Building Bridges Across the Americas

The Inaugural event of the Building Bridges Initiative brought together 130 students who joined from 58 different universities in 21 countries. They met in regional groups many times during January and February of 2022 in Canada/USA, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, Brazil, and other parts of South America. We challenged students to share with each other their personal experiences with migration and to discuss the factors pushing people to move away, pulling people in certain directions, and what is the experience of the migrant and community. The students shared and listened, discussing their diverse experiences with unemployment, violence, climate disasters, social stigma, and more. 

Each group selected two students to represent them in a dialogue with Pope Francis, which took place in February 2022. This was the first such event, livestreamed with direct dialogue and engagement between the Pope and students with a shared voice across such a broad region of the world. In an extraordinary set of conversations, the Holy Father listened carefully, for example, to a young woman joining from her dormitory in the USA, a young man at his university in Brazil, and another from a school in Mexico. He spoke with 16 students in total, calling them by name and affirming their experiences while sharing his own. Pope Francis encouraged them to be persistent, to exercise their creativity and strength and agency.