GEOFF BENNETT: Issues such as inequality, gender identity and education have become the subjects of national debate, with the focus often on what elected leaders in Washington say and do about them.
Yet many of those same issues play out on the local level in communities with their own particular histories and challenges.
Judy Woodruff recently traveled to one such community in North Carolina, as part of her ongoing series America at a Crossroads.
WOMAN: The history in Alamance County is not so pleasant.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Inside this room in Burlington, North Carolina, residents of Alamance County have come together to talk through a very difficult subject, their divisions.
WOMAN: We have some gargantuan problems, especially with our school system.
MAN: I don't care what side of the spectrum you're on.
We're in a tough situation right now.
JUDY WOODRUFF: They're being led by Rich Harwood, who through his nonprofit, The Harwood Institute, has spent decades trying to help communities like this one come together during increasingly divided times.
RICH HARWOOD, The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation: We have separated from one another more and more in our country, and so that has led to a coarsening of our politics and of our public discourse.
It's a fight-or-flight mode, which says, I am so frustrated with things, I am so afraid of one another, I am so anxious and fearful that I'm going to throw up my hands in disgust and frustration and fear of one another and retreat, or I'm going to come out swinging and try to win at all costs.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And how does this community or -- in Alamance County play into what you just described?
RICH HARWOOD: Look, I have great affection for this community.
I have been working here now for a couple of years, but we have to tell the truth about what's happening.
And the truth is that this is one of the most divided places in America that I have worked.
VAUGHN WILLOUGHBY, Pritchett Farms Nurseries: I'm here to see her.
What's her name?
JUDY WOODRUFF: One key division here is over growth.
Out in rural Alamance, it's the busy time of the year for Vaughn Willoughby.
VAUGHN WILLOUGHBY: Is that everything you need?
All right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: He runs Pritchett Farms Nurseries situated in the middle of a cow pasture.
And when everything is blooming, his business is booming.
VAUGHN WILLOUGHBY: This is our prime time.
So we make all our money from about the 1st of March until about Mother's Day.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Yet that same boom also worries Willoughby.
Since 2010, Alamance County has grown twice as fast as the country as a whole, thanks in part to its highways, nearby colleges, open land and relatively low cost of living.
But that's turning more of the farmland that he and many others love into commercial distribution centers, housing developments, and public roads.
VAUGHN WILLOUGHBY: Like, that kind of growth, the people who live in that community that have always lived there, they grew up there, they don't like it, because they have lost their neighborhood, they have lost their way of life, they have lost everything that was -- once resembled what Alamance County was.
JUDY WOODRUFF: For him, the growth, the influx of newcomers is forcing difficult questions about zoning, taxation, and the future.
VAUGHN WILLOUGHBY: And therein lies, in my opinion, the pressure that we feel from the agricultural community that I work with and represent through Farm Bureau, that I think the biggest thing is, where do all these people live?
Or where are they going to live?
Or what are you going to do with them?
Where are they going to go to school?
JUDY WOODRUFF: Over in East Burlington, about 20 minutes away, that pressure is being felt acutely.
WOMAN: Six days before the start of this new school year, there are yet more mold issues than the Alamance-Burlington School System.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Last fall, amid ongoing funding shortfalls, the Alamance-Burlington School System suffered a major outbreak of mold, the results of years of neglect.
It led to a two-week delay to the start of the school year.
SENECA ROGERS, Alamance-Burlington School Board: What it told me is something that I felt like a lot of us knew.
We knew that the upkeep of our schools was lacking.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you have good memories of the school?
SENECA ROGERS: Oh, yes, I loved it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: School board member Seneca Rogers grew up here in East Burlington and attended Cummings High School, one of the schools impacted.
This area was once home to the Western Electric Plant, a major employer in Burlington.
But since its closure in 1992, he says the community's east of the train tracks have suffered from neglect, lack of investment and inequality, even as other parts of the city and county have prospered.
It's a feeling summed up in a common refrain, "No Chance Alamance."
SENECA ROGERS: You know, from people moving away, businesses moving away, I mean, neighborhoods just going down and even - - I can say that it even trickled over into our schools over here in East Burlington and what their supports look like.
So I think that is why that "No Chance Alamance" came along is that people just felt like, we have always been left behind.
So why is it going to be different now?
MAN: You will be arrested!
JUDY WOODRUFF: In 2020, as the country dealt with the twin challenges of COVID-19 and a racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, the Confederate monument in nearby Graham, North Carolina, became the focus of protests over race, inequality and injustice.
The following year, the NAACP sued to remove the statue.
But last month, a state court ruled that the county didn't have the power to take it down.
So there it remains, now protected by a steel fence.
SENECA ROGERS: Of course, anywhere in America, those divides are there, and it's various tensions and situations with it.
But, also, I do think that within there, you are starting to see more people trying to see other folks from a different perspective or more people trying to be willing to hear from another point of view as across racial lines.
WOMAN: You learn new things from people you work with.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Over at Alamance Community College, another sign of change, newly arrived immigrants practicing English.
STUDENTS: So that you can do the job well.
JUDY WOODRUFF: A growing share of Alamance is Latino.
And Yholima Vargas-Pedroza, who helps run the English as a second language program here, says that has presented new challenges for public transit, bilingual services and many other areas.
YHOLIMA VARGAS-PEDROZA, Alamance Community College: Navigation of the legal system, educational system, health system, public safety.
So, every area is trying to work, creating more opening ideas of welcoming.
And yet, the county itself is like an organic entity.
It's a life organism, and it's changing so rapidly.
Some people don't want to change.
YHOLIMA VARGAS-PEDROZA: They're comfortable, generationally speaking, where they are and where they have been.
Newcomers like myself are bringing new ideas to the table, where I honor the past, ugly and not ugly, of this community, because somebody built it before I showed up.
JUDY WOODRUFF: That ugly history includes allegations of racial profiling of Latinos and racist language by the county sheriff, who was sued by the Department of Justice over a decade ago.
The case was ultimately settled, yet mistrust remains.
Originally from Colombia, Martha Krall moved to Alamance from New Jersey 17 years ago.
MARTHA KRALL, Alamance Resident: That division was there from the beginning.
People questioned me if I was legal in this country, times that I was told to really go back where you belong.
RICH HARWOOD: What the country needs, what I think Alamance County needs is a civic path forward.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Since he began working here in 2021, Rich Harwood's focus has been on addressing all of these issues by first building a civic culture, creating spaces like this one, where community members can meet to have difficult conversations and slowly establish trust.
RICH HARWOOD: Too many efforts begin too large.
They begin with these comprehensive plans.
They're often kind of utopian visions about what we want in our communities or in society.
And what happens to them?
Time and time again, inevitably, they start with great fanfare, with a nice press conference, with something at the most expensive hotel in town, where they bring everyone together, and then, in a year or two, they fizzle out.
So our approach is different.
We say, look, let's start small.
We just need enough folks who are ready to go who want to start to work differently.
CRAIG TURNER, Alamance County, North Carolina, Commissioner: I think it has something to do with being willing to go to places where we're not comfortable, to hear attitudes that we don't share.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Republican County Commissioner Craig Turner.
CRAIG TURNER: In addition to being divided, we're anxious.
The county is anxious.
People in the country are anxious.
And so what that does is has a tendency to make us huddle in the groups that we already exist in and it requires us to be intentional to come outside of those groups and to listen to one another and to trust one another.
MARTHA KRALL: I think, if we start with small steps, this is what we need to do, and be not afraid to talk to the person that feels different from you.
RICH HARWOOD: Let's just be real and let's be honest about it.
Like, there are no guarantees this is going to work.
JUDY WOODRUFF: It is slow going, but Harwood says the answers to our big national divisions will begin small in rooms like these, with community members focused on their shared challenges and interests.
RICH HARWOOD: If we insist on talking about political divides and political parties in this work in a place like Alamance or other places where we're working, we will have the same discourse that we're having nationally.
If we can get on a civic path, on a civic path, where we're saying to people, this is about the health of your community, this is about the future of your life, this is about the issues that matter to you, like mental health, like safety, like your good public schools, about the ways in which people work together in your community, a civic agenda, then we can actually make progress.
And not only can we make progress.
What I have found is that we can push out the culture wars.
We can push out the politics that are seeping in from other places and get people focused on what really matters to them, get them to work on those things, and get -- and get progress made.
That's what we need to focus on.
JUDY WOODRUFF: For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Judy Woodruff in Alamance County, North Carolina.
