Diversity & Opportunity Project (Add'l Information)

Extended History

As we looked around our inaugural summit in 2018, we noted that our participants were not representative of the nation as a whole. We needed more diversity in several key areas, namely ideological, ethnic/racial, faith, age, geography and more.

The Bridge Alliance was not unique as this was true across the cross-partisan movement as a whole. And while there are a few amazingly diverse organizations, they were a minority. Therefore, the Bridge Alliance immediately addressed this problem as an important component of our 2019 strategic plan. We created the Diversity and Opportunity Task Force to study the problem and establish a process for ensuring that the democracy field becomes genuinely diverse and representative of the country with regard to race/ethnicity, sex/gender, social identity, religion, ideology, and age. 

After almost a year of research and community interactions by the Bridge Alliance Diversity and Opportunity (BADO) task force it has become apparent that the democracy field is currently represented by mostly white, older and progressive-leaning people. Since our democratic republic is premised on equality, the democracy field should be representative of the diversity of the nation as a whole. Those underrepresented in the democracy field are people of color, conservative thinkers, youth, faith based and rural residents.

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