That was the question on Rosalie McVay’s mind after several years of leading a discussion group for women to form bonds across race, religion, and geography in an Illinois town outside of Chicago. Rosalie had named the group Connections, and they focused on bridge-building and civic activism under the umbrella of the American Association of University Women, an advocacy group that fights for gender equity in higher education.
Connections hoped to do something about the rising level of discord around the Chicago suburbs, where angry outbursts and name-calling had become more common even at routine school board, city council, and library meetings. They wanted to help calm things down, so they decided to study conflict resolution and books on mindset and argument de-escalation. It was the winter of 2023, but the cultural climate was hot. And that’s when, by chance on the internet one day, Rosalie found the Dignity Index.
Excited and energized by her discovery, she brought the Index to the Connections steering committee, where it found a warm welcome. Each person spent months studying the scoring guide and the social science behind it. Next, the committee brought the Index to the full Batavia-Geneva-St. Charles branch of the AAUW, other branches, and eventually the statewide convention, reaching hundreds of people who seemed eager to adopt the principles. “The feedback was immediate and passionate,” according to Anita Walls, president of the Batavia-Geneva-St. Charles branch of the AAUW-Illinois, adding that the Dignity presentations were “hitting on a nerve we all feel.”
The small inner circle guiding Connections – a group of mostly retired leaders experienced in various professional fields – essentially morphed into an ad-hoc Dignity Index implementation team that worked, in Anita’s words, “like a well-oiled machine.”
“Everyone was shocked about the nonsense going on and how to deal with it,” Rosalie, a horticulturalist, remembered. Speaking of the Index she said, “It was such a mind-changer. It’s so nice to get the word out and do the work.”
And how did they go about doing the work? With a grant from the state AAUW for transportation money, and Dignity Index materials and encouragement from Tami Pyfer, co-creator of the Index.
With Anita sometimes behind the wheel of her Jeep Wrangler, Rosalie and the rest of the team, Pat Hendrix, Chris Bruun, and Maureen Brandon, squeezed in and hit the road, crisscrossing Illinois to meet with AAUW branches across the land of Lincoln.
“We wrote ourselves a script for a 45-minute presentation, all of us doing different pieces of it,” said Maureen, a retired academic dean and professor of biology and biochemistry. As a scientist, she added that she was particularly confident in the methods and spreading the information because of the depth of analysis and testing that went into developing the Dignity Index.
“I know what quality social science research looks like when I see it,” Maureen said. “Two of us on the steering committee are scientists and we said, ‘you have to have data, because you have to support all of this, otherwise people can just dismiss it.’”
No one dismissed it. They only seemed to want more and more. “It was really resonating, and the more people talked about it the more opportunities we saw to spread the power of the Dignity Index,” Anita said. “We believe in the work that we’re doing, and we recognize the value. It’s been a joyful body of work.”
