When Strangers Become Neighbors

By Dr. Dane White, Director of Education

When Strangers Become Neighbors
By Dr. Dane White, Director of Education

Like a lot of soccer fans, I have been glued to this Men’s World Cup. I was fortunate to make it to one match in person and have watched many others on the screen, and between those experiences and the flood of stories on social media, I keep coming away with something I did not quite expect: hope. I recognize that hope is the kind of word that tends to show up on motivational posters and then disappear the moment things get hard, so I want to be specific about what I mean. I’m not talking about the cautious, provisional kind. I’m talking about the kind that makes you wonder why you ever stopped expecting it. Because what has been happening in the stands, in the streets, and in small US towns that most of the world had never heard of is something worth paying close attention to, regardless of where you fall on the soccer fandom spectrum. These past few weeks have offered a masterclass in what it looks like when community actually forms across difference.

Lawrence, Kansas, and What Hospitality Actually Looks Like
The story of Lawrence, Kansas, and the Algerian national team is the most vivid illustration I have seen in years of what genuine community building looks like when people actually commit to it. When FIFA assigned Algeria to Lawrence as its base camp, I assume many people in Lawrence probably could not have told you much about Algeria, and most Algerians had never heard of Lawrence. That gap closed faster than anyone anticipated.

Local artist Stan Herd created a massive Algerian flag on the University of Kansas grounds. About 800 people turned out to see it unveiled. Massachusetts Street, the main drag downtown, was filled with green jerseys and Algerian flags hanging from shop awnings. Locals who had never watched a soccer match in their lives were buying merchandise and learning chants. When Algeria scored a winning goal in the 82nd minute to beat Jordan, there were celebrations in Algiers, and there were celebrations in Lawrence. Herd described what he witnessed at the unveiling this way: “It wasn’t the flag, it wasn’t the art, it was the embrace of the community.”

The story went international. Lawrence became, according to an Algerian ambassador, the talk of the Algerian internet. The BBC covered it. The New York Times covered it. Algerian brothers traveled back to Lawrence specifically to say thank you after watching the city’s welcome go viral. One of them put it simply: “A lot of people don’t even know Algeria exists. We had never heard of Lawrence until the Algerian team came here. The people were very, very welcoming, and they adopted the Algerian team.” And Lawrence was not alone. Boston hosted the Scottish Tartan Army with matching enthusiasm. Haiti and Scotland fans danced together in the streets before their match. In Dallas, Croatia got a downtown welcome parade. Dr. Rachel Fu, who studies tourism and hospitality at the University of Florida, observed what researchers have long found to be true: people remember people more than places. A visitor will forget the final score, she noted, but will remember the stranger who said, “Welcome to the USA.”

What strikes me most about Lawrence, in particular, is that they did not do anything complicated. They made room. They learned some names, and they showed up. In doing so, they built something real with people they had never met, across a divide of language, culture, and geography that, a month ago, felt like it might be entirely unbridgeable. As students of leadership, it is worth understanding this phenomenon as more than a feel-good sports story.

The Research on Building Across Difference
Our fellows spend time during their international seminar learning what it means to be both a host and a guest, and there is a direct line between that curriculum and what has unfolded at this World Cup. The host-guest relationship is not a modern invention. The ancient Greeks called it xenia, understood as a sacred obligation: the host provides welcome and protection without asking the guest’s name first, and the guest reciprocates with respect and gratitude. What that tradition understood, and what Lawrence demonstrated, is that the host-guest relationship is a social phenomenon that generates genuine connection between strangers. Researchers today have a name for what that kind of welcome produces: bridging social capital, the connections that link people across divides of background, culture, and class (Causevic & Lynch, 2009).

Robert Putnam’s research distinguishes between bonding capital, the close ties within a group, and bridging capital, the connections that form across groups. Bonding capital is good for “getting by,” but bridging capital is what communities need to “get ahead” and to solve problems that no single group can solve alone (Putnam, 2000). Generous hosts initiate it.

The research on coalition building across differences reinforces why that decision matters. Researchers at UMass Amherst have found that diverse coalitions are often more effective than homogeneous ones, but only when relationships are genuinely at the core of how the coalition operates. As one researcher put it: “Nurturing relationships with an eye towards different forms of diversity is often key to doing our best work together” (Pachucki et al., 2017). The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Leadership Network, which has studied leading across difference for years, frames the central skill as finding common ground while still seeing difference clearly, rather than pretending the difference does not exist. The common ground in Lawrence was a soccer team and a street. It turned out to be enough.

What Do We Do With This?
I want to be direct about what I think this means for California agriculture, where building coalitions across difference is the actual work, and where community building is a renewed focus of our program, front and center at our Chico Year 1 seminar right now.

First: identify who is not in the room, and ask why not. The research on coalition building is unambiguous that the absence of certain voices is not a neutral condition. It is the result of decisions, some deliberate and some not, about whose presence was worth pursuing. Lawrence did not wait for the Algerian community to make the first move. The city extended an invitation before anyone was required to do so. Building across difference begins with that same honest look at who your community actually includes and who it has left out by default (Anguelovski, 2015).

Second: take the host role seriously as a leadership obligation. If you are convening a group, you are a host, and how you hold that role determines whether people with different backgrounds and less institutional power feel safe enough to contribute honestly. Research on diverse coalitions consistently finds that communication across sectors is the variable that most determines whether diversity strengthens or undermines a group’s effectiveness (Towe et al., 2017). Good hosts create conditions for honest communication. They make it easier for guests to bring what they actually know, rather than what they think the host wants to hear.

Third: low-stakes interactions are not low-value. Putnam’s work on bridging social capital notes that it often begins with what he calls thin trust, generated by brief, repeated, genuine interactions between people who are different from each other. Nobody in Lawrence designed an interfaith dialogue program. They went downtown and cheered for a soccer team. The relationship followed. In your organization or community, the equivalent is creating shared experiences that are genuinely enjoyable and low-pressure before you need people to collaborate on something hard. The match comes before the committee meeting.

Fourth: practice being a learner in someone else’s context. The guest role is as important as the host role, and it is one our fellows practice deliberately. Going somewhere unfamiliar with genuine curiosity rather than judgment, and being willing to follow the local customs before importing your own, is a leadership skill that transfers directly to cross-cultural coalition work. The Algerian brothers who flew back to Lawrence to say thank you were modeling exactly what a gracious guest does. The relationship became mutual. That is always the goal.

The United States at 250
The United States has always carried a promise: that there is room here for people from everywhere, that a stranger can be welcomed, that a North African soccer team can spend a few weeks in Kansas and feel like they have come home. That promise has always been imperfectly kept. But the capacity is real, and this World Cup has put it on display in ways that have moved people all over the world.
What Lawrence built, and what Boston and Dallas and so many other cities have been building all month, is not the product of formal programs or organized initiatives. It is the product of individual people deciding, in the moment, to extend themselves toward someone they did not know. That choice, made consistently and at scale, is what community actually looks like. And it is available to all of us, in every context we work in.

The leaders who will shape California agriculture over the next twenty years are going to need exactly this capacity. The table is large, the voices are many, and the work of finding common ground across genuine difference is not optional. It is the job. What this World Cup has reminded me is that human beings are remarkably good at it, when someone decides to go first. Lawrence, Kansas did not know Algeria a month ago. Look at them now.

In the 250th year of this country, I find myself optimistic, about what we are capable of as a nation and as an industry. The evidence is right there on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence. Our best years are not behind us. They are being built, one relationship at a time, by people willing to make room for someone they have not yet met.

References
Anguelovski, I. (2015). Tactical developments and community coalitions in urban environmental justice movements. Urban Affairs Review, 51(2), 218–260.

Causevic, S., & Lynch, P. A. (2009). Hospitality as a human phenomenon: Host–guest relationships in a post-conflict setting. Tourism and Hospitality Planning and Development, 6(2), 121–132.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.

Pachucki, M., & colleagues. (2017). Diverse voices can make for more effective community coalitions. UMass Amherst research summary.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster.

Towe, C. L., et al. (2017). Effects of sectoral diversity on community coalition processes and outcomes. PMC/National Cancer Institute research.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network. (2025). Leading across differences. WKKF Community Leadership Network.