By Keldine Hull

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Head out to the sidewalk this evening and walk to talk.

Sidewalk Talk is a global listening movement dedicated to providing the public with safe opportunities to be heard. Four years ago, Sidewalk Talk Director and Founder Traci Ruble was inspired to take to the streets and simply listen. Ruble explained, “I’m a psychotherapist, and I work full time as a psychotherapist. A couple things really motivated me to want to put my chair on a sidewalk. One was sort of the hatred and violence going in our society. And two, it seemed like people were struggling. I wasn’t going out there to say, ‘Hey, you’re broken, and I’ve got all the answers.’ It was more saying, ‘What’s going in our society today that we are aggressive and mean?’ People are shooting each other, and we’re being non- inclusive to people that are different from us. There’s so much inequity.”

In May 2015, Ruble along with 27 other volunteers sat out on San Francisco sidewalks in 13 different locations, catching the attention of several press outlets in the process. Ruble continued, “NPR actually mic’d me while I was listening, and one of our talkers was willing to be mic’d. On the air, he publicly came out as being somebody with Acute Bipolar 1 Disorder. He wanted to say, ‘Look, people struggle with stuff that you don’t even know.’ He looked like a regular tech worker; you would never know.”