The Des Moines Civil & Human Rights Commission is a city government department that enforces illegal discrimination laws in the City of Des Moines with the goal of advancing justice, promoting equality, and protecting the human rights of all Des Moines residents, workers, and visitors through discrimination investigations, community education and outreach, and the proposal of policies for a more equitable city.

Since 2015, under the tenure and leadership of Director Joshua V. Barr, the Commission has expanded its community outreach leading to an increase in the number of complaints filed in the office by 170% and the number of probable cause discrimination cases by 500%. In 2017, recognizing that the goal should be to address systemic issues in order to prevent and reduce individual discrimination, the Commission decided to engage in community dialogues at two levels: 1) at an individual, one-on-one level with the purpose of changing hearts and minds and 2) at collective level in larger group settings to identify larger community issues that require policy change. The results were the Breaking Bread, Building Bridges Project and the Bridging the Gap Initiative.

The Bridging the Gap initiative consisted of community-wide deliberative dialogues to discuss what could be done to increase opportunity and make a safe, more just community for all. These conversations involved persons from throughout the community from elected/appointed officials in local and state government, to police officers, to everyday working adults and youths. Through the Bridging the Gap project, the Commission were able to create new city policies including: protected class status for persons with government benefits to obtain housing; protecting the right of residents to be free from inquiry about immigration status from local law enforcement; creation of a grant program from the city to local organizations that work to increase socio-economic opportunity for residents and small businesses; and developing a cultural competency training program for all city employees. 12 new initiatives including an equitable workforce policy and community response team are presently in the works.

The commission enlisted a local Iowa production company Digital Matters to help document the conversations create a document about the project. On April 30, 2020, the Commission debuted the documentary of the project on both Facebook and YouTube. The Breaking Bread, Building Bridges documentary has been viewed over 17,000 times.

As the climate of both the country and city grew increasingly polarizing, the Commission was challenged to find ways to help the community to connect and breakthrough differences that prevent them sitting down and discussing matters at the table. The Breaking Bread, Building Bridges project was conceived to see what happens when people take the time to converse with one another despite their differences over one commonality all human beings share, the need to eat. Nearly 200 people registered to be a part of the project and many interviews took place before 40 persons were selected to participate.

Those 40 persons were matched up with another participant based on their differences rather than similarities. The project was done in five parts over the course of few months where the participants first had discussion-guided group dinners with their partners, eventually moving on to having casual dinners in the homes of their project partners where they rotated to the other partner’s home a few weeks later. The project ended with a final group dinner to discuss what the participants had learned about their partners but more importantly themselves.