Soon after the president was inaugurated, an organizer from North Carolina found a flyer and shared it with me. It offered support to people struggling with addiction: “We care about you. Let’s work together to stop this epidemic.” The sponsoring organization? The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. I wish this was an aberration, but unfortunately it’s becoming more and more common.

Roughly speaking, we encounter three broad categories of about equal size when we’re door-knocking. The first is the group of people who are with us on economic, racial and gender justice, but often feel unseen by big-city progressives. A second group is as conservative and in some cases as openly racist as you might expect. And then there’s a group in the middle who supports expanding public health care, raising wages and taxing the wealthy, and is conflicted about immigration, and possibly about race, guns and religion.

We start by engaging with people around the issues that came up most often during our front-porch conversations, like polluted water, health care, low wages or addiction. When enough people say, “There are way too many factory farms in our county” or “We need to raise wages so people can make ends meet,” we work together to create a plan to get results. That may be urging local officials to pass a resolution for a moratorium on factory farms or a living wage at the county level.

The groups that form are almost always multiracial — small-town America is more racially diverse than many might think — and in the organizing process people build relationships often across economic, religious, racial and ethnic lines and begin to develop trust.

As we make tangible impact, people start to see one another in a different light. That’s when we start having tough conversations about how racism is a big reason we haven’t been coming together all along. To be clear, some folks leave. But an amazing number become part of a growing community of people who choose to defy expectations and live in a more inclusive America.

Small towns have been doing just that. In June of 2018, my organization’s affiliates staged nearly 780 rallies across the country to protest the family separation crisis. Half of the rallies were in counties that voted for Donald Trump. Small towns like Angola, Ind., and Ketchum, Idaho, with populations of 8,000 and 2,700 respectively, were among the communities that came together to support migrant families.

People followed those rallies with rural cookouts, deep in so-called Trump Country, to gather and talk about family and the plight of migrants, and pass the hat to post bond for migrant families.