The Village Square: Liz Joyner on Building Peace One Relationship at a Time

Peacemaking tips from Liz Joyner

• Start with one person. Find someone you like and have something in common with, but whose views you don't quite understand — and build a real relationship anyway. A single friendship across difference changes how you see everyone else you disagree with.

• Seek out the group that doesn't already agree with you. If every group you belong to shares your views, find one that doesn't. There's no substitute for direct contact with people different from you. Proximity, over time, is what builds trust.

• Lead with reciprocal kindness. People return the decency they're shown. Extend the first small kindness and stay in the room — that ordinary give-and-take is what turns a divided group into a connected one.

Building Peace Across Differences

Summary of the interview with Liz Joyner

There is no substitute for direct contact with people who are different than you. There just isn't.

That's Liz Joyner, and she's spent nearly two decades proving it. Not in theory — in rooms, in towns, at dinner tables where people who couldn't be more different sit down across from each other and, somehow, build trust.

Liz is the founder and president of The Village Square, a nonprofit out of Tallahassee, Florida. She holds a master's in social work with an interest in family systems, and she's been honored as a woman of peace. But the thing that comes through most in a conversation with her isn't the credentials. It's that she genuinely believes ordinary people, in their own hometowns, can do the work that the whole country seems to have forgotten how to do.

We sat down with Liz to ask a simple question: how do everyday people actually bridge the divides in their own lives? Her answers were practical, hopeful, and a little bit challenging.

Start with One Relationship

We asked Liz how a regular person builds more empathy. She didn't give us a theory. She gave us a person.

When she started The Village Square, there was someone in her life — a woman she knew through a mom network — whose politics she never understood. "But she's just the most amazing human being," Liz said. So she reached out. They walked the relationship along a little way. And something shifted.

"I can't look at someone who disagrees with me politically now and not think, well, they can't be so bad — because I know my friend."

That's the whole secret, and it's smaller than we expect. One real relationship with one person you genuinely disagree with changes how you see everyone else you disagree with. So Liz's first piece of advice is almost disarmingly simple: start small. Who in your life do you like, have something in common with, but quietly think, I just don't understand their politics? Start there.

Disagreement Isn't The Problem

Most of us treat disagreement like something to survive. Liz treats it like something to use.

"I can't be in rooms of people anymore where everybody agrees," she told us. "It's very flat. You need disagreement to solve problems."

She points to how the best companies operate — they don't hire a thousand people who think exactly alike. They gather different heads because different heads produce different ideas. "A feature of a country that allows me to be free is that I allow you to be free, too. So the fact that we disagree isn't a surprise. It's something we do together."

Once you stop seeing disagreement as a threat and start seeing it as generative — even interesting — something turns. You're suddenly in the place we all need to be.

Rings of a Tree

Here's where Liz got practical, and it's the idea worth stealing for any group, family, or town.

When The Village Square wants to build a big, diverse gathering, they don't start big. They start with a small core — maybe ten people — chosen to represent the diversity they want the whole room to have. That core meets for a long time. They get to know each other well. Then each person invites others: Who do you know who's different from you?

The group grows outward like rings of a tree. And because it grew from relationships, it holds. "You've got people who agree and people who disagree, but now they have friends inside the group. That's the glue."

For your own life, Liz's version is even simpler: get a small group, and have each person reach out to just one someone they disagree with. Suddenly you have cross-cutting relationships — the kind that make a group resilient instead of brittle.

The Human Superpower

Liz is clear-eyed about human nature. We're groupish. We fall into us-versus-them easily; it's practically the factory setting. But she says we have another trait that's just as strong, and we forget to use it.

"We're astoundingly reciprocal. We reciprocate kindness so readily to anyone who's shown us any kind of decency. You open a door for someone, and they open the door for the person behind them."

That's the superpower. Put people in proximity, add a little reciprocal kindness, and something starts to work its magic. The people Liz is closest to who disagree with her? "That disagreement is about thirty things down the list of what I care about them." The problem isn't that we can't get along. It's that we're rarely in the places where that superpower can surface.

Make it Less Serious

One of the most surprising things Liz said was about tone.

Peacebuilding, she argues, often makes a well-meaning mistake: serious people take on serious tasks in a serious way — and take all the joy out of it. It starts to feel like an HR meeting. Rules for the difficult conversation. A somber discussion of local ordinance 759.

Meanwhile, the people rolling division downhill are having a much easier time, because negative emotion moves fast and they've made it feel almost fun. Liz's answer isn't to match the anger. It's to make peacemaking genuinely inviting — even celebratory. Her organization has thrown big events with lights and a stage and music, gathering hundreds of people across their differences in a way that felt like a night out, not a lecture. When things got harder in her community, she did more of that, not less.

Peacemaking, she reminds us, shouldn't feel like work we dread. It should feel like a life we actually want to live.

Want to go deeper? Explore The Village Square to see how Liz and her team bring people across their differences into the same room. You can also read her essay "The Threads of a Nation".

And consider her invitation: don't wait for the whole country to change. Start with one person you don't quite understand, right where you live.

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