Colleagues of the Week: Lisa Forbes and Bill Howe

Lisa Forbes and Bill Howe
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Lisa Forbes leans Red but she is the champion of “The Other.” She wants everyone to hear the voices of the many who declare themselves neither Red nor Blue. That’s just one theme she’s passionate about. As one of Colorado’s three state coordinators, she knows there is plenty for Braver Angels to do.

So too does her co-coordinator Bill Howe. Together with Denice Davis, formerly the state’s only coordinator, Bill and Lisa have a laundry list of initiatives where they hope – expect – to see progress over the next year.

In the Denver metropolitan area, there’s a dynamic alliance that boasts 40 or so active Braver Angels members. But it’s Colorado’s only alliance. “We’re working on reaching out to people and groups statewide. It’s been fun meeting people across Colorado, albeit virtually,” says Bill. “We’ve found interest in the Colorado Springs area, Aspen, Northern Colorado, and on the western slope.” The Denver Alliance, where Bill and Lisa are members of the executive committee, is planning an event for early next year where the whole state will be invited to participate.

Lisa would like to see the Denver alliance – and perhaps other future alliances in the state – experiment with Town Halls. That event format is one that people are familiar with and comfortable with, she believes. “Participants can say anonymously what they think,” she says, “and they don’t have to join anything or be a member of anything.”

She agrees with others in the organization who maintain that topics close to home have more resonance and a stronger pull for Braver Angels members who participate only occasionally or for others who have not yet found good reasons to join the organization. “In Denver, homelessness is a tremendous topic,” she observes. “It’s what I see when I step out of my front door. How can Braver Angels help with that issue?”

Above all, Bill, Lisa, and Denice really want to bring in more members. Complementing Lisa’s perspective on Town Halls, Bill appreciates that Braver Angels’ alliances have the latitude to come up with their own workshops; early on, as a new member of the Denver Alliance, he proposed and helped organize a discussion about press freedom based on the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Bill believes that the Common Ground virtual workshop – an event format he had participated in in Oregon – has value for all kinds of communities across Colorado. He is also excited about the Denver Alliance’s plans to push for more one-on-one interactions. He has been involved with one-on-one discussions via Zoom and in person and has found those online events to be valuable extensions of what he has learned in Braver Angels workshops.       

Like Lisa, Bill leans Red, and like her, he contributes to Braver Angels beyond state lines. Retired now, he has been trained as a Zoom Event Manager and has assisted with workshops in Colorado and other states. He was attracted to Braver Angels after he experienced polarization in his own family following the 2016 US Presidential election.

For her part, Lisa wants to fit other Braver Angels activities around her high-pressure day job as a paralegal and law-firm administrator. “I would like to finish the moderator training – maybe become a moderator,” she says. She’s active with the Angels of Color Caucus and considers it something of a mission to demonstrate that “people like me really exist,” as she puts it. By that she means helping Americans – notably White, liberal Americans – to see that not all African-Americans are reflexively Blue or somehow all of one mind. “We need to stop letting people think they know everything about other people,” she says.

For helping with that objective alone, Braver Angels is the perfect vehicle for Lisa and many like her. Indeed, after the anxieties of the 2016 election, she had actively sought out a non-partisan group because she felt that other organizations that made much of being impartial were not especially amenable to those like her who leaned Red. “I was looking for somewhere where I could express my conservative opinions, but it was being conflated with Trumpism,” she recalls. “I needed to be identified as separate from that.”

Her first Red/Blue workshop – at the invitation of Denice Davis – proved to her that with Braver Angels, you “don’t have to pretend to not have an opinion,” as she puts it. Not long after, Denice, Blue, invited Lisa to be the Red co-coordinator for Colorado.

Which brings us back to Lisa’s defense of Others – their views and their participation. She’s not the first person to observe that more and more Americans are sick of the nation’s two-party system and are very open to and interested in ideas about a third party.” She cites the Forward Party initiative led by Andrew Yang, the former US Presidential candidate, that is getting a lot more attention. “I have a lot of conversations about that,” she says.

And how might such ideas relate to Braver Angels’ work? Lisa knows that Braver Angels clearly welcomes “Others” and has always done so, but she contends there is more to be done on that front. “If there’s a perception that we lean Blue or that we’re trying to get more Reds, then we’re not talking to the third of the population that don’t want to be affiliated with either party,” she says.

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