to give up, and doubted whether he could represent the issues in a way that’s productive. But through the Fellowship, he has been able to be vulnerable and seek support from his peers.

In addition to his listening tour and video series, Scott’s GATHER project also involves writing a book that details his journey, and designing a toolkit that includes practical tips for bridging differences. He believes building partnerships is key to this work, which is why he’s established many while on his journey with organizations like the Greater Good Science Center at U.C. Berkeley. Stories, skills, and science—Scott believes all three are important components to changing society.

“There are so many different kinds of people and perspectives out there,” Scott said, “and I don’t think we do justice living a life when we don’t get out there and feel all the things that are possible to feel, and meet with all the people that it is possible to connect with. The meaning of life is to break out of those boxes.”

You can follow Scott’s journey in real-time across the United States on Instagram.

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Scott and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

For all the indignities that come standard with the middle school experience, one thing that Naissa never thought she would have to feel embarrassment for was her identity—for being black.

Yet, there she was, one of just four or five black pupils in a school with hundreds of students, making their way to the principal’s office after a school-wide announcement had summoned “all the black kids” to the main office.

“I was very confused, and embarrassed for being pointed out,” Naissa, a 2015 Seed from Maine and 2019 GATHER Fellow, recalled recently.

“I never thought I’d be put in a position where I needed to walk in front of all of the school to an office, wondering what would be on the other end, what could all of the black kids have done?”

When Naissa and the others arrived at the office, the principal realized her mistake. “I meant the Black kids,” the principal said, referring to a family name, and dismissed the students of color without so much as an apology.

As political refugees who left Rwanda when she was a very young girl, Naissa, along with her mother, twin brother, Nathan, and older sister, Pricillia (both Maine Seeds, 2016), were already long accustomed to being the vast minority almost everywhere they went in the mostly white city of Portland, Maine. So this incident wasn’t the first time she had felt lumped into a collective instead of being seen as an individual, but it was certainly the first time she had seen it painted so clearly.

Looking back, however, she said it was an eye-opening experience that set the table for the work she would eventually pursue.

“I saw that whatever I had been feeling for years, it wasn’t nonsense, and it made me realize the importance of having some type of understanding or recognition of people who have different identities outside of what the majority is,” she said. “It was the first moment that made me see that, okay, you need to do something about it—although I didn’t know what.”

A few years later she and Pricillia would put the pieces together in the form of CivilTEA Discourse, a series of peer-to-peer led dialogues that, as a Seeds of Peace GATHER Fellow, Naissa is working to expand to high schools across the northeastern United States.

The idea for the program came in 2016, shortly after Naissa’s second summer at the Seeds of Peace Camp and Pricillia’s first. It was a time when America was beginning to experience a type of divisiveness they hadn’t witnessed since arriving in the U.S., and it hit extremely close to home for Naissa. Her mother had always made sure that her children paid attention to what was going on around them—from gentrification changing the composition of neighborhoods in Portland, to politics happening in both their home and their adoptive country.

So when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign visit to Portland triggered negative conversations at their school, the sisters saw an immediate need for civil discourse—the kind of vulnerable, open-hearted discussions around difference where everyone had a voice—that they had been introduced to during facilitated dialogue sessions at Camp.

It took hard work, but eventually it became part of the curriculum at their school, with regular dialogues on whatever the students wanted to talk about—racism, identity, beauty norms, immigration, religion, sexual orientation. Before long, other schools began to take notice, and CivilTEA blossomed from there.

They currently have four schools that are fully signed onto the program, which includes schoolwide dialogues (including faculty) every other month and panels on relevant topics. They are also working with a number of schools and universities on providing facilitation training. The goal of the program, Naissa said, is not to reach consensus or implement a certain agenda, but to create a platform where underrepresented voices could be heard and participants build empathy by listening to perspectives different from their own.

The concept in and of itself is impressive, but don’t forget that Naissa and Pricillia were teenagers when they started this. Even three years later, at ages 19 and 20, respectively, they’re still facing the same challenges that most any young changemaker can relate to: 1) balancing your dreams with classes, homework, a job, a social life, and any other extracurricular interests; 2) figuring out a budget and the ins and outs of running a nonprofit or business, and 3) perhaps most importantly, being taken seriously in professional settings.

“No one has ever brushed us aside, but not only are we young, we’re women, and women of color at that,” Naissa said. “So whenever we have an idea or initiative in a work setting, we feel like we need to work even harder to prove ourselves, to show a little more confidence that we know what we’re doing and that the work we’re doing is very serious and should be treated as such.”

Of course, there are times that youth is an advantage. Naissa is only a few years removed from being in the exact same seats as those now filled by the high school students that CivilTEA serves. And since many of the participants in the facilitation courses are also college students (Naissa is majoring in international studies, and Pricillia in political science, at Emmanuel College in Boston), she’s able to understand their mindsets and work with them on a peer-to-peer level.

The balancing act, however, still remains a tricky one. She said her professors have often been accommodating, especially since CivilTEA has ways of tying into her coursework, but when it comes to actually attending classes, maintaining a full-time job, and planning for CivilTEA, there are only so many hours in the day.

“I don’t know how we’re doing it, to be quite honest,” she said. “But I think one thing that keeps us going is understanding what we’re prioritizing, and the heavy love that Pricillia and I have for our education, as well as the honor we feel for being in a position where we’re able to work on CivilTEA.”

It would seem that there would be no room left for also participating in a Fellowship, but for Naissa, being accepted into GATHER was like an additional level of validation that all the work she and Pricillia had been pouring into CivilTEA was worthwhile.

“When I got that first call that I was being considered for GATHER, I had to step back and say that no matter how many times I’ve thought CivilTEA wasn’t going anywhere, or felt frustrated, or overwhelmed, or questioned if we were putting in too much or not enough effort, this was an outside perspective saying, ‘yeah, this is worth it.”

Her dream, she said, would be to see CivilTEA as a mandatory part of school curriculums all over the world. And as she sees the way immigrants are being treated in her adoptive country some 15 years after she arrived, and people being viewed not for their gifts and possibilities, but for their skin color or visa status, she can’t help but think that a dialogue-based tool for finding and spreading empathy is more critical now than ever.

“I think what keeps me up at night is that we aren’t looking at each other as individuals with so much potential, with so much to offer the world. I tune into the news today, and see how we’re looking at and talking about each other here in the U.S. as non-humans, and can’t help but think of Rwanda, and how they called the people cockroaches,” she said. “I see immigrants coming here today for the same reasons that we did, so of course it feels personal because I share an identity with them, but I have this life they don’t have, and it could have so easily been different.”

One thing she said she often talks about with her GATHER mentors is the endgame for CivilTEA—does she want empathy, or solidarity? Of course, solidarity would be the ultimate goal, but to Naissa, the pathway must come through empathy. Dialogue, be it in CivilTEA or another form, can’t solve all the world’s problems, but is one way to bring out the humanity we all share.

“I think we all have the capacity to be empathetic, and once we’re able to recognize that and see people as individuals, to find at least one thing to love about them and let that embody who that person is to us, then we can reach solidarity. And I think that’s what everyone is striving for, especially at this point that we’re at in the world.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Naissa and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

What if every time you met a new person, every time the phone rang, or even every time you went to a social gathering, there was a good chance that you would soon be revisiting the most traumatic moment of your life? Would you pick up the phone? Would you leave your home?

For Yousef, a 2005 Palestinian Seed from Gaza and 2019 GATHER Fellow, he’s now been making that choice every day for nearly half of his life. In countless interviews, essays, lectures, and his memoir, Yousef has told and retold the story of how, at just 15, a bullet came to be permanently lodged in his spine, and how he came to forgive the Israeli soldier who put it there.

The first time he publicly spoke about it was at Camp, his wound still so fresh that, as he told Seeds of Peace in 2018, a rigorous game of street hockey caused it to reopen and required medical attention. He then shared that Israeli soldiers had occupied the majority of his family’s home in Gaza for five years. They destroyed his family’s farms, riddled the house with bullets, made the majority of the home off limits to his family, killed their donkey for sport, and nearly killed Yousef when an unidentified, unprovoked soldier shot him in the back. And all the while, his father continued to teach peace, to refer to the soldiers as “guests,” and chose to live with his oppressors rather than abandon their family home.

When he was 16, Yousef moved to the U.S. to attend boarding school in Utah and went on to study at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Since graduating, his career so far has been focused on working for political and social change, including at a think tank that advocates bipartisanship among U.S. Congressional staffers, as a foreign affairs fellow in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders, and as a Manager of Congressional Affairs for the Chief Representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the United States. And now, he is hoping to put a face and name to the Palestinian people, so that what he learned from his father, and experienced as a child, will not be in vain.

“I am passionate about presenting an authentic Palestinian story to the world,” Yousef said. “I believe in peace because I am a Palestinian born and raised in Gaza. I do not want to fight; I just want to be heard by friends and enemies.”

In a recent phone interview with Seeds of Peace, Yousef shared about the process of publishing his book, “The Words of My Father: Love and Pain in Palestine,” which came out in the U.K. last fall and the U.S. in May, of what it’s like to share his story with audiences, the complexities he faces as an advocate for peace, and his hopes for the future. The questions and responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Seeds of Peace: How did this book come to be? You wrote that your father told you to tell your story, but when did you know you had to put it into a book?

Yousef: When I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to go to his funeral. It was probably my sophomore year in college, and I couldn’t go home, and I realized I was never going to see him again. I must have done a hundred, or maybe even more drafts, just writing over and over and over and over. I was lucky because someone, finally, was serious about wanting to work with me and helped me find an agent who would pitch it. Everyone said no in the beginning. Over the whole process, my English had to improve, I had to read a lot of books and memoirs. But it’s been a dream of mine for five years and I know how much I believed in it despite how difficult it was to get published.

Seeds of Peace: Being a Seed, and a Palestinian individual who can picture a future of coexistence, is kind of a difficult position to be in. What is the reaction that you usually get when you express your opinions on the conflict?

For most people, be it Israelis and/or Palestinians or Americans, they will tell me, “I very much respect you and your opinion,” even if they don’t agree. So, I’ve never had a negative experience, although occasionally you will get someone who will do the blame game and say, “why aren’t all the Palestinians peaceful like you?” This is sad because I’m peaceful because I was born and raised by Palestinians.

Seeds of Peace: It has to be incredibly difficult to keep reliving this day over and over, how do you keep telling your story when it was such an emotional experience?

It’s become like family. I mean, how do you always go back to family even though they drive you nuts sometimes? It becomes a part of you, and that’s one. Two, it brings me closer to my dad. I feel that I am keeping him alive every time I tell it, and I’ve mentioned his name pretty much everyday on so many occasions. Not just on the train or to my friends, but on college campuses and before people, and at dinners, at conferences, at events, and briefings. So he’s very much alive to me because of that experience.

It also helps me to deal with the emotions and to carry on despite the difficulties of the whole thing. It can be exhausting, but the bullet is there in my back and it is always a choice. I could just say, “I’ve got pain. I’m going to sit at home. This small event is not worth it.” Or I could be speaking and hopefully giving one more chance for peace and reconciliation in Israel, Palestine, and around the world. I have never once said no to any event, small or big, just simply because of that, because I would feel almost embarrassed before my dad. I think he would tell me, “you’re going to have the pain anyway, why don’t you just invest it in peace then?” And that’s what I think I’ve been doing.

Seeds of Peace: With each telling you’re meeting new people and traveling around. What new things have you learned from your audiences?

For those who live in Palestine or in Israel, they think that Americans don’t care about what’s going on there. And many Americans don’t know, but are curious. There’s especially a lot of passion and eagerness to learn among the Jewish students and audiences around the U.S. Regardless of where they stand, they are incredibly passionate about the whole subject. And for me, to come and see that people are incredibly interested in working to make the situation better, that’s a valuable thing for me to learn and take with me.

Also, when you just walk around with your own story, you think that you’re the only story, and every time I speak, someone will be just as brave and just as courageous to stand up and talk about what they’ve gone through, and what challenges they have to overcome. And that reminds me that I am hopefully giving that person a chance to express themselves and to know that they can also do what I just did: stand up and tell my story.

Seeds of Peace: The first time you shared your story was at Camp. What is your strongest memory of your time there?

I’ll give you two. One is when I first discovered pancakes. I thought it was the most incredible thing ever.

The second is when I first spoke. I’d never stood up in front of strangers and when I shared my story in front of the campers, their reactions gave me a sense of a mission, a commitment. I said that if I can live with soldiers for five years, be shot, you know, in a wheelchair, and if someone is able to go through such things and still be able to forgive, I hope that that still complicates it even more for Palestinians and Israelis who feel that we have no chance of ever living together in Israel/Palestine.

Seeds of Peace: You said as your GATHER platform that you want to be a voice for Palestinians. What do you want to tell people about Palestinians that they aren’t hearing elsewhere?

That everything that I believe and all my values and principles come straight from Gaza, and therefore my country and my people should be subjugated no more, should be denied no more. We should not be in constant fear. I want to present a legitimate voice of my people in a human way. There are so many issues that, when I lived in Gaza, I thought were only issues that the Palestinians had. But when I came to the U.S., I saw that there’s conflict, poverty, and inequality here, too. And I want to remind people that I’m not just a political thing. I’m not a threat. I’m not going to do harm.

Seeds of Peace: Do you ever feel guilty that you left Palestine? That you had the opportunity to get out while others did not?

Every day. That’s why I do what I do because I’m trying to make it count. Every day that I got to spend in this country, I treated it as it was my last day, especially when I was on a student visa. I was always on a mission. I knew that I always needed to make everything that came my way count. Because if I make it, and hopefully I do, then other kids from Palestine, and the world who are going through such circumstances, will still find the light and hope to do something interesting and powerful with their lives.

Seeds of Peace: You’ve been living with this story now for about half your life. How does it continue to motivate you to work for peace?

I’m never going to give up because that’s the whole point of my dad, that we are never going to let the actions of others, right or wrong, determine what kinds of human beings we will be. And though there’s still war in my country, I feel even more dedicated to just stay true to my message and learn. I will study books, I will read, I will meet all people, including the ones who disagree with me, and try to understand where they are coming from and to educate myself as much as possible, because that makes for a truly fulfilling life.

Seeds of Peace: What do you say to people who say that peace is impossible? Or that too much damage has been done?

For five years I watched my dad be mistreated by soldiers. I watched them takeover his house. And after all that, I remember how I was forever sold because he won. He didn’t leave, they didn’t demolish the house—he paid a price, but he didn’t become a refugee. Of course, Palestine is still under occupation, but I just saw in that little circle, that little point on planet Earth, I saw soldiers and I saw my dad. I didn’t see TV, I didn’t see big issues, and propaganda and media, it was just with my own eyes, and he got the house back. It still is the most incredible thing I’ve ever witnessed. So, when someone says peace is impossible, I would like to remind them of the moment after the soldiers finally left, that my dad went upstairs and said to us, “I told you I was going to get the house back.”

Seeds of Peace: With the platform given to you by your book and by being a GATHER Fellow, what do you hope to achieve in the long run?

I hope to be someone who is able to change lives and to help those who need help. I hope to be there by a good leader’s side who’s trying to make the world a better place. And to write another book.

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Yousef and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.