One Small Step

Vital lessons and wisdom from StoryCorps’ acclaimed nine-year project of bringing people together from across the American political divide to listen to one another

A liberal and a conservative walk into a room. No, it’s not the set up to a joke. It’s the first step in a remarkable nationwide project whose scope and hopeful audacity could only have been conceived and executed by Dave Isay and StoryCorps. In states across the country, thousands of people with opposing political views—who have been led to believe they should loathe each other—have been guided into a dialogue that gets them past their talking points and toward real intimacy and understanding. It’s not supposed to be possible in a polarized America in the late 2020s, and yet the stories and the lessons these encounters have yielded are powerful correctives to prevailing counsels of despair.

Now, as he’s done with other epic StoryCorps projects, and in books like Callings and Listening is an Act of Love, Dave Isay guides readers on a moving and edifying experiential journey through the arc of the “One Small Step” project. We meet remarkable people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs, and take to heart what they brought to their conversations, how things went down, and what they left with. We come to appreciate the methodology Dave and his team of experts created and deployed to make such bridging possible. And we absorb the surprising lessons they learned along the way, which they used to evolve the project as it went.

One Small Step is a beacon of hope in a very dark time. If you heed its light and follow it, even haltingly, you’ll arrive at a place of connection where the overwhelming majority of Americans—who are exhausted by the rancor and division—truly want to live. The book is the path of reconciliation and repair our democracy keenly needs. The thousands who have already walked this route thanks to StoryCorps have now, with this book, made it possible for their experiences to blaze the trail for many thousands more. Perhaps even you.