July 15, 2026
This month’s Voice of Peace is Nealin Parker, executive director of Common Ground USA, which oversees all of Search’s US-based work.
The day that Donald Trump was elected as president for his second term, one of my children came home crying from school because one of her immigrant classmates feared they would soon be deported. That same day, another one of my children came home with a note from their kindergarten teacher stating that some of the students had chanted, “Kill Donald Trump.” I felt so powerfully that we were not only handing problems to our children, but also a terrible example of how to deal with them. While these snapshots may seem like contrasting moments, the truth is, they’re really one and the same. They were both shaped by our conflict politics.
I spent 15 years living and working in a number of countries experiencing conflict, some in open war. In each of these cases, I sought to be deeply respectful of the context and contribute to meaningful outcomes. But at the end of my placement, I returned home. Now, I work in the United States, and if peacebuilding doesn’t work here, I cannot leave. This is home. This is where I work and where I will raise my children. For the first time in my career, I and my family are part of the conflict for which I’m working to build peace.
What I do with Common Ground USA is more directly for the wellbeing of my own family, my own community and country. But it remains also for the wellbeing of the world. The US has an outsized influence on the world, and whether or not it should be that way, it is. I used to feel like I needed to work in the places most impacted by war in order to make the greatest difference. But I’ve come to see that the peacebuilding work I do domestically is just as vital. If Americans aren’t in conflict with one another, then we can make more considered and thoughtful decisions about our role in the world—and about the people who are and have been impacted by our decisions. If we get our community right, that contributes to getting our country right. If we get our country right, that contributes to making the world a better place.
We live in a country with an opportunity for impact globally that is rare in history and in the world. And so the question is, what am I going to do with it? The United States is still the most powerful country in the world. And, unlike everywhere else I’ve worked internationally, that means there is no other country, no peacekeeping mission waiting in the wings outside of our conflict dynamics who can shut it down. We have to generate the will to end our own toxic politics from within. We have a powerful set of ideals as assets to help guide what that looks like. In countless ways we’ve not lived up to those ideals, but having lived in places that did not have any legal guarantees or aspirations for equality, I know just how powerful it is that these ideals exist. For me, patriotism—love for my country—means holding the US accountable to its ideals.
That work begins with our team. We are diverse by design, representing various identities and differences. We do not ask one another to leave those identities at home. We do ask that everyone hold to our collective North Star: that our problems are best and more enduringly served when we work together across our differences. The most important shared identity we bring is that we believe it’s possible to resolve our problems in ways that are good for everyone. Of all our team’s incredible work, perhaps our greatest contribution is that in today’s conflicted America, we show that it is possible to do audacious things with big impact across our differences—and that in fact we might be stronger because of them.
My vision for the next 250 years of the United States lives within the DNA of that story.
