Adding ProHuman to ProSocial

As regular readers know, I’ve spent the last year learning about and getting involved in an amazing organization, ProSocial World. Even though peacebuilders don’t often use the term, in many ways, our work can be seen as a subset of being prosocial which covers almost everything we include in concepts like positive peace.

Now, I’ve been asked to join the board of advisors for an organization with even a loftier or more ambitious title, the ProHuman Foundation.

My first instinct was to decline. I recently stopped serving on two boards of directors. I’m not getting any younger, and I have a lot on my plate getting Peacebuilding Starts at Home off the ground. Yet, as I’ll try to make clear in the rest of this post, I couldn’t say no to this organization and its request to help it in a way that won’t take up a lot of time or energy.

To be honest, I had never heard of ProHuman until two months ago when I attended the Mercatus Center’s Pluralism Summit which I wrote about at the time. In other words, this has been something of a whirlwind romance for both of us.

Daryl Davis …

I had heard about ProHuman’s cofounder, Daryl Davis, and was frankly a bit surprised to see that he would be one of the keynote speakers since Mercatus is the country’s leading libertarian leaning think tank and I hadn’t thought that is would appeal to Daryl who has left his political mark by helping people leave the Ku Klux Klan.

I had actually met Davis about ten years ago when he attended my wife’s first husband’s seventieth birthday party which was a swing dance. Daryl’s day job is as a pianist who often played at the dances that Ed went to and they had become friends. We only met in passing, and I’m not sure that I even knew that he spent a lot of his time helping create ex-Klan members.

Fast forward a few years. A series of events which you will remember all too well brought racism and white supremacy back into the news. Daryl ended up as the speaker at any number of events I attended in the weeks after George Floyd’s murder where he talked about his work and covered at least some of the material in this video.

So, at one of our blended family cookouts during the pandemic, I asked Ed if this was the same Daryl Davis whom we had met at his seventieth. Of course it was.

I ended up talking about his work a lot but never expected to meet him again until the Mercatus invitation came.

We got a few minutes together before his talk when we mostly talked about Ed and the party. I then asked a question after his talk about how people who weren’t Black and weren’t high end musicians could apply his work. My question must have grabbed the attention of the ProHuman staff members who were there because we spent a lot of time talking during the rest of the workshop and afterward which led to their decision to invite me onto their board of advisors.

…Meets Growth Mindset

In fact, the ProHuman Foundation is in many ways the answer to the question I posed to Daryl that evening. Daryl’s work is very much at the heart of what it does as would befit the organization’s co-founder.

However, the rest of its staff is committed to using his work as an inspiration to address a lot of the social-psychological drivers of ideological division in our country that have been at the heart of my own work for the last decade or so. As they see it, American history is filled with huge steps forward and equally huge periods of stagnation and even regression culminating in the situation we find ourselves in today when so many of us feel that the country is heading in the wrong direction—no matter who they voted for. Thus, as they see it:

The defining question of our time is: How do we break through the demonization and division, and find the courage to move forward together?

We believe that embracing the foundational truth, that every person is a unique individual united by our shared humanity, is what will allow us to continue to advance.

They bring an impressive understanding of social psychology and neuroscience together in defining an organization whose mission revolves around three core goals each of which is built around three additional concepts;

  • Growth Mindset. The term itself was coined by the legendary Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck who found that people who sought to develop themselves in any number of ways fared better because they found ways of combining: Gratitude, Optimism. Grit.
  • Social Harmony. Theirs is not a vision of harmony that accepts the status quo but one achieves a new kind of balance through: Fairness. Understanding. Humanity.
  • Positive Connections. As the author of a blog entitled the Dot Connecters, I had to love this one because ProHuman is all about building strong, constructive relationships through: Curiosity, Courage. Compassion.

As a new organization, the foundation is still defining its role. Still, it has begun developing three separate initiatives each of which seems promising. They are actively seeking candidates to work with on all three fronts.

  • Prohuman Ambassadors will work with Daryl and other members of the team with whom they will explore those key principles and develop ways of taking them into the communities they work with.
  • Educational Resources and Training. The team has already created curricula aimed at kindergarten and early elementary school students. Plans are under way for developing related material at least through the high school years.
  • Educator Grants of up to $500 are available for K-12 teachers who want to integrate ProHuman themes in their classrooms.

Next Steps for Them and Me

I honestly thought that I would never join another board and probably would have refused had Daryl and his friends asked me to join a Board of Directors that has governing power and/or fund raising responsibilities.

But given Daryl’s charisma (not to mention his unusual personal trajectory) and the foundation’s emphasis on so many issues that are near and dear to me, I just couldn’t say no.

My guess is that I can best be of service to them by integrating them into the broader Alliance for Peacebuilding and other communities that I work with. That, for example, will begin with connecting them with my co-author, Patricia Shafer who does remarkable work with high school students through Youth and Peace in Action which she created at the beginning of this decade. Then, they should obviously get to know the folks at ProSocial World.

After that, who knows?

But I mostly expect to spend some time hanging out with Daryl and his colleagues who demonstrate something that I whole heartedly believe it—peacebuilding has to be fun as well as challenging.

Next Time—I’ve intentionally taken time off from writing this blog to process the election and its implications for peacebuilding. Although I don’t have anything useful to say about the election itself, I will spend the Thanksgiving weekend thinking through how my colleagues and I should respond to a second Trump administration.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.