My Story
Hi, I'm Jill Farrar
In today's explosive world, I've met so many people who don't feel equipped to sit at the divided tables where we now find ourselves. Conflict avoidance only works for so long because the conflicts aren't going away, they're multiplying.
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I'm putting my 15+ years of facilitation and team building experience to use addressing the problem of polarization.
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School for Risky Conversations is a nonprofit to help others connect with best practices, proven tools, and grow their skills to better communicate across divides.​
Our Vision
A world where conflict intelligence, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence are accessible and commonplace.
[... even as widely available as artificial intelligence]
Our Values
Here's how we commit to showing up.
Lead with generosity
Giving the benefit of the doubt from the start
Own your accountablity
Take responsibility for what you should
Connection over control
People over ideas
Better every day
Growth over perfectionism
Dignify uniqueness
Respecting each other's differences
Meet the Board
Why we find this problem compelling
The polarization gap keeps widening
Political scientists look at the most moderate of each side and observe that the amount of common ground is narrow to nil. Not a news flash, we know, but this phenomenon doesn't just affect the folks working in D.C. It's impacting our families, our communities, and our health. The widening distance correlates to the perception that the people in our lives on the other side of this divide aren't just different or wrong. We've come to see 'those' people as evil. When we adopt this value-judgement, either explicitly or somewhere in the background of our minds, we close the door to exploring perspectives other than our own and working to find common ground. We exacerbate the divide.
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However, social scientists have also found that when we sit down and have a conversation across divides, we don't necessarily agree and sing 'Kumbaya', we see where they are coming from. We better understand an experience very different than our own. We're more likely to see them as human instead of evil.
Our social health matters
Our social health is as important as our physical and mental health. If that feels like a hot take to you, the World Health Organization backs us up on this. And yet we don’t reach for help with our social health nearly as often as we do for our physical and mental health. Even worse, our social health seems to be held captive to the divisions discussed above. And then those divisions get magnified when we spend time on “social” apps, creating a cannibalizing cycle of social health. Some of us have honed the art of avoidance which provides short term relief from this cycle but, it really just throws a blanket over the hot mess we all know is there. If we want real social wellness, we have to learn to have meaningful connections across divides. This requires that we have the skills to have tough conversations and how to have them skillfully.
We as individuals aren't powerless
The magnitude of the polarization we face, systems we’re stuck operating within, and high stakes it poses to our relationships can feel absolutely overwhelming. We need reminding that we are not powerless to these big messy things. We hold more power than we know, in our abilities to bridge gaps, to create connections, and to build our social health. The key lies in having risky conversations which are about as fun as doing burpees. But, like the endorphins you experience at the end of a workout, we experience higher levels of trust, understanding, and connection at the other end of a risky conversation.
The trick is that most of us didn’t learn how to do this well, communicating effectively in disagreement. We got some basics in Kindergarten. Some of us had parents that passed along the best of what they know but if we’re honest, we also got a lot of the same flaws. But most of us haven’t built up the emotional bandwidth and practical skills to show up how we’d like to in these risky conversations. That’s why we're here. We want to empower and equip people to be able to have these conversations that actually create connections across divides.