Millions of Conversations

Samar Ali is President and CEO of Millions of Conversations. As a conflict-resolution practitioner, she is a recipient of the White House Fellows IMPACT Award and Vanderbilt University’s Young Alumni Professional Achievement Award. Ali is a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Working at the intersection of civil rights, national security, and economic development, Ali served as a White House Fellow in President Obama’s administration and as Assistant Commissioner of International Affairs in Tennessee Governor Haslam’s administration. Ali is currently working on a memoir, From the Holy Land to the Heartland: Olives & Sweet Tea, about one family’s century’s long quest for peace through belonging. 

She maintains her law practice through Bass, Berry & Sims and is a Commissioner on the Nashville Human Relations Commission. She received her JD and BA in Political Science from Vanderbilt University. 

Millions of Conversations is a project that addresses the dangerous divides in American society exacerbated by COVID-19, racism, disinformation, and polarization. 

Our project aims to shift behaviors and norms among target audiences by providing counter narratives to toxic polarizing messaging. We are creating an extensive, multi-modal campaign informed by robust data to “hack” the well-funded algorithms that spread hate and disinformation and that permeate conventional and social media. 

Simultaneously, we are building platforms designed to engage people across divides to support investment in a shared future rooted in communal ideals. One of the key ways we do this is by producing content that inspires social cohesion by messengers that our target audience trust. We place this content strategically across media outlets and follow up with dialogue that builds consensus and momentum continuously as a way of shifting moments of crisis into moments of opportunity for sustained engagement, empathy, and betterment.

Our project seeks to counter the Hate-Industrial Complex. Composed of coordinated, global and profitable enterprises disseminating hate to turn profit and influence, this complex has shifted the US from being one of the world’s most successful democracies to a society on the brink of civil war. Critical problems--like a pandemic or racism--become nearly impossible to address because of its constant stream of polarizing messages and the ideologies it fosters. 

Polarization is one of our era’s greatest challenges, exacerbated by the emergence of social media as a primary news source. Pew reports that a majority (62%) of US adults get news on social media. Gravitating toward sites that reinforce their point of view, these echo chambers function as high-speed rails for disinformation campaigns spreading fear and hate. Over time, people lose the ability to see the humanity of the “other” or imagine common cause. 

In 2018, Pew reported that most Republicans (62%) and Democrats (70%) say that the other party makes them feel “afraid.” In many cases, this results in people dehumanizing entire groups as other— or alien at their very core. For communities who are already marginalized and lack political or social power, the effect is devastating. 

We are transcending ideological divides by countering systemic disinformation and disseminating messaging around themes that promote visions for a shared future.

Divided by differences in race, religion, culture, political affiliation, age, sexual orientation, and more, most of us surround ourselves with people who think like us, speak like us, and look like us. In this digital age, we are lowering our tolerance for those who are different than we are, which can happen without ever leaving the house or having an in-person interaction. Viewing one another through these lenses of other makes people fearful. 

Our project addresses this crisis by virtually rebuilding the public square and uniting people around commonly shared values: (1) Family; (2) Hard work; (3) Justice; (4) Honesty; and (5) Community Engagement. We are not aligned with any candidate or political party. Rather, we are institutionalizing conflict-resolution best practices through the platform we have built for people to talk and listen to one another during moments of profound tension and disconnection. These discussions "flip the script" to find common ground around divisive topics that have been politicized such as healthcare, race, guns, religion and power--the same social media topics receiving the most promotion through algorithms. 

Our work serves people who desire a functional democracy in the United States. Polarization unravels the social fabric of that system, and as a result, our democratic aims. Our project appeals to the same people who have been targets of the hate and disinformation campaigns that rip our social fabric apart. We work with communities who are vulnerable or sympathetic to polarizing messaging, pulling them back into our communities with trustworthy and relatable information.

We spend time with people who are vulnerable to polarizing messaging online and offline including those: (1) in rural and urban counties (2) of all political beliefs; and (3) who feel they are economically disenfranchised. Thus, we are supporting marginalized communities by reducing the viability of fear-mongering campaigns that spread hate and incite violence.

We’ve initiated our “Listening to America” initiative to continuously understand the needs of those we serve: (1) A Citizen Study quantifies engagement level and campaign impact on target audience members; (2) A Critical Friends Panel monitors social media trends with the potential to shift public opinion about marginalized communities in America; and (3) A Digital Landscape Monitor gauges the tenor and volume of fear-based hate and polarizing content on social media.

In a divided society, empathy, wisdom, and love are our path forward.  Empathy tells stories that connect our common humanity. Wisdom informs how we overcome fear. Love engages community members with whom we disagree and inspires us to resolve differences. 

Knowing that fear easily spreads online, we draw upon empathy, wisdom and love as we move quickly toward our goal of a depolarized future. 

Two truths inform our work: (1) ideological polarization--and uncertainty of its origins--is one of the most difficult problems for our world; and (2) we can solve this problem by changing people’s attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.

When I was a law student in 2006, Congress passed legislation to block the sale of a company to potential buyers because they were Muslim. Listening to the toxic rhetoric used during the public debate to justify the bill was alarming. Realizing that the only way to undermine the effectiveness of these tropes would be to counter its underlying fear-mongering narratives, I sketched out a plan. 

Over the next decade, I developed the capacity to initiate this solution. By this point, though, the Muslim American community had become an even more frequent target of multi-million-dollar disinformation campaigns. Individual lives, including my own, were threatened. The FBI reported a 99% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes from 2014 to 2016, and this demographic continued to be the focus of laws and policies that were discriminatory in practice. 

In 2017, my colleagues and I received a Democracy Fund grant to organize bipartisan experts who would help structure our campaign, Millions of Conversations. Realizing that the same methodology we created to disrupt Islamophobia could be applied to disinformation campaigns of all kinds, we expanded our mandate in 2019 to replace ideological polarization with an inclusive American public square that works for everyone.

Growing up in rural Tennessee as the child of Syrian and Palestinian parents inspired me to become a peace-practitioner. While my childhood upbringing was idyllic, I witnessed terrifying divides abroad. I’m now experiencing the same in the United States.  

My college roommate called me racial slurs, and a restaurant refused to serve my family, which is sadly not new for many marginalized groups. Since then, however, the attacks I have endured personally have become more violent, including death threats that have necessitated FBI protection. Simultaneously, my hometown of Waverly has become an area where the Hate-Industrial Complex stokes the flames of racial antagonism in the age of using disinformation as a substitute for economic opportunity.

These experiences fuel my dedication to a career committed to transforming my community so that all of its members can realize their full human potential by eliminating barriers to opportunity. My case is just one example of the discrimination, otherization, and even physical danger that millions of people across our country experience. My work as a mediator addresses these issues of exclusion and hateful, bigoted narratives that have fractured our society and must be changed. We can do better, and we will.

I am a trained mediator and conflict-resolution practitioner who builds bridges across communal divides locally and globally. Having trained to use a polymathic approach to problem-solving, I am especially suited to use the power of language and sequence in my work. Although I’m a small-town girl at heart, my experiences are global, among the most complex negotiations and opportunities for creative problem solving in the world. This work is gratifying because the stakes are especially high to those directly affected, and it provides me with the opportunity to identify creative solutions that address longstanding differences between groups. The key tenant of my approach is to facilitate dialogue that inspires trust over shame.

Having worked for a Democratic administration at the federal level and a Republican administration at the state level in Tennessee, I am well-versed in how to build bipartisan support and trust--even in the most trying of times.

Beyond my training and professional background, my lived experience has prepared me for this project. As a target of hate, I learned an invaluable lesson. I became the pariah, which exacted a personal burden upon me that is difficult to explain, but anyone who has experienced it understands that pain intrinsically. I am a lawyer, and this hate forced me to become the victim and the defendant at the same time. My experiences as a survivor of disinformation compel me to seek solutions that help me do more than merely survive. I find solutions that enable all of us to thrive.

I have learned that addressing adversity in life, especially public adversity, requires courage and commitment. I had my first lesson on public adversity when I served as Vanderbilt’s student body president in college. After proposing a successful resolution to change the name of Confederate Memorial Hall to "Memorial Hall" on campus, an important signal of the school’s mission to build community, I was attacked and caricatured as the Devil in the school newspaper. While it did create personal discomfort, I knew that this was a position that was not only reasonable, but necessary. I value my role in launching that conversation at Vanderbilt despite the vicious attacks, because it created an opportunity for my school to rid itself of an awful legacy.

That experience girded me for later encounters. Over the past decade, I have been vilified and publicly shamed by a well-funded national campaign accusing me of being a terrorist because of my Muslim heritage. These attacks began during my White House tenure when a series of conspiracy theories linked me to the robust machine spreading falsehoods about President Obama's religious beliefs. I survived these attacks by building unity with people who initially considered me the enemy. 

On June 21, 2020, I read a full-page ad in The Tennessean claiming that “Islam” would detonate a nuclear device in Nashville. After speaking at length with the editor of The Tennessean, both the paper and Gannett publicly apologized, investigated this as a case of hate speech, and donated the ad’s proceeds to a grassroots organization. To shift the dialogue away from the inflammatory language and to promote collective action, I wrote an op-ed, “We Must Fight Hate and Discrimination Together” that was published by the Tennessean the next day.

Working in partnership with local organizations, I led an effort to draft a pledge against Hate that secured over 650 signatures within 48 hours from diverse community leaders, many of whom followed up with me to discuss ways to work together long-term. By mid-week, The Tennessean transformed from a host for hate to an active ally, asking us to facilitate Diversity-and- Inclusion trainings for their staff. Gannett offered us $50,000 in free advertising space nationally to engage their readership through messages that would counter the fear-mongering efforts and inspire positive communal action instead around wearing masks, voting, and truth-and-reconciliation efforts. We are calling this campaign “Lift Up.”

Our project is uniquely positioned to address this urgent, historic moment of anxiety and possibility. We spent two years identifying, researching, and understanding the Hate-Industrial Complex. We have curated a multi-modal system to disrupt it and have tested the effectiveness of the values-based messaging that we use today.  Our methodology has already convinced several politically motivated high net-worth individuals to discontinue funding disinformation efforts. 

Our shared expertise in conflict resolution, creative advertising, social-change communications, and community organizing hones our abilities to redefine our systems. Over the past decade, our team members have conducted primary research on the drivers and motivations of structural inequity and hate, and I have applied my work as a mediator. As a team, we have designed a media campaign rooted in anti-racism, “structural competency,” and conflict resolution. We share resources and collaborate with a diverse grassroots network of partners across the country that spans the ideological and geographic spectrum. 

By building powerful momentum behind content and dialogue that engages our target audiences in positive peace-building ways, we will be able to successfully encourage social change from our polluted environment that divides Americans so easily into Red or Blue, Conservative or Liberal, Racialized or Racist, and other binaries into inclusive, shared action. Through this innovative system communities will engage again in productive, humanizing discourse.  As we reconcile our past and present societal differences, we are building an efficient system that facilitates consensus toward a social contract that serves our common future interests.  

Our work impacts humanity by transcending divides in America for the purposes of building consensus around a functional democracy. Our theory of change outlines how our activities lead towards our long-term outcomes of a new social contract and long-term positive engagements between disparate communities. Our intervention has four main activities/outputs: 1) extensive, multi-modal media campaigns informed by robust data to “hack” the well-funded algorithms that spread disinformation and that permeate conventional and social media, 2) targeting funders of disinformation campaigns to discontinue funding of divisive speech, 3) real-world mechanisms for dialogues about hot-button issues, and 4) a toolkit for constructive engagement and trust building, including for traditional media outlets.

Our activities share several key features that prior research and our pilot programs have demonstrated are essential: 1) they feature messengers who are relatable and that resonate with our target audiences; (2) they deliver a message that connects with these audiences; (3) the content is delivered at least seven times through media channels that are already trusted by our key audience; (4) the messaging is interactive, allowing recipients to respond and become further involved.

Through our activities, we build trust and work with target audiences to first and foremost see each other’s humanity during intensifying moments of crisis. Our positive digital media inspires empathy and local connections to bring us together around shared purpose. These initial steps then help us move towards committing to building shared futures and a new social contract. We can see this theory of change in action daily as we bridge divides and disrupt cycles of fear. During a recent discussion in Orange County, California, we met with eight moderately to extremely Islamophobic individuals. As we sat in the room together, we had a candid but slightly tense conversation about race, poverty, religion, and American democracy. By the end, a woman apologized to me and said, “When you first walked into this room, I feared you because you are a Muslim. But, now I fear for you.” That’s the kind of intervention we’re learning how to scale, one conversation at a time.

Currently, our project is serving approximately 1.75 million people as we disrupt disinformation campaigns, work with decision-makers, and increase positive engagement between marginalized communities and our target audiences equipping them with ways to resist fear-mongering efforts. This includes reaching people through content and language that empathetically moves them to humanize each other, even online, and to engage them in ways where they actively commit to building a future together. 

Within one year’s time, through our systematic approach to strategically placing content that serves as the catalyst for our depolarization work and our solutions oriented programming, we expect to serve at least 6 million people through a combination of online and offline engagements that we take to scale. 

Within five years’ time, we hope to reach and serve at least 35 million people in the United States; at least 4 million people in the UK through our partnership with the Good Society Forum; and at least 3 million people in other geographic locations by sharing our model, know-how and resources with strategic global partners. 

We recognize that in order to reach these goals, we need help with amplification, reach, and content. 

As our intensive integrated digital strategy enables online engagement and scalable face-to-face interactions, Millions has defined three main tactical goals for its programs: (1) Increase positive engagement between marginalized group member and other groups, through a range of grassroots and organizational activities; (2) Increase accurate media coverage about these marginalized groups that have been purposefully dehumanized and specifically targeted by Disinformation campaigns ; (3) Improve perceptions online of the marginalized group, through integrated media campaigns.

We create high quality content, reliable information, and credible voices for our constituency. Through paid promotion and advertisements, we place this content on news feeds, homepages, and streaming channels. This includes digital ads on online TV streaming platforms as well as digital media platforms that are popular among this demographic. In order to maximize impact, we continually test and iterate through our Listening to America initiative.

Knowing that the placement of video content on Social media posts has at least 48% more views, over the next year we plan to place 24 creative video ads to engage at least five million people across 250 markets nationwide. Simultaneously, we anticipate inspiring 10% of our viewers to join our Conversationalist program to engage in difficult conversations hosted online and offline at least three times a month. In addition, we expect to disrupt at least four well-funded Disinformation campaigns with global reach. Within five years, our plan is to multiply this by 10 and to be operational in at least 25 states across the US and five countries.  

Several factors have created obstacles for leveraging the resources and social connections that our work depends on for success.

First, one of our biggest challenges involves taking our work to a national scale without compromising the integrity of our vision and the passion that motivates us.

Second, as a Muslim-American woman raised in rural Tennessee, I personally have had to overcome a number of structural and cultural barriers to win the respect of traditionalists, establish political credibility, and create institutional platforms to realize this vision. Needing to constantly overcome a culture of suspicion because of my background has been exhausting. One potential funder told me recently, “While I would like to fund you, I simply cannot take the political risk of being associated with you because of your Muslim and Arab background. While it is not your fault, you are collateral damage.”

Third, while being headquartered in Tennessee is a productive context for the social issues our organization addresses and Nashville is a storytelling town, the local network here lacks the philanthropic base that organizations based in New York, Boston, or Silicon Valley can easily access. 

Finally, our success to date has been due to entrepreneurship and creativity. While our positive results have allowed us a seat at the table in relevant decision-making circles, at state, national, and international levels, the barriers to continuous entry are high. 

The Elevate Prize will help us overcome each of these barriers. By supporting our national scale-up, Elevate will allow us to deliver our program without compromising the integrity of our vision. The network and institutional support that comes with the prize will also help us access national-level donors and policymakers in ways that allow us to remain true to our mission. In addition, Elevate will help us build capacity around management and logistics.

We believe that the best way to overcome these barriers, especially the obstacles I have faced as a Muslim American woman, is by working with people to overcome their fears, building capacity, working closely with Nashville's world-famous storytellers and country-music industry, investing in human potential for positivity, focusing on what we can control, tenacity, and letting our work speak for itself. 

In addition, we have invested resources in developing a diverse working environment and secure culture that fosters innovation, kindness, respect, empathy and humor--keys to persevering through any obstacle course! Through camaraderie and positive attitudes, we mirror what we want our country and world to be and are motivated to bring our best to every day which helps us to see around corners, believe in our potential, work well with others, and to remain focused on what we are working towards. Noting the language The Elevate Prize uses to describe its own purpose, we feel we are speaking here to kindred spirits who also believe in the power of humanity. 

Because our mission is to transcend divides by reimagining our social systems, maintaining partners across a geographic and ideological range has always been a primary tenant of our organization. Some of our partners, like Integrity First for America, the Anti-Defamation League, Narrative 4, Project Over Zero, and Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative work on a national scale to counter hate and build unity. We collaborate to host webinars, share research, and produce content that inform our audiences about our partners’ work and explain how Millions of Conversations serves as a path to social cohesion as we work with these organizations to eliminate disinformation. 

As a national non-profit working in an increasingly divided society, we know that local organizations and leaders are equally crucial partners. These partners know how to best operate at the grassroots level. We have partnered with Tennessee’s American Muslim Advisory Council, the Boy Scouts of Humphreys County, the Murfreesboro Muslim Youth Organization, the Jewish Federation of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, ThinkTennessee, Faith & Culture Center, Equity Alliance, and the United Way of Humphreys County to provide toolkits, in-person engagement opportunities, and continued conversation with local civic and social engagement organizations. We are always expanding our presence across America's 3,142 counties. Notably, we are currently in conversation with an organization in Scott County to incorporate our research assets into their high school education curriculums, and we are working with the ADL Western Division to scale our internal dialogue toolkit for in-class activities for partners schools across the West Coast.

Millions of Conversations drives impact by transcending divides for communities in conflict through a multi-modal model. As our key beneficiaries include both people who are vulnerable to polarizing messages and/or dependent on a functioning community and government, we have found communities asking us for our services at the local, regional, national and global level. 

Depending on the community in need, we engage in a variety of forms to untangle the existing system contributing to divisions while simultaneously working toward restoring trust and agency to build new systems that meet needs of the community in real time. Our service offerings include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) Creative advertising that inspires empathy and humanization over fear of the "other"; (2) Market research, including insights into what key messengers and effective messages will engage  intended audiences; (3) Conflict Resolution Toolkit and Programs for communities wanting to learn how to resolve conflict by using truth & reconciliation best practices; (4) Anti-Racism Toolkit and Programs that includes a guide for how to reimagine existing institutions that need to transition away from toxic power dynamics and into healthier ones;  (5) Webinars and Written Briefings on how to frame and understand the Disinformation problem; and (6) access to strategic partner organizations using the same platform and methodology working towards the same outcome.

We provide these programs, products and services both in person and online. Our revenue model depends on the following: (1) US foundations; (2) US Corporations; and (3) Grassroots contributions. 

Millions of Conversations is a non-profit with an embedded social enterprise. Some of our funding come from providing services, such as trainings, to corporate clients. Most of our funding, however, comes from donations from individuals and organizations that share our mission. We’ve already demonstrated our ability to achieve financial sustainability through diverse revenue sources. Since our launch, we have raised over $1,500,000, which we have invested in pilots and research that tells us what works. This success demonstrates both the demand for our work and the willingness of a range of funders to support it. We are now ready to scale, amplify, and increase the speed of the system we've developed as this work is time sensitive and is dependent on our ability to build momentum. 

We are now at an inflection point, where this grant would allow us to scale our proven method nationally. As we scale and show results, we will also scale our proven fundraising capacity to secure both core and expanded program funding from a range of donors. 

Grants (12 month period)

1. 08/22/2019: Democracy Fund - $600,000
2. 01/22/2020: Stand Together -   $50,000
3. 6/25/2020:   Gannett-              $50,000- In-kind Advertising 

Grassroots Donations (12 month period)

7/1/2019-7/1/2020: $45,200 

Revenue sources (12 month period)

1. 10/15/2019: Millions-Belcourt- $2,500- Evening Conversation to Transcend Divides

2. 4/27/2020: Alliance Bernstein - $4,000 - Corporate training on depolarization 

Over the past three years, Millions has secured funding from diverse sources, including from the Democracy Fund, Hogan Lovells, Stand Together, and several high-net-worth individuals across the country, including in Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Michigan, Washington DC, Texas, and California. We have active grant proposals and are in conversation with foundations and corporations across the United States.

Corporate Trainings

In February 2020, Millions facilitated a corporate training for 150 executives of AllianceBernstein on their “Day of Understanding.” The training was a huge success - and the model is one we've been asked to use for  future corporate trainings. Last week, Millions partnered with ISPU and AMAC to bring journalism training to the Tennessean and potentially all Gannett newsrooms in the future. 

Last week, AllianceBernstein asked us to do similar training for one of their partner organizations, the Tennessee Diversity Consortium. 

In-Kind Donations 

• Gannett

• Facebook/Instagram

• Twitter

Grassroots

• We have active grassroots donations coming in on a monthly basis. 

Events

• Free Trip to Egypt Event 

• Monthly Conversations 

• Annual Fundraiser

Payroll

$300,000

Research & Programming (Includes "Listening to America Initiative")

$450,000

Advertising

$400,000

Content Creation 

$350,000

TOTAL ESTIMATED EXPENSES 2020

$1,500,000

The conversations and dialogue we have been able to inspire through Millions of Conversations have the power to open minds, build understanding, and foster inclusivity. We have documented the potential of our programs to strengthen communities and reduce stigmas, but our biggest challenge involves taking our work to a national scale without compromising the integrity of our vision and the passion that motivates us. The opportunity to benefit from the Elevate Prize would transform our impact by enabling us to learn how other leaders have navigated challenges such as scaling social change.

Through my work, I maintain an unwavering commitment to reduce social divides and a vision for how to build a stronger society. However, leadership requires more than vision: it requires managerial acumen, resilience, and a keen grip on logistics. These are some of the skills that I would love to develop through the MIT Elevate Prize network. I seek out opportunities to learn how others have managed large organizations committed to social change. I want to learn from experts who have endured attacks from those who wanted to undermine their work, how they ramped up fundraising activities, and how they learned to deputize tasks within their organizations. Finally, my work requires me to spend my days in spaces riddled with negativity and hate, and I too need to spend time in positive, strengthening environments that I know the MIT Elevate Prize will foster so that I can continue to be effective on the ground.

The challenge we are addressing isn’t caused by impersonal social or economic forces, but by a coordinated and well-funded movement we call the Hate-Industrial Complex. This movement spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year to divide and scare Americans and has access to the halls of power and savvy and sophisticated strategic advisers.

From our research, we know that we currently face an uneven playing field as hateful content outperforms empathetic content on social media. 

It is going to take a network of collaborative partners to build the momentum we need to realize our ambition--to dismantle and replace the Hate-Industrial Complex with an inclusive public square. 

The Elevate Prize will help us level the playing field by providing us with mentorship, partnerships, media experience, and resources that will allow us to “hack” the algorithms of the Hate-Industrial Complex and build a more inclusive society for everyone. 

We are excited for the opportunity to learn from partners working at the intersection of education, innovation, and digital security. Because Millions of Conversations works to heal the divides of social conflict in the United States, we would be honored to learn more from a current Solver, Beyond Conflict. As we seek to better understand how to stop the cycles of fear, hate, and violence, we must also better conceptualize the underpinnings of social conflict in our country. We would be thrilled to collaborate with Beyond Conflict to map conflict in the United States and provide a roadmap to rebuild our communities in a public square model. Much of our work will take place online as we reimagine a public square, and we are in need of experts who can help us hone our digital data and mapping abilities.  In addition, we also hope to learn from the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Because we work for social change in place of disinformation, we recognize that education – at every age and stage – is an essential aspect of our work. The MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab and the Harvard Kennedy School Social Innovation and Change Initiative would be ideal partners as we explore the applications of education and innovation to our current work.