With Ben Fink, Hands Across the Hills partner, Time Magazine
With Ben Fink, Hands Across the Hills partner, Time Magazine

Dialogue builds connections and strengthens bonds, encouraging us to care for each other and create some semblance of wholeness that perhaps the US has really never known. We need to engage deeply and decisively, before the chasms between us become too wide to cross. Paula Green

Honors > Publicity

Hands Across the Hills meeting in Kentucky
Hands Across the Hills meeting in Kentucky
Hands Across the Hills meeting in Kentucky
Hands Across the Hills meeting in Kentucky

We are at such a fragile moment of US history.  There are many paths to influence its trajectory. One path is this one, sitting face to face to understand each other’s concerns and perceptions. Meeting each other, we overcome our separateness and co-create a new reality. Paula Green

Hands Across the Hills, our US dialogue and cultural exchange project between small numbers of residents in MA and KY, generated an outsized media response. I believe this occurred due to the anxiety and despair felt by millions of Americans over the past several years. Violence stalks our streets and our news cycles. Dehumanization and xenophobic rhetoric increase. Options narrow for most economic classes. Community solidarity frays. Climate crises multiply. Government is weakened by disrespect and narrow interests. Hopelessness seeps into the culture, grows, and reproduces like an aberrant cell.

Into that mix came Hands Across the Hills, this modest but very hopeful attempt to bridge divides, to reach across the polarizations to meet with those who they have been taught to degrade or dismiss. Who would not be curious to know if this might succeed, if we could talk to each other, let alone like each other? Folks were hopeful that if we could manage, so might other groups in this vast nation engage with each other meaningfully. And so might they engage with family members estranged by politics. The press was intrigued; many in the population were eager.

Below we list some of the important media outlets that generously covered our experiences. For even more, please visit handsacrossthehills.org

Paula Green, Director of Hands Across the Hills, a cultural exchange initiative between a group of liberal voters in western Massachusetts and conservative voters in eastern Kentucky, stands for a portrait at her home in Leverett, Massachusetts on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2018. Green has international experience in facilitating dialogue, conflict resolution and "peace building", turned her attention to the domestic front following the 2016 Presidential election.

NYTimes

LEVERETT, Mass. — Paula Green has spent much of her life working on conflicts abroad. In places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Myanmar, Dr. Green, an American psychologist, brings together survivors of war, helping them see past their differences so they can live with one another again.

Read the full article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/conflicting-experts-peacebuilders.html

 

New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/can-conversation-bridge-americas-political-divide

Video: Arte Films in Europe: America’s Divided Soul
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/075811-000-A/die-gespaltene-seele-amerikas/

Time Magazine 3/24/20
https://time.com/collection/apart-not-alone/5809175/meet-the-uniters/

NPR:
WGBY Connecting Point
NPR Here and Now
 NEPR with Karen Brown

Boston Globe: A Unique Exchange Program between Red and Blue America, 11/2/18
https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2018/11/02/when-red-and-blue-rural-america-sat-down-chat/gG11e302eRgUOihOBJzJ9N/story.html

Amsterdam die Trouw https://www.trouw.nl/home/op-bezoek-in-het-land-van-trump-en-kolen~aaccdc7b/
Visiting the Land of Trump and Coal

Japan Times