An evening with the UNIFIERS℠
Sophie Beren of The Conversationalist describes her mission to bring Gen Z leaders together over dinner. Last week, she did so with young Democrats, Republicans (and independents) in Washington, D.C.
Last fall, I had the opportunity to attend a Friday night dinner hosted by Sophie Beren, a self-described “unifier” and the founder the CEO of The Conversationalist, a non-partisan Gen Z focused platform and community looking to bring young people together by breaking down echo chambers online and IRL.
Sophie’s been hosting what she calls “UNIFIERS℠” dinners since last summer — meant to bring young people of all backgrounds together over a shared dinner experience to connect leaders from all walks of life. It comes at a time when young people are looking for opportunities to gather in person, putting their phones down and connecting over a shared face-to-face experience. She’s hosted the first few dinners on Friday nights and integrated her own personal experience with Shabbat to ground the evening as a way to disconnect from the outside world and make way for these important connections and conversations.
Since then, I’ve been following along on social media as Sophie invites young leaders from various industries and backgrounds to join her on Friday evenings. I was especially struck last week, when she hosted an event in D.C. with high profile Gen Z personalities across the political spectrum, including those such as the progressive founder of left-leaning Gen Z for Change, Aidan Kohn Murphy and right-leaning content creator and host of ‘The Isabel Brown’ show, Isabel Brown (both pictured hugging in the photo below).
Eager to learn more about her most recent convening, I reached out to Sophie. Here’s our conversation, edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
You’ve been holding these UNIFIERS℠ dinners for a bit (I’ve had the opportunity to attend one myself!)… What’s the impetus/mission behind them?
SB: Our mission at The Conversationalist has and will always be to unify the world. Since starting the platform five years ago, we have evolved time and time again to meet the present moment. We believe that if we can empower young people to open their echo chambers and build lasting relationships across difference, we can slowly find our way back to one another. Our goal with our UNIFIERS Dinner Series is to create a place where genuine IRL conversations can happen between the most prominent voices in our generation.
Unifying is a universal process and is something we believe should be a way of life. We want to leave our guests feeling that our mission resonates with them and that they have tangible skills to bring back to their own communities.
And hey, as a self identified foodie, I like to think that there’s no better way to break your echo chamber than by breaking bread, and even better with someone different from you.
How do you typically decide who’s in the room?
SB: Right now, we aim to invite our generation’s most prominent figures and leaders into the room. We empower young leaders with powerful voices in their communities and professions to spread our mission of bridge-building and coexistence in their circles and lines of work. When deciding who to bring around the table, we seek a mixture of backgrounds, ideologies, races, religions, cultures, and career trajectories - the things that make up your lived experience and shape your worldview. Our role as a brand is to present each guest with multiple echo-chamber-breaking opportunities and we can’t do this without ensuring that we include guests around the table from all walks of life.
We base our dinners around a common thread shared between the guests, a partner organization’s mission, or a pressing issue we want to unify around. So far, I’ve been lucky to host an interfaith focused dinner with Ziad Ahmed, a media and journalism dinner with Reed Alexander, and a creatives dinner with Aija Mayrock.
Our hope is that someday, as we continue to grow, everyone who wants to attend a dinner will be able to. We have an interest form where people can share more about who they are to be considered for a future gathering.
What’s the format of the evening?
I can't give too much away! The magic is in the room and we like to preserve as much of it as possible, so everyone can enter the room with little to no preconceived notions. We have a very intentional format to guide our guests through the evening.
We utilize our own SUN Philosophy to lead guests through a unifying journey and help them uncover common ground. SUN is a three-step method that empowers people to broach the hard conversations, overcome divides, and identify what is needed to take action and move forward - long after they leave the dinner table.
One more thing I can share is that we do not reveal the guest list ahead of time. Our reason for doing so was perfectly captured by one of our guests, who shared the following: ‘It was amazing to go into it not knowing who everyone was, not having any preconceived ideas about people, and learning in real time what they are passionate about and what makes them tick.’
You held a big one in Washington, D.C. last Friday, and I was struck by the mix of people and ideology in the room. How did that come together?
Something I’m so proud of is the way that we have been able to foster relationships with leaders all across the political spectrum since I founded The Conversationalist.
Since the election, I feel like you can cut our generation’s tension with a knife. I’ve been feeling the frustration rise, witnessing people bow out of conversations altogether or simply raising the volume of their voices, which tunes out any possibility for constructive dialogue. There is a lot of hurt right now, and rightfully so, and yet, there’s a deep appetite for human connection.
“Since the election, I feel like you can cut our generation’s tension with a knife. I’ve been feeling the frustration rise, witnessing people bow out of conversations altogether or simply raising the volume of their voices, which tunes out any possibility for constructive dialogue. There is a lot of hurt right now, and rightfully so, and yet, there’s a deep appetite for human connection.”
I decided to host our UNIFIERS dinner in D.C. to meet the present moment. We specifically gathered young leaders from across the political spectrum. It might seem surprising to some that there’s an appetite for a dinner like this among some of our generation’s strongest voices on the left and right, but many of them are people who have been supportive of our movement for years. It came together on short notice, but stemmed from an insatiable urge I had to host this gathering between young political leaders as quickly as possible. I was so pleasantly surprised by how many immediate RSVPs I got. Our generation feels this urge to gather, too, whether we like to admit it out loud or not.
I’ve found that we’ve become even more siloed and that we’re missing a space that resembles a ‘third place.’ This is a term I learned in sociology that refers to a social environment that’s separate from the two usual ones we all inhabit: the workplace and the home. If those two environments are already echo chambers, and our online algorithms continue to push us apart, then we have to be the ones to create the ‘third places’ to resemble the world we want to inhabit.
“Our generation feels this urge to gather, too, whether we like to admit it out loud or not. I’ve found that we’ve become even more siloed and that we’re missing a space that resembles a ‘third place.’”
This is why I created our UNIFIERS dinner series. It is a ‘third place’ for engaging in real conversation, while also allowing our guests to show up fully as ourselves. It’s a space to not only be heard, but to also hear others. Being a unifier doesn’t mean you have to sit somewhere in the middle or shy away from your opinions, but rather to stand firmly in who you are, while choosing to turn towards the person across from you instead of away. This celebration of our shared humanity is what we need most, especially when it feels like everything and everyone else is at odds.
I know that our generation will be the one to bring the world back together. Sometimes we just need a reminder (and some food) to weather the storm, together.
What was the conversation like?
Before our guests arrive, they have one task at hand — focus on who you are, not what you do. Because of this intention, our attendees know that this is not your average dinner or a networking opportunity. We ‘hold their hands’ and immediately guide them to dig beneath the surface. The conversations quickly and progressively get deeper, because guests aren’t ‘allowed’ to talk about work. We guide the evening with specific prompts like ‘when was the last time you had to admit you were wrong about something?’ and ‘have you ever lost a friend or a relationship because of your views?’ And what dinner party would be complete without a fun ice breaker?
I hope our guests can see first-hand that our overall goal is to create an environment where unifying is possible, when we can have open and honest conversations. We know that this leads to common ground.
Since we started this series, 98% of attendees felt they found common ground with someone outside of their echo chamber and 93.9% discovered they had more in common with people outside of their echo chambers than they would have thought.
This past Friday, one guest reflected that ‘more unites us than divides us and we’re more than our jobs.’ This is music to our ears — if we can get our generation to celebrate this and lean into who we are, we will be able to start solving some of the greatest issues of our time.
Did the attendees agree to disagree? Or were controversial topics avoided altogether?
In D.C,, when your ideological views are probably more likely to be tied to your professional life than in other cities, this definitely shaped the conversation a bit. However, we talked about some of the most important issues that our country - and certainly our generation - are grappling with, from abortion to democracy.
I’ll say this: one guest said, ‘I sat across from someone who, when we first met said, ‘We won’t be friends if you google me.’ By the end of the night we were laughing and commiserating. The next morning, they requested to follow me. We have a fondness for one another that wouldn’t be apparent based on who we’ve worked for or what we’ve done professionally.’ Another guest said ‘I was incredibly blown away by the conversations we had. It's reflective of the common ground that exists on most social issues, though we often may not realize it,’ and another said that they left knowing ‘there’s value in learning from people who you may disagree with.’
“I sat across from someone who, when we first met said, ‘We won’t be friends if you google me.’ By the end of the night we were laughing and commiserating. The next morning, they requested to follow me.”
Of course attendees will agree to disagree on a range of issues, but that isn’t our goal. Our series allows guests to take their first crucial steps in unifying, which start with seeing and understanding each other. Our dinner does just that.
Noteworthy reads
What Is Revenge Quitting? Gen Z Driving New Career Trend, Marni Rose McFall for Newsweek
Millennials and Gen Z Are Fighting Again. This Time About Gym Clothes., Madison Malone Kircher, The New York Times
Millennials had it bad, but Gen Z’s outlook is impossibly bleak, Katie Morley for The Telegraph
The word this brought to mind was, "Hope"