One Small Step

conversations across political divides:
Take One Small step

Americans say they’re exhausted by political polarization and looking for a way out.

In response to the current culture of contempt, StoryCorps One Small Step is an effort to help mend the fraying fabric of our nation—one conversation at a time.

As a follow up to StoryCorps founder Dave Isay’s visit to Western Michigan University in late March, Kalamazoo was a recording site for One Small Step interviews between local citizens holding opposing political perspectives.

StoryCorps is a national non-profit founded in 2003 with a mission to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs that launched One Small Step in 2021 to bring strangers together for a 50-minute conversation about their lives, not politics. Each conversation is moderated by a trained facilitator and with participant permission, interviews are archived at the Library of Congress. A very small number of interviews are edited into short audio and animated stories that showcase the impact of the program.

One Small Step is based on contact theory, which states that a meaningful interaction between people with opposing views can help turn “thems” into “us-es”. The conversations help remind Americans from across the political spectrum that we all have a patriotic duty to listen to people with whom we disagree and to have the courage to see the humanity in others. To date, 2,000 people in 40 states across the country have recorded a OSS interview.

We Talk, the University’s civil discourse initiative, partnered with the Fetzer Institute, and StoryCorps, to bring OSS to campus and the Kalamazoo community.