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.

Could a board game change the world? If it helps players change their minds about the people and the world around them, then Tugba, a 2019 GATHER Fellow from Turkey, is already seeing the results.

Through her company, Learning Designs, she’s created over 60 games and training sessions that introduce skills, ideas, and lessons on everything from teamwork to children’s rights, intercultural learning, youth entrepreneurship, and active citizenship.

Surprisingly, Tugba didn’t play many board games growing up—she said it just wasn’t part of the culture in Turkey—but she did have a playful grandmother who taught her games from her own childhood. Even through a Skype call over an ocean, that ebullient nature shone through in Tugba: She’s quick to laugh, open hearted, and eager to connect.

Building relationships, along with a desire to make an impact, are, after all, what inspired her youthful aspirations of one day becoming mayor. And though she’s not working in government institutions today, in reality, she’s doing exactly what she always wanted to do: make a difference.

“We are creating many different games and trainings that touch people: refugees, young people, and adults,” she said. “I wanted to be mayor because I wanted to change my region and my city, but now I’m doing it for my country and even on an international scale.”

The games, which are often tailor made working with schools, businesses, and nonprofits who focus on a specific need—such as social inclusion for refugees—have been played by thousands of people in Europe and Latin America, but she applied to the GATHER Fellowship looking to further develop a project that’s based around an issue that hits close to home for Tugba: gender equality.

“Turkey ranks 130th (out of 149 countries) in gender equality,” Tugba said, citing a 2018 report by the World Economic Forum. “To overcome this problem, we have to change points of view and make gender issues a point for people to talk about.”

As a female business owner, it’s a topic rooted in personal experiences—when she started her company, she said that even her family still wondered if she could really pull it off, solely because of her gender. It’s these sort of societal barriers, the kind that would give even a supportive family pause or keep a young girl from reaching her full potential, that drive Tugba to change traditional mindsets around gender.

“Even if there are strong women or strong men, we still see that women are not really taking on responsibilities outside the home because their families, or society, is pushing them in that way,” she said. “I know that many of the girls are marrying very early because of this, or many of the girls are not going to school because of this, or not doing what they want to do at school because of this, so we have to change this mentality, this perception, then society will change.”

So how does a board game for 9- to 14-year olds teach this?

“Our first approach is not to teach, but to explore,” she said. Using a design thinking method, each game begins with research and the help of more than 100 volunteers around Turkey who try out the games.

Many of the games encourage players to discuss different topics with the help of prompts—for example, the gender equity game asks questions like, “What do you think of when you hear the word woman/man?” Then continues with questions that flip some of the more common gender stereotypes: “Name any of your boy friends who can cook well,” or, “name a girl friend who has leadership skills.”

“So we are making them think about and discuss gender issues, while they’re also learning about critical thinking and making consensus and working in a team,” she said. “This particular game has already been sent to about a hundred public schools in Turkey, so even when the curriculum doesn’t include gender equality, teachers now have a way to explore the topic through the game material.”

It’s all part of Tugba’s goals to combat stereotypes through dialogue and empathy, while also carrying out the “game-ification” of education, as she called it.

From as early as she can remember—kindergarten, in fact—when it came to the educational system, she’s always thought “there has to be a better way.”

“While things are improving, education in many parts of the world is like a cage for children, where you are not really motivated to learn,” she said. “Learning is the most amazing thing we can do throughout our lives, but while we are children very often it’s like an obligation.”

It was sometime after college, when she held a job running training courses for a European Union program, that she began to see how experiential learning (e.g., games, role playing, and simulations) could invigorate the learning process. If done well, even adults could shake out of their insecurities, and better learn—even enjoy!—a workplace training.

“I noticed that participants in these training courses were being more like themselves; they weren’t judging each other and were being more confident,” Tugba said. “So I started to wonder: How can we use those tools for education? Because education should not only be for cognitive information or knowledge, it should also be a skill, an attitude, an awareness and language. It should be compelling.”

While she hopes to extend the impact of the games’ by translating more of them to English and Arabic, she is resistant to any business strategies that would lessen the social impact of Learning Designs within Turkey. Relationships, Tugba said, are of the utmost importance to her: One way to strengthen connections and bring people together is through playing games, another is through the way she creates them.

“People have told me I should mass produce the games in China for cheap, but I’m producing everything in Turkey because I want to work with local people, social entrepreneurs, and women’s groups and support them,” she said. “My team is always thinking more about impact—how we will make change, how more people will benefit from it—than about profit.”

Success, she said, is not something she’s measuring in numbers, but in the changes she sees in her community, and in the kids playing their games. She described an instance when she was watching children playing a Learning Designs game in the street, and how one little boy refused to follow the game’s instructions to hold hands because it meant he would have to hold the hand of a little girl. About five minutes after being asked why he was refusing, he nonchalantly took the little girl’s hand.

“This is what we want. It’s not about giving them answers, but making them question themselves,” she said. “In many ways, children are more just than adults, and given the chance, I believe that children will find the right way.”

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

“Storytelling is the glue that keeps everything together.” Wael, a 1993 Egyptian Seed and 2019 GATHER Fellow, sees stories everywhere.

From newspaper articles, to TV commercials, to religious texts, Wael considers stories to be a defining element of the human experience. “Entire societies and civilizations come and go based on stories and the telling, retelling, re-adapting, and revising of them,” he explained.

Wael has always been a storyteller. Born and raised in Cairo, Wael’s mother was a painter and researcher and his father co-owned a sound stage, so he grew up surrounded by—and with a deep appreciation for—the arts. Before becoming a filmmaker, he was a self-described “theater kid,” a marketing professional, and a comedy club ticket salesman—all of which, in one way or another, developed his storytelling skills.

Currently, as a project-based media professional, Wael produces content ranging from documentaries, commercials, and branded content for the corporate and NGO world. He also spends part of the year as the director of the Cairo chapter of the Shnit International short film festival.

Wael has never had a desk job. Moving around and meeting new people is a core component of his work. During his travels, Wael was regularly struck by Egypt’s ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity and saddened that this diversity was often suppressed rather than channeled into collective progress.

Seeing a clear connection between storytelling and societal change, Wael founded Story Lab, an initiative that builds connections among diverse or conflicting groups through collaborative storytelling workshops.

Consensus, according to Wael, was somewhat easier to build in ancient times because narratives were built around the campfires of civilization. Simply put, Wael is “trying to bring everybody back to the warmth of that campfire.” He is committed to strengthening communal expression so that it can, once again, be used as a tool for connection, collaboration, and change.

Ranging from creative writing, to photography and filmmaking, these workshops bring together diverse groups of Egyptian people—particularly people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford arts programming. Story Lab was built to be responsive to the needs of communities across Egypt, so each workshop serves a different group of people. A photography workshop in Cairo, for example, worked with elementary school children, while a creative writing workshop in Aswan served adult members of the Southern and Nubian communities. A team of freelance creative professionals works with Wael to facilitate the workshops, and Wael himself is an instructor for Story Lab’s filmmaking workshops.

Story Lab works with local partners wherever it goes—from schools, to local government councils, to village elders. Especially in more conservative or rural parts of the country, Wael emphasizes the importance of community members to help facilitate connection and cooperation.

“We access these communities essentially as outsiders and as foreigners,” Wael explained, “there’s a certain cultural distrust. We are often viewed as city-folk, so we try to settle this suspicion by engaging directly with their people, their traditions, and even their cuisine.”

Each Story Lab workshop is structured around a group project. On the first day of any workshop, the brainstorming and bonding process begins with playing games. These games are meant to solicit opinions, tastes, and preferences from all of the participants. Through these games, Wael said, “very quickly the group realizes how much of a common ground they often share.”

Story Lab intentionally engineers groups that otherwise may have never had the chance to sit in the same room—at least not in an egalitarian way. An upcoming workshop in Alexandria, for example, will include a Syrian refugee who was working in a shawarma shop in Alexandria, as well as patrons at his shop.

“They’ve probably never talked about anything in their lives except what they want in their shawarma,” Wael reflected, “this is the kind of dynamic that we’re always trying to transform.”

Story Lab helps people find agency within, and ownership over, their stories. This focus on individual and collective ownership, indeed, is the secret to Story Lab’s success: “Participants are always connected to what they’re learning because it’s theirs,” Wael explained.

In fact, Story Lab’s focus on building connections between conflict groups can be traced back to Wael’s experience as one of the first campers during Seeds of Peace’s inaugural year, in 1993. Wael’s connection to Seeds of Peace is ever-evolving. As he reflected, “Seeds of Peace, for me, is an experience you unpack over decades, not months or years.”

Wael’s time at Camp ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House. He explained that this “honeymoon period,” however, was shattered two years later with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Wael became deeply disillusioned as a result. He remembers thinking: “If what it takes for us to actually have peace is for both peoples to be airlifted to Camp in Maine, then forget it. Peace is unattainable.”

Years later, though, after living in New York and making Jewish-American friends, Wael was able to disconnect his Seeds of Peace experience from political events.

“Politics tends to color things with the wrong colors … it’s the wrong brush altogether,” he said.

“Seeds wasn’t built on what I see on TV or what my family or society tells me,” he reflected. “It was an actual experience that I could go back to. I could go back and remember those bunkmates from Israel, from Palestine.”

Wael explained how personal connections, like those fostered through Story Lab and Seeds of Peace, cultivate tolerance. He acknowledged that tolerance can be acquired intellectually, but, as his experience illustrates, tolerance is often more intense and enduring when it’s emotionally-based.

Wael applied for the GATHER Fellowship in part to expand upon his Seeds of Peace experience as well as to “cross borders with my work and my thinking.” The GATHER Fellows, Wael explains, are “completely diverse with divergent skill sets. But we all need each other’s skills in a way, although we don’t do exactly what the other does.”

This collaboration and celebration of difference that Wael finds in GATHER and fosters in Story Lab brings meaning and purpose to his life. He wants to take the world a step beyond coexistence.

“Coexistence to me, in 2019, sounds cold. I coexist with the people in my building, but we don’t know each other. We don’t have these warm, neighborly relations. We don’t share a story,” Wael reflected. “And that’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to take the world into that warmth, that warmth of community and collaboration.”

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

Nas talks fast because his brain moves fast. He can take you deep into the trenches of a subject without you realizing you were ever standing at the edge of a new topic, and he’s constantly in motion.

This is likely one of the reasons why the New York City-based Palestinian entrepreneur has already seen more of his ideas come to fruition than most of us could dream of in a lifetime. To name a few, he’s been a part of producing an award-winning film, opening a restaurant, running a series of pop-up dinners benefiting refugees, co-founding the food experience start-up Komeeda, advising a kitchen incubator in Turkey that trains refugees to build food businesses, hosting a New York City festival of refugee food and art, and, at the time of writing this article, he was in Morocco on a gastrodiplomacy mission to introduce American halal beef and poultry to a new part of the world.

Now, as a 2019 GATHER Fellow, he’s using his experience in gastrodiplomacy and storytelling to help lift refugees out of poverty, and at the same time, coming full circle on his own story of conflict and loss of community.

For Nas, much like the refugees he works with, you have to take the time, be willing to peel back the layers, to even begin to see the whole picture.

A WINDING PATH FORWARD

Nas was just a child the first time he realized that food could be much more than fuel for the body.

“I can tell you all the cliché things, like food brings us together, the way to the heart is through the belly,” said Nas. “And they’re all true, but it’s also one of the cheapest things to weaponize.”

Growing up in a small farming village in the West Bank, Nas saw his family’s future, and past, turn into ashes, as their olive trees were burned one by one to make room for the expansion of the nearby Shilo settlement.

“Those trees had been planted by my grandmother’s grandfather,” he said. “She cried harder for those olive trees than when her husband died.”

His family did not have much money, but with a keen sense of a good opportunity when he sees one, Nas found a way to make cash fast at the age of 13: traveling to Jerusalem to buy adult videos that he would then sell at a markup in his village.

It sounds like the kind of side hustle a cheeky teenager in a movie might come up with—but it came with serious consequences. A few of his clients were caught stealing money from a charity donation box, and soon a trail was traced back to Nas for what they had used the money to buy.

As punishment, his father pulled him out of the nearby private school run by American Quakers and for a year sent him to the village school, which he said, to put it mildly, was vastly academically inferior to the Quaker school.

Seemingly overnight, he went from being one of the most popular kids in the village to becoming a social pariah. The only person who would talk to him was a boy from the poorest family in the village who was also shunned because his grandfather had been an Israeli military sympathizer.

With the sudden ostracization, Nas went into a deep depression, and was eventually diagnosed as bipolar. During that time he also developed vitiligo, a condition sometimes triggered by extreme stress in which pigment is lost from areas of the skin.

The two-tone patches on his face are a permanent reminder of the trauma he experienced in his formative years, and yet, he says it gave him an important insight that aides him today: to see how quickly others are to judge a person for their current situation in life without bothering to learn the full story.

“It allowed me to understand that you have to talk to and engage with people,” he said. “It is so important for us to look beyond what we see in front of us.”

It was a lesson that would serve him well years later, working in kitchens among other immigrants and navigating the metropolis of New York City, where he moved to in 2001.

After a few years of working sales jobs, he enrolled in Baruch College with the goal of becoming an investment banker. Unfortunately, he graduated just as the economy was beginning to bottom out, and he couldn’t find a job in finance.

Instead, he began waiting tables at a chain of barbecue restaurants in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. As he recalls, it was an extremely difficult time—he was embarrassed that he was still waiting tables while his friends were starting companies, buying apartments, and moving on with their lives.

“I felt like a failure, and I was really, really depressed. So at 30, for the first time, I went to therapy.”

It was a major turning point for Nas, one that would finally allow him to stop comparing himself to his friends and set his own future in motion.

“I decided to take ownership of waiting tables and see how that works,” he said. “Eventually, I became the best seller of wine, one of the best cooks on the line, you name it.”

In the back of those barbecue kitchens and many more after, he would hear the stories of immigrants from Mexico struggling to make a livable wage, see how a decision as small as the source of the mint garnishes for your lemonade can make all the difference to one farmer, and learn pride in serving the food of his homeland.

And it was while working at the immensely popular Lebanese restaurant ilili that Nas was eventually asked to open his own restaurant, where he began hosting special dinners to tell the stories of the Palestinian diaspora in South America. He received a call from a friend at the United Nations asking if he could help out Lutfi, a newly arrived Syrian refugee who had faced discrimination among his community for being gay.

Nas decided to adapt the dinner series to allow Lutfi to tell his own story for two evenings. Lufti had never cooked a large meal, but it didn’t matter. The dinners sold out, and soon, the Displaced Kitchens series began in collaboration with his startup, Komeeda.

They were immensely popular and went on to help many more refugees find a new way in a new land—some landed full-time jobs, others found apartments, but the point is to help others see there is more to the picture when it comes to refugees, and for the refugees to become self-sustained. Of all his projects, Nas said that these small victories are what make him most proud.

“If I can help you feed yourself and earn a living, it’s a success,” he said.

COMING FULL CIRCLE

There are many projects on Nas’s mind at any time—including making Komeeda into “the Airbnb of food experiences,” the gastrodiplomacy project for the U.S. government, a book, a television show, and setting up kitchen incubators for refugees in Sweden and Yemen.

But no matter where he is, or how much time passes, the conflicts of Nas’s youth—between Israelis and Palestinians, and the competing chemicals in his brain—seep into everything he does: his work, his motivations, his relationships, “everything.” “Every single thing, relates to the conflict,” he said.

And for Nas, that’s part of why he needed Seeds of Peace, an organization that, as a Palestinian youth growing up amid conflict, he once considered an agent of Normalization. It wasn’t so much the prestige of a fellowship, networking, or the entrepreneurial development that led him to apply to GATHER, but rather, a need to see a vision of the world in which he’d like to live, and immerse himself further in a community of changemakers working to make it a reality.

“Seeds of Peace allows me to find some healing and support for the conflict—to understand and work with what I assumed for a long time was the enemy,” he said. “I care about the actual mission of Seeds of Peace, for the future. That’s more important to me.”

He sees his purpose today to carry on the mission of humanitarian minded chefs like José Andrés and Anthony Bourdain. And though one meal is not going to solve the world’s problems, it can be a gateway to starting a conversation that might not have happened otherwise.

“I care about bringing stories to life and talking about difficult subjects through food,” he said. “How do I sit down and talk with you about solutions to the conflict in the Middle East? Let’s start through hummus and falafel.”

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