In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, fear and loathing and the us versus them mindset make RUBI's bridging work harder and more important than ever. Two depolarization experts will share their thoughts on the connection between toxic polarization and political violence and what can be done to bring down the temperature without abandoning our political goals and projects.

Kristin Hansen is the co-founder and executive director of the Civic Health Project, an organization that uses technology to foster healthy discourse and social cohesion. Zachary Elwood is a former content strategist for Builders Movement, an organization committed to overcoming toxic polarization. Zachary is the author of Defusing American Anger and host of the  People Who Read People podcast.

Register here.

Join us for a discussion with acclaimed sociologist Arlie Hochschild as she discusses her latest book, Stolen Pride.  In her research in Kentucky, Hochschild explores the emotional factors behind the rural-urban political divide and how feelings of lost pride and shame have played a significant role in shaping the political landscape.  She encourages listeners to bridge the "empathy wall" between different political groups and to practice "emotional bilingualism" to better understand one another.

Register here.

For more than six months now, millions of Americans have participated in a resistance movement, fighting the anti-democratic, unjust and cruel actions that the Trump Administration has perpetrated. It’s been well organized, with several national progressive organizations providing help and guidance to thousands of local protest efforts. But something has been almost entirely missing, from the protests themselves as well as the broader media and social media discussion: Working people, whether farmers, miners, factory workers or union rank and file. In RUBI’s September 3rd briefing, you’ll hear from Jared Abbott, Director of the Center for Working Class Politics and Anthony Flaccavento, RUBI’s director about why this is so essential to stopping Trump, as well as strategies for how we can broaden the resistance.

Register here.

Musa al-Gharbi will share his analysis of why Democratic candidates have faltered in recent electoral cycles. al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His research primarily focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and the social life of scholarly and journalistic outputs. He is a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. al-Gharbi’s first book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, was published by Princeton University Press in October 2024.

Register here.

For much of the twentieth century, unions were more than just workplace institutions or collective bargaining units; they shaped the daily lives and worldviews of working-class families by building collective ties that extended into the civic and political fabric of small-town America, especially in the American Rust Belt. As union power declined, so too has this shared political and social identity. Many former union towns now have significant influence from Republican-aligned networks and narratives. This presentation will conclude with a discussion of how lessons from the heyday of Big Labor -- when labor was deeply involvement in community -- can inform current practices.

Lainey Newman is a lawyer and researcher from Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on labor, political identity, and the evolution of communities. She wrote Rust Belt Union Blues (Columbia University Press) with sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol in 2023. She graduated from Harvard College in 2021 and Harvard Law School in 2025.

Register here.

Make plans to join Community Works 2.0 on June 28th, 1-2:30pmET to discuss next steps in building a local CWorks Chapter. Our pilot counties will share specific ideas for building a leadership team, identifying needs and partners, and organizing successful community projects. 

Register here.

Tariffs are, literally, all the rage these days. Are they always bad? Can they ever be useful? How do they impact rural industries and communities? Trade attorney Lori Wallach will tell us how we got into this mess and discuss how we can understand tariffs in the context of global trade agreements going back to 1944.

Lori is the director of Rethink Trade. She is a 30-year veteran of international and U.S. congressional trade battles starting with the 1990s fights over NAFTA and WTO.

Register here.

In a state Trump won by 20-points, Independent Dan Osborn came within six points of unseating a two-term Republican incumbent Senator. Dan will talk about his campaign, what he ran on, and how, when and where Independents can run to win rural races.

Dan Osborn served in the United States Navy, Nebraska Army National Guard, and has punched a clock for 20 years as an industrial mechanic. As president of his union, he led the successful 2021 Kellogg’s strike in Omaha, preserving hundreds of middle-class jobs. In 2024, Dan ran for United States Senate as an independent, over-performing the presidential ballot by more than nearly any other Senate candidate in the country. Dan did it all without taking a dime from the corporations and party bosses that control Washington.

Register here.

Throughout the country, family farmers suffer the worst impacts of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and other forms of industrial agriculture. But farmers are fighting back.

Sonja Trom Eayrs is a lawyer and family farmer in Minnesota and the author of Dodge County, Inc.: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America, a memoir of her parents' three-year legal battle against a heavily polluting CAFO adjacent to their farm. She will talk about how rural and communities have been devastated by industrial agriculture and what they can do about it.

Register here.

Why did some deindustrialized mid-western factory towns make a right-wing turn while others retained their Democratic allegiance? Stephanie Ternullo interviewed working class residents in three very different small post-industrial cities in Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota. Her learnings open up new possibilities for candidates to reach voters many assume have been lost for good.

Stephanie Ternullo is Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University. Her research, including her recent book, How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics, examines how local contexts shape Americans’ political behavior.

Register here.

In a state Trump won by 20-points, Independent Dan Osborn came within six points of unseating a two-term Republican incumbent Senator. Democrat Sarah Keyeski defeated the Republican incumbent in her rural Wisconsin state senate race. Dan and Sarah will talk about their campaigns, what they ran on, and what they see as the keys to their success.

Dan Osborn served in the United States Navy, Nebraska Army National Guard, and has punched a clock for 20 years as an industrial mechanic. As president of his union, he led the successful 2021 Kellogg’s strike in Omaha, preserving hundreds of middle-class jobs. In 2024, Dan ran for United States Senate as an independent, over-performing the presidential ballot by more than nearly any other Senate candidate in the country. Dan did it all without taking a dime from the corporations and party bosses that control Washington.

Sarah Keyeski grew up on a dairy farm and went on to work as a Licensed Professional Counselor. The founder of Lift Lodi, a local community service group, Sarah was asked by community members to run for Senate and run she did!

Register here and we'll see you on Feb 5 at 4pm ET.

Join us for a conversation with Arlie Hochschild about her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. Arlie has spent the last few years talking with blue collar men in Pikesville, Kentucky about their lives, their dreams and their disappointments. The men in her book wonder whether or not their jobs, their region, and their self-worth have simply been lost or—as Donald Trump tells them about the 2020 election—have been “stolen.”

Arlie's first book, Strangers in Their Own Land, helped form the backbone of RUBI's understanding of the rural-urban divide. Robert Reich describes her insights as compassionate, illuminating, and deeply moving...we agree!

Register here.

Win, lose or draw, this is the one election post-mortem rural politicos won't want to miss. Our panelists will crunch the numbers and analyze voting behavior to get a picture of who voted, how they voted, and why. We'll examine national rural voting patterns and then zoom in for a closer look at North Carolina, Montana, Penn, and mid-western factory towns. Join us for this special briefing.

Watch here.

Want to know more about Community Works and our role in bridging the rural-urban divide? Join us for this month’s introduction to who we are, what we do, and how we are succeeding in rebuilding trust across political differences in our rural communities. Register here: Bridging the Divide with Community Works, 4th Wednesday, 6:30pm ET.

Meet the man who "brought the class war to the DNC." John Russell, a self-described "dirtbag journalist", is a labor and class politics reporter for More Perfect Union and has his own Substack called The Holler ("class politics for rednecks and hippies"). An Appalachian, Ohio Valley native who ran for Congress, John made his way to the 2024 DNC mainstage where he gave an electrifying speech calling on working class Americans to come together for control of our government and workplaces. John has also produced a viral video where he interviewed Trump supporters at a rally in Erie, PA. 

We'll screen John's short, powerful speech and the fascinating ten-minute video during the briefing.

Register here.

Karuna Koppula will show us how to create simple, non-partisan voter guides. These guides can be distributed in local and statewide races as a non-polarizing means of informing disengaged voters of the candidates' positions on key issues of importance to local voters. This is something we hope RUBI supporters will form teams and try out during this electoral cycle. If you are part of an Indivisible chapter or other local group with a neutral-sounding name, voter guides are an underutilized, very impactful thing you can do to help move vote margins. Come learn how to do it --it's not that hard!

Karuna Koppula is Vice President of Administration at the Center for Voter Information. Before joining CVI, she was the Deputy Director for Political Engagement at the Analyst Institute, where she worked with internal and external partners to deploy evidence-driven strategies.

Register here.

RUBI's own co-founder and Communications Director, Erica Etelson, will share highlights from two new RUBI resources: The Back Road to 2024: 8 Ways to Depolarize Rural Electoral Campaigns and Talk Like a Neighbor: Communication Tips for Rural Candidates. In this era of peak polarization, left-leaning candidates who can defuse partisan hostility stand a better chance of appealing to soft Republicans, swing voters, and the "exhausted majority" of the electorate. Erica is the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide and co-writes the Rethinking Rural column for The Nation.

Register here. 

Join the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) at this year’s Rural Assembly Everywhere for a training about the origins of the rural-urban divide. At the training, you’ll engage with information and suggestions for how to navigate and lessen the divide. The objective of this workshop is to gain the skills to find mutual understanding and common ground, defuse hostility and contempt in conversations and relationships, and build multi-racial working and middle-class rural solidarity between rural, suburban, and urban dwellers. RUBI’s practical solutions are based on research by our own and other scholars, as well as the personal experiences of rural progressive organizers.

Register here.

As we get closer to the November election, many progressive and Democratic strategists advise a focus on “turning out the base,” while others prioritize persuading independents and other potentially movable voters. But what if “the base” for progressive and Democratic candidates is shifting? And what if one of the biggest blocs of potential voters for Joe Biden and Democratic candidates – working class and rural people – is showing signs of shifting their votes away from MAGA Republicans towards more populist progressive representatives? In this presentation, Sarah Jaynes, Founder and Executive Director of the Rural Democracy Initiative, will provide an overview of fascinating new rural polling and the work of more than 100 organizations and initiatives making headway in rural America. Sarah will also highlight some candidates running in rural districts with a strong chance of winning.

Register here.

Want to know more about Community Works and our role in bridging the rural-urban divide? Join us for this month’s introduction to who we are, what we do, and how we are succeeding in rebuilding trust across political differences in our rural communities. Register here: Bridging the Divide with Community Works, June 26th, 6:30pm ET.

In 2000, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly told a Washington Post reporter, “We’re the only show from a working-class point of view.” Liberals and progressives found this laughable. O’Reilly’s show and Fox News constantly boosted a party inflicting deep wounds on working-class people: undermining unions, blocking more affordable health care, and starving public services through tax cuts on the rich. How could he possibly represent a working-class audience? In this presentation, communication scholar Reece Peck explains how conservative media producers learned to effectively brand political conservatism as blue-collar by appealing to working-class taste, knowledge, and morality.

Register here.