Last week I wrote about a seed from Tanzania. I want to stay with the same theme, a million small beginnings. Change often starts in ways that look modest, overlooked, almost ordinary. It is rarely rocket science. Mbayani in Tanzania collects rainwater using methods that have been around for centuries. And here at home, I want to share another kind of “solution.” One that begins not with technology, but with people talking to people.
“It is people not like us who make us grow.” That line from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has stayed with me. It names something we often forget in our northern European lives, where bubbles and comfort zones keep us apart. We live in parallel worlds: villa owners and tenants in the suburbs, immigrants and long-established Stockholmers, young and old, professionals and unemployed. Most of the time we speak only within our own circles. But what if real change begins when those circles overlap?
More than ten years ago, a friend and former colleague of mine, Karin Bruce, decided to test that idea. She had noticed that people working in the same city sometimes only met for the first time when they came to our gatherings in Tällberg, a small village three hours north of Stockholm (Karin and I both helped design and run the Tällberg Forums). “Why did they have to travel all the way here to connect with each other?” she asked. What if there could be something in the city itself that invited such meetings, conversations that matter, among people who would otherwise never meet?
LärOlika was born from that question in 2014, and it is still here. Despite the pandemic, when physical gatherings were impossible, and despite today’s growing polarization and waning interest in dialogue, it continues.
So what is LärOlika? (The name is a play on words: lärorika in Swedish means instructive or educational, and olika means different. Put together, you get Lär-Olika.) It is a program that brings together people who only have one thing in common: they live and work in the same city. A handful of sessions invite them to meet, talk, and listen through different exercises, on different themes, and in different places. At its heart is a simple idea: bring people together across divides and let them talk. No lectures, no pre-set outcomes. Just conversations where the participants themselves create the content.
The people are the key. Each program is designed for maximum variety: hospital managers and retired bankers, marketing directors and unemployed youth, imams and priests, politicians and young activists. Teenagers and pensioners. People at home in boardrooms or in classrooms, behind the wheel of a bus or in charge of a business. Circles that almost never overlap, except perhaps by accident in a subway car or a hospital waiting room. And this mix does not happen by itself. A lesson from the past decade is that it takes real work to achieve this level of diversity. Participants have to be found, invited, convinced.
The places matter too. Each group meets in different parts of the city. One session might be hosted in a law firm, another in a youth club, another in a museum, in a theatre rehearsal space or a Sikh temple. The idea is that most of the group always finds themselves outside their usual ground. Many participants have said that the simple act of walking into an unfamiliar neighborhood or building was already part of the learning. Some had lived their whole lives in Stockholm but never set foot in a Community Center in a suburb, or inside the headquarters of Swedbank. (Programs have also taken place in Göteborg and a few other Swedish cities.)
And then there is the process. Each gathering has a frame, but not a script. Small groups. Guiding questions. Exercises that invite listening, curiosity, or creativity. Nine times out of ten the content comes from the participants themselves. The outcomes are unpredictable, and that is exactly the point.
I have been lucky to play a part in this adventure. Sometimes co-facilitating, sometimes (like now) as board member of the non-profit association that carries the work, sometimes simply cheering from the sidelines. And always a fan, telling people about its quiet magic. Because I have seen it work.
I remember one evening when a young man from the suburb of Tensta found himself in a deep conversation with an older woman about life in Stockholm in the 1960s. He had never heard stories like that before, of a city without today’s cars, with a different rhythm, different struggles. She had never listened to someone describe what it meant to grow up in an immigrant-dense suburb, dealing with stereotypes and prejudices every day. By the end of the conversation, both were changed.
Other evenings stay with me too. I remember a conversation about faith with a woman from Somalia, wearing a hijab. She vividly described the challenges she had faced as obstacles placed on her path by God, and that of course He knew she would overcome them, otherwise why would He have put them there? Or the young man who described how he embarked on the long and dangerous journey from the bombs of Damascus, across borders, on rubber boats over the Mediterranean from Turkey to Greece, through Europe to Sweden. He spent years in the hands of migration authorities before finally getting a job, a home, and a family in Stockholm. To hear that story directly, in his voice, is something you carry differently than when reading about “the refugee crisis” in the media.
Moments like these don’t make headlines, but they are seeds. They slowly shift how people see each other, and how they see their own city.
And here lies the deeper meaning. It’s not about “us” and “them”. Everyone needs integration; middle-class Swedes as much as refugees from Afghanistan. Entrepreneurs as much as pensioners. Each of us lives inside partial truths, and we need encounters that unsettle us, that broaden the frame. In a time when polarization and fragmentation are tearing at our social fabric, these meetings are not luxuries, they are necessary seeds of resilience. A community, a city, even a society where such conversations can occur is a society with roots deep enough to weather the storms ahead. That is where the roots of the future take hold.
So let me return to the theme: a million small beginnings. Change rarely comes from parliaments or boardrooms. It begins when two strangers sit down to talk and really listen. As Paul Hawken once said, change often happens when “indeterminate actors connect in chance meetings with a sudden shared purpose to do something.” These beginnings may look fragile or easy to miss, yet together they shape the ground of our shared future. And to me, they often carry more promise than the grand designs we keep being offered. I wonder what small beginnings you have seen or been part of — what seeds of connection, resilience, or change might you share?
❤️