Bright Ambassadors

The Bright Ambassadors program leverages volunteerism, community service, and inter-community interactions to encourage understanding, civil discourse, and interrelationships and social cohesion across diverse people and communities.  Bright Ambassadors complements the 360 Degree Storytelling series by providing real life interactions that reinforce the positive representation in the storytelling series.

Data shows that unconscious negative bias toward a particular group can be reduced through:

• Increased positive contacts and interactions with members of stereotyped groups.
• Counter-stereotyping, where individuals are exposed to information that is the opposite of the stereotypes they have about a group.
• Counter-stereotypic imaging, where a person relies on an opposite image of a stereotyped group to challenge their biases and biased interactions.

Through increased positive contacts and interactions, counter-stereotyping, and counter-stereotypic imaging, over time people interact with members of different groups based on their individuality rather than their membership in the stereotyped group.

Bright Ambassadors – General Information

 The Bright Ambassadors Program connects people from different groups that are unlikely to interact with each other and more likely to hold negative stereotypes about each other. Groups may be based on racial and ethnic, socioeconomic, geographic diversity or some combination of these and other types of diversity. Whether bringing together groups from marginalized rural communities and underserved urban areas for a community services event, having black church members assist with cleanup in a predominantly white community after a natural disaster, or simply bringing together communities that are on the opposite sides of the tracks for a game of kickball, Bright Amassadors provides opportunities for communities to be in service to each other and to come together around common causes and gatherings. The goal of these interactions is to increase positive contacts and provide real-life interactions that support counter-stereotyping and counter-stereotypic imaging.

Examples of programming includes:

• Post disaster community rebuilding and support.
• Volunteer support for daily activities.
• Summer camps and after school activities that bring volunteers from one community to another.
• Intramural and recreational events.
• Shared days of service.

These events and activities generate positive interactions, build intercommunity relationships, and create opportunites for Americans to see and lean into the values and experiences they have in common over focusing on their differences. Indeed, we’ve found that when groups spend time together, they actually learn that perceived differences are untrue!