How do you actually change hearts and minds?

This will be an author lead discussion about how to engage our neighbors in the polarizing social issues America faces today.

Weather permitting this will be an outdoor garden gathering. I will have some light snacks and drinks available.

Garrett Bucks grew up in Jefferson County and Missoula, Montana. For most of his professional career, he followed a path familiar to many social-justice-inclined White people. He taught on the Navajo Nation and in Chicago. He worked at large nonprofits. Eventually, though, he began questioning why the default assumption amongst do-goodery white people is that “the work” is always in other peoples’ communities. Those questions snowballed into others— about white-saviorism and the hunt for individual absolution— which led to his current life as the founding organizer of The Barnraisers Project, which helps majority-White communities play their part in broader efforts to build a better world, and as a writer (of his popular newsletter The White Pages and his forthcoming book, Race of Strangers). He currently lives in Milwaukee, WI with his wife and two kids.

While in Butte, Garrett will be working on his upcoming book, Race of Strangers (which will be released in 2023 by Simon and Schuster). Race of Strangers is both a personal and collective story— a recounting of Garrett’s failed attempt to prove his social justice bonafides by distancing himself both from other White people generally and the communities that raised him, as well as the larger story of how Whiteness itself is defined by distance and disconnection. It is also a hopeful story about what lies on the other side of disconnection, of the promise and potential of building and sustaining White communities that are honest about race and our role in the world.