Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, I grew up isolated and isolating in the suburbs of Detroit, and I've been asking some version of the same question ever since: what helps people stay human with one another when fear, difference, conflict, or uncertainty make that hard?

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, watching a great city hollow out while everyone around me lived a little isolated from everyone else — including, often, from each other. I didn't have language for it then, but I already sensed that how we live near one another, without really connecting to one another, was costing us more than we knew.

Law school pointed me toward a career built on argument. I practiced family law for years — divorce, custody, the cases where two people who once loved each other were now fighting over who gets which weekends. I learned quickly that the legal outcome was rarely the real problem. Underneath every custody dispute was grief, fear, betrayal, a relationship that had failed to hold two people's needs at once — and until someone addressed that, no ruling actually resolved anything. That's where I first learned that resolving what's underneath a conflict matters more than winning the argument on top of it.

Later, I ran the planned-giving program at United Way of Greater Cincinnati, helping people build charitable gifts into their estates. I'd been trained to argue cases. What I found instead is that nobody gives away a piece of their life's work because you out-argued them — they give because something moved them, because they felt what the gift could mean. People give from the heart more than the head. That reshaped how I saw every room I've worked in since: organizations don't change because someone won the debate. They change because people feel something true together.

The clearest proof of that came when I moved to a transitional neighborhood near downtown Cincinnati and joined a small civic group called the Urbanists, who believed a vibrant downtown mattered to the region's future — the way I'd once watched Detroit lose its own. We were a think tank until organizational consultant Peter Block ran one simple exercise: he asked us, in small groups, why the city mattered to us personally. That one shift — from talking about the city to talking about our relationship to it — turned us into a movement. Margaret Mead was right that a small group of connected people can change something much bigger than themselves. I've spent every year since trying to recreate the conditions for that kind of shift, wherever I'm asked to help.

That's the thread running through this work — family law, fundraising, city-building, and now organizational facilitation: people don't change because they lost an argument. They change because they got reconnected to what mattered to them, and to each other.