Urban Rural Action builds bridges in a divided America
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Few would deny today that across the country—from Congress to neighborhoods to friends and families—there is a divide between “us” and “them.”
And few would argue that this is a good thing.
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At the national level, groups are emerging whose goal is to build bridges across the many divides, to promote a new sense of community and cooperation – and simply to get people talking to each other again.
One of them has specifically addressed business and economic cooperation in Maryland and the prevention of targeted violence in south-central Pennsylvania.
The initiative is called “Urban Rural Action” and aims to bring people together and build relationships to find solutions to societal challenges.
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What does Urban Rural Action do?
Founder and CEO Joe Bubman has a background in international peacebuilding, serving with the Mercy Corps before founding Urban Rural Action. Through his association with Vantage Partners, he leads negotiation workshops for Fortune 500 companies and the Air Force.
He became involved with nongovernmental organizations “working in conflict zones around the world, trying to do exactly what we’re doing now in this country, which is to bring together local people on different sides of the conflict, turn the tables and try to make progress on the problem at hand,” says Kira Hamman, a longtime mathematics professor at Penn State—Mont Alto who now serves as UR Action’s program director.
After the 2016 election, she said, he “recognized some of the conflict dynamics that characterize the international conflicts in this country … and so he changed his strategy and created this organization.”
Programming began in 2019, Hamman said, and funding comes from a variety of sources, including grants. A grant from the Department of Homeland Security, for example, funds the Pennsylvania project. The organization also receives donations and generates revenue from programs on college campuses and customized worship services for individual clients.
One of his previous projects involved Washington County Chamber of Commerce President Paul Frey, who now serves on the board of UR Action.
“I worked on a working group for immigrant entrepreneurs in Easton, Maryland,” Frey said, “because language and cultural barriers were hindering their success.”
“We found that there are resources for every business, but many immigrant entrepreneurs don’t know how to access them or don’t have the connections,” Frey said. “Our goal is to help immigrant entrepreneurs who may not have the connections to engage with the business community to be more successful… And we found that there was a divide; it was mostly about language.”
That has made it difficult for the immigrant owners to connect with others in the business community to get the help they need, he said. “Through our work, we’ve made those connections and relationships and found that if we can help the business owners succeed, it helps the economy. And they win, and the local economy wins.”
There are prejudices to overcome, Frey said, as entrepreneurs try to understand each other’s perspectives. The UR Action team encouraged one entrepreneur who spoke “very little English” to learn more English to be successful – and encouraged English-speaking entrepreneurs to “jump the fence a little bit” and learn some Spanish.
“It’s really about relationships,” he said. “We have similar goals; sometimes we don’t talk about it and then the collaboration doesn’t happen. Then it’s a lose-lose or win-win situation.”
Hamman said the program has been so successful that UR Action is replicating it elsewhere.
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Curbing Violence in Pennsylvania
Bubman and Hamman currently co-lead a program to prevent targeted violence in Franklin, Adams, York and Dauphin counties in southern Pennsylvania. The program began in 2022 and runs through September — but an offshoot of the program focused on election-related violence will continue through the rest of the year.
But why south-central Pennsylvania?
“This is a very polarized area politically, but the truth is that targeted violence can happen anywhere,” Hamman said. “And almost by definition, you don’t expect it. You don’t see it coming. So it’s not so much that this area is at particularly high risk for targeted violence, but that there is a risk of targeted violence everywhere.”
But there is no larger framework in the region to prevent such violence, she said, and UR Action’s Uniters have “made great strides. … They’ve done some amazing things. But because it’s a pretty polarized region, it’s a good opportunity for us to step in and bring people together to think about this issue, which is a critical issue everywhere.”
UR Action runs a similar program in the Kenosha area of southeastern Wisconsin, where violence did occur in 2020 – “so that was a little bit of a different situation,” Hamman said. “But it’s a problem everywhere. And that’s why we hope it doesn’t actually happen in this area.”
Participants learn the warning signs of possible violence.
“People don’t just freak out,” Hamman said. “There are plenty of warning signs. So if you can teach the community to recognize the warning signs, and if you have systems in place – reporting structures, but also support structures to intervene when people are on that path, then you can often, maybe even usually, steer them off that path.
“It is not inevitable that they will commit a targeted act of violence.”
UR Action’s program includes supporting threat and management teams, which Hamman said are “multidisciplinary teams that have K-12 education, mental health, support services for all kinds of different populations, whether it’s homeless, veterans, people in recovery, all of those types of organizations, as well as law enforcement.”
“To get those people talking to each other so that when a questionable person is identified, there are a lot of options. It’s highly contextualized… What’s going on with this person? What do they need? And who can provide it? So that’s the job of the threat assessment and management teams.”
Community members need to be aware of warning signs and know what to do when they recognize them, she said.
“It’s good to recognize that,” she said, “but if you don’t act on that information, it’s useless.” That’s why developing these management teams is so important.
But in a broader sense, a strong, cohesive community already offers significant protection against violence, Hamman said.
“When community cohesion is really high, when the community is very resilient, then these things are just much less likely to happen,” said Hamman, which is why UR Action works with so many community organizations.
“The idea is that we strengthen the capacity and the reach of these organizations and their ability to take these kinds of recommendations and direct them to the right place,” she said. “And we just want to prevent it from getting to that point in the first place.”
While UR Action’s work on that project is scheduled to wrap up in September, a second program for Franklin and Adams counties specifically focused on preventing political violence related to this year’s election was launched last week. That program will run through February.
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Learning to talk to each other is the key
UR Action already works on college campuses, promoting dialogue, relationships and peacemaking. This fall, Hamman said, the organization will launch programs for K-12 education.
The key to all of these efforts, Frey said, is building relationships. Even those who disagree often have the same goals, he said.
“They may need an opportunity to have that dialogue; someone to just listen,” he said. “People who go to the other side of the fence, whatever that fence may be, have kids and a house, they want their kids to go to school, they want to raise their families, they have a lot in common. And then how do you bring the differences together and have a conversation?”
“Focus on what you have in common.”
Frey said he got involved with UR Action because of the collaborative aspect.
“I wanted to bring in the business perspective because I thought it was important,” he said. “How do you balance government intervention with the free market? How do you do that? That’s why I got involved, because trade is important.”
“And honestly, how do you get a diverse group to work together? … That’s just critical.”
This “used to happen on the playground, it used to happen at home and in the neighborhood,” Frey said. But with the development of social media, people don’t talk or interact as much anymore, he said.
“We used to learn this on the playground, from our parents, from friends. And today it’s all less common,” says Frey. “People hide their opinions behind a computer screen or a smartphone and no longer have face-to-face conversations.”
“Our role is not to provide solutions,” Hamman said. “Our role is to help communities work together across departments and find their own solution.”
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Learn more about violence prevention in your community
UR Action is sponsoring a “Regional Prevention Summit” on August 24th from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Franklin County 11/30 Visitors Center in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The summit will feature representatives from the Pennsylvania Project and local officials who will discuss their actions to prevent targeted violence and provide opportunities for sharing ideas.
Interested? Register by August 15 at www.uraction.org/events.
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