Rebuilding Bridges: Dialogue, Trust and Solidarity Post October 7th
14 – 18 March 2026 | Brussels, Belgium
The Future 500 spring workshop “Rebuilding Bridges: Dialogue, Trust and Solidarity Post October 7th” brings together European professionals and leaders to examine the key questions shaping dialogue and social cohesion today:
- What happens when dialogue breaks down, and how can it be rebuilt after crisis and collective trauma?
- How are AI, online platforms, and traditional media influencing narratives, polarisation, and interreligious relations?
- What can we learn from dialogue practitioners working across crises – from war and discrimination to community-based activism and empowerment?
- How can we create online and offline spaces that strengthen trust, solidarity, and genuine conversation?
European societies face accelerating social fragmentation amid compounding crises. Digital and analogue environments increasingly mediate how communities interpret events, navigate conflict, and construct trust. Algorithmic curation, AI-driven communication, and evolving media ecologies fundamentally reshape social relations and public discourse.
These transformations intersect with mounting societal challenges: interreligious polarisation, displacement-driven social tensions, proliferating disinformation, and the erosion of dialogic capacity following collective trauma. Yet this critical juncture also generates emergent possibilities for renewed cooperation and democratic engagement.
The Future 500 programme invites you to take on the challenges of these urgent transformations. In partnership with TWON (Twin of Online Social Networks) and leading international experts, we will explore how digital technologies, traditional media narratives, and community practices intersect – how they can amplify division and mistrust, but also how they can open pathways for rebuilding dialogue, strengthening solidarity, and renewing democratic culture.
Format
Through workshops, interactive sessions, simulations, public events and encounters with experts, participants will explore both the risks and the possibilities of our digital and social environments, with a particular focus on rebuilding trust across divided communities.
The workshop is organised in cooperation with TWON (Twin of Online Social Networks), an EU-funded project that sets out to study the potentially harmful effects of online social networks (OSNs) on democratic debates and to provide the European Commission with strategic recommendations for possible regulation of technology companies or platform operators.
The Future 500 programme brings together Europe’s most promising talents from politics, business, academia, the arts and civil society. Future 500 develops concrete socio-political initiatives through international interreligious-worldview and intercultural dialogue, implementing these within European civil society. Through its work, Future 500 sustainably strengthens social cohesion across Europe.