Team profile by Debbie Goldstein

The North Carolina Leadership Forum (NCLF) aims to transform the state’s policymaking environment from one of negative polarization and distrust to one of effective collaboration. Founded in 2016, NCLF works with state and local policy leaders from the government, business and nonprofit sectors to provide them with the will, skills and relationships they need to engage with each other constructively across ideology, party, race and gender, age and rural-urban divides.

By June 2024, NCLF will have successfully conducted 8 statewide cohorts and 4 regional housing cohorts, including two statewide cohorts in 2023-24 (elections, community safety) and our first full-day alumni program on housing.

This project sought to enhance NCLF’s work to address political polarization in North Carolina in academia, encourage students to engage in collaboration and dialogue and communicate NCLF’s work to a wider audience to increase its impact.

Additionally, this project provided students with exposure to NCLF’s model for cross-partisan dialogue as well as to state and local public policy leaders themselves as they engage in such dialogue and leadership skill development in engaging with different points of view. It also provided students with opportunities to apply research to a public policy setting by conducting research on polarization; provide research support to NCLF during a forum on a specific topic; and draft NCLF reports on the proceedings of its dialogues

Background on the assumptions of the NC Leadership Forum:

• Polarization and distrust in politics serve as barriers to enacting sound policy.
• Leaders contribute to polarization; they don’t understand the perspectives of opponents.
• North Carolina Leadership Forum (NCLF) addresses polarization at the state and local levels.
• State leaders have few spaces to engage in debate on important policy topics.
• College campuses may contribute to polarization; students have limited opportunities to engage with different political views.
• Students aren’t exposed to the realities of state-level policymaking and the dynamics that make it difficult for local leaders to behave differently.

Team Activities

Throughout the year, students attended NCLF cohort meetings on the main topic of elections in North Carolina. As part of their participation, students interacted with state and local leaders, took notes on discussions, prepared research memos to inform discussion and debriefed on their experiences (in class and through journal entries). At the end of the program, each student contributed a portion of the NCLF draft report on the proceedings.

Students were also split into two different sub-teams – Academic Context and Communications – where they designed and implemented small group projects on each theme.

The Academic Context team produced two products:

1. Literature review of key sources on four main themes underlying NCLF’s model (deliberative democracy, role of relationships, political leadership and efficacy of interventions)
2. Comparative analysis of peer organizations doing similar work to NCLF

The Communications team produced 12 short video interviews of participants in the Elections NCLF program, as well as executive summaries of three full-length prior NCLF reports (with a goal of increasing accessibility for the public), and a social media strategy for NCLF that included templates and link trees and new NCLF accounts on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Canva.

Strengthening Cross-Partisan Collaboration in North Carolina Policymaking

Poster by Addie Geitner, Alexia Jackson, Andrew Fostiropoulos, Anna Hallahan, Ayush Gaur, Jaden Rodriguez, Katelyn Cai, Liv Schramkowski and Samantha Richter