Essential Partners

Founded in 1989, Essential Partners helps people build relationships across differences to address their communities’ most pressing challenges.

Our proven approach helps people live, work, worship, and learn better together. Through richer, healthier, more inclusive dialogue, people strengthen relationships while gaining new insight into themselves and each other as well as the problems they face together. Since our founding in 1989, we have collaborated with a diverse array of partners, including more than

• 350 college campuses
• 140 workplaces and organizations
• 400 local communities
• 100 secondary schools

We have partnered with people across all 50 U.S. States plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico as well as 29 other countries, impacting the lives of more than 500,000 people each year.

At EP, we believe that the most urgent problems can only be addressed by people who live and work together every day. The strength of relationships rooted in trust and mutual understanding empowers people to address the most pressing challenges—from partisan polarization and political dysfunction to interfaith conflicts and abortion access—without compromising their deepest values or identities. We envision is a world of thriving communities strengthened by difference, connected by trust.