Peacemaking tips from Megan and Jayne

• Ask about experience, not opinion. "What led you to believe that?" opens people up. Debating the belief itself usually shuts them down.

• Set real ground rules. Equal time, no interrupting, no visible reactions. Structure is what makes it safe to say the hard thing.

• Practice listening as a discipline. Resist the urge to plan your response while the other person is still talking.

Practical Peacemaking

"You hear a lot about peacemaking, but you don't see a lot of actively doing practical peacemaking."

That line, from Jayne Connolly, is the whole reason this conversation matters. It's easy to talk about the need for peace. It's much harder to build a weekly habit of practicing it.

In this episode, Nell Rose Hill sits down with Megan Stevenson and Jayne Connolly, two recent Brigham Young University graduates who, as undergraduates, started a student club called Students for Understanding. Megan studied wildlife conservation; Jayne studied political science. The club is still running. This conversation isn't about politics. It's about what it actually takes to sit across from someone you disagree with, every week, on purpose.

The Basement Talks

The club started with a documentary.

The semester before Megan and Jayne launched Students for Understanding, Megan attended a campus event that screened a film about a volatile chapter in Boston's history around abortion, a time that included a killing at an abortion clinic. The film followed women from both sides of that divide who began meeting in secret, in a basement, to talk. Over time, some of them became friends.

"I thought the other side was the worst. I thought they were the devil," one woman said in the film. And yet.

Megan was moved. It was also close to the 2024 presidential election, a stretch she describes as volatile in its own right. She had strong opinions and wasn't coming into contact with people who saw things differently. She and Jayne, already best friends, had been talking late into the night about politics. They realized something was missing at BYU: "There wasn't really a space on campus where we could have difficult conversations."

So they built one.

Ninety Percent Listening

The structure is what makes the club work, not just the goodwill.

Each week, everyone got the same set of questions and time to think them over. Then the group went around in a circle. Everyone spoke, or passed, without interruption and without comment on what the person before them had said. No reactions. No eye-rolling.

"You had to sit and listen to what everyone else had said, even if you disagreed with them, before you could speak again," Jayne explained. "It didn't really feel like a conversation as much." That was the point. Megan put it simply: "That teaches you how to listen. Not just immediately thinking about how you're going to respond, but really actually listening to them."

The rules did more than keep things civil. They built trust. Coming back week after week, showing up for people even when the topic was hard, is what let people eventually share their real vulnerabilities.

They didn't invent this framework alone. Much of it came from a resource called Living Room Conversations, which favors questions about experience over questions about opinion. Megan also credits a connection they made through the Venn Diagram Project for helping shape the expectations and ground rules that made the structured dialogue work. Instead of asking whether abortion is moral, they'd ask what experiences led someone to believe what they believe. "Hot takes are usually opinions that many people don't agree with, so they're the least understood," Jayne said. Asking about the story behind the opinion opens people up in a way that debating the opinion itself never does.

Not Binary

The club covered immigration, abortion, climate change, the role of government, campus life at a religious university, and, a month after the 2024 election, the election itself. They also talked about the Grammys, on purpose, to draw in people who might never come for a "serious" topic.

What surprised them most wasn't the disagreement. It was the variety inside it.

"When you focus on one issue deeply for an hour, you realize everyone in the room has different opinions on it," Jayne said. "You might classify them into two groups, but even if they're both Democrats, they see it very differently." Megan agreed: the club helped her see people "more than the labels that identify them." That's a daily struggle, she added. It's tempting to size someone up before you've heard a word from them.

Jayne described a recent moment in a friend's car when a charged topic came up. In the past, she might have let it drop. Instead, they opened up and found more common ground than either expected.

Get to the Action

Both Megan and Jayne were candid that founding a club felt intimidating. What made it possible was the Sorenson Center's support handling logistics, and simply not doing it alone. "Having a friend like Jayne where I wasn't starting it alone was really nice," Megan said.

Their advice for people outside a college campus starts there: if the space doesn't exist, build one. "I need to take on accountability to making more spaces," Jayne said, "and not feeling downtrodden that there's not one." She pointed to Living Room Conversations as a place to start, not a finished product but a real head start.

Their bigger piece of advice is about pace. Don't wait to be fully at peace with someone before you try. "It doesn't start being fully resolved or full of peace," Jayne said. "It might be a relationship that's snappy and uncomfy." Pick something realistic. Pick someone who will respect your dignity. Then act.

"Try and get to the action as soon as possible," she said.

Still Learning

Neither Megan nor Jayne claims to have this figured out. "Being a peacemaker isn't something you can just turn on," Jayne said. "We are still learning how to be those peacemakers."

That may be the most useful thing they offered: peacemaking isn't a credential you earn once. It's a habit you keep choosing, one conversation, one relationship, one Wednesday night at a time.