Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups

The United States faces many forms of social division, but the country has also developed ways to communicate and collaborate across lines of division. In Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups, Dr. Linda R. Tropp and Trisha A. Dehrone, in partnership with Welcoming America and the Intergroup Relations and Social Justice Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, describe how to create spaces for people from different backgrounds to meaningfully engage with one another. The authors also advise on how to draw on people’s similarities and differences to help solve problems in the community. Tropp and Dehrone discuss strategies to help people from different groups collaborate as equals, in order to share their ideas and perspectives and successfully create new initiatives across group differences. The authors provide materials to help organizations evaluate their contact programs’ effectiveness, while also offering advice for making cross-group interaction and collaboration more meaningful and sustainable over time. The authors hope that the guide will provide “helpful evidence-based recommendations on how to structure contact programs effectively, along with useful tips and best practices for implementing and facilitating these programs.” These types of programs, the authors contend, will strengthen the social fabric of the U.S., helping build more resilient and healthy communities for future generations. (Erika Hernandez for The Immigrant Learning Center’s Public Education Institute)

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