A message from our CEO: The Discipline of Curiosity

Once again, thank you for inviting me to be the new Chief Executive Officer of OneJax. These early days have rewarded me with many new friends from the broadest reaches of our City. The greatest reward has been in more fully understanding OneJax’s trusted position as a conversation partner and facilitator as Jacksonville continues to make progress toward being a city of Belonging.

We are navigating a centuries-old structure of pronounced division. Understanding where that structure comes from is what lets us write a different, more unified story for Jacksonville going forward.

That structure is older, and more ordinary, than we tend to think. Consider a discovery made a few years ago in the city of Pompeii. Archaeologists clearing volcanic ash from a small house found charcoal drawings low on an interior wall, and beside them, the outline of a four- or five-year-old child’s hand, pressed flat.

The drawings seemed to have been made not long before Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. That catastrophe preserved a child’s ordinary afternoon: charcoal in hand, drawing what she had seen and couldn’t stop thinking about. Gladiators: stick figures unmistakably fighting in the arena.

What she captured wasn’t just harsh entertainment from the amphitheater. It was Rome’s social order on full display: that life is a competition, that the strong deserve to survive and the weak deserve to fall, that the proper response to human struggle is to watch from the stands and render a verdict. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. The crowd deciding who lives.

The dualities were absolute: free and slave, citizen and outsider, winner and loser. Every person in that city, from senator to child, was shaped by that same logic. It was the water they swam in; simply how things were, so this child drew it the way another child might draw a rainbow – without a second thought.

We are not so different from that child. Before we had language for it, before we were old enough to examine it, each of us absorbed our own culture’s version of the arena: who belongs in which rooms, which neighborhoods, which futures. We learned the shape of “one of us” and “one of them.”

And like the Romans, we built those dualities into systems: worthy and unworthy, deserving and undeserving. These were never just private opinions. They became load-bearing columns in our shared architecture, quietly determining who gets the mortgage, the benefit of the doubt, the good school, or the neighborhood investment. This paradigm doesn’t just sort people into categories. It sets them against each other, building a world where one person’s gain requires another’s loss, and belonging becomes a prize instead of a given, whereby definition not everyone can win.

Our social structures are too often organized around what divides us rather than around what we all share, what we all need, what we all are. And a structure built on division cannot produce belonging, because the moment belonging becomes a competition, it has already stopped being belonging at all.

So what breaks that pattern? Not outrage; outrage feeds it. Not guilt; guilt paralyzes us. What breaks it is something quieter, and more interesting: Curiosity. – Not curiosity as a personality trait, but curiosity as a discipline. A daily, deliberate refusal to let a category be the last word on a person. The practice of asking, before the old verdict gets rendered: Who are you, really? What have you seen? What do you love?

Curiosity is how categories begin to crack. It’s how a stranger becomes a neighbor, and a neighbor becomes someone whose story changes your own future. It’s how the wall each of us carries, the one handed to us before we had words for it, slowly begins to lose its authority.

Now imagine what happens when enough people practice curiosity, not just privately, but in how we vote, build institutions, design neighborhoods, and write policy. Curiosity, practiced with courage and commitment, shifts the structural architecture of the world.

This is the work OneJax exists to do. For decades, OneJax has built spaces where those old dualities – those gut-splitting competitions — get interrupted, not through outrage or guilt, but through the slower, harder work of curiosity: sitting across from someone whose age, background, or faith tradition is unfamiliar, and asking who they really are before any category gets to answer for them.

That work matters because divisive systems don’t disappear on their own. They are worn down, conversation by conversation, relationship by relationship, by people willing to ask real questions and stay for real answers.

As I move through these early weeks, I’ve already seen this discipline alive in OneJax’s programs and in the people who show up for them, choosing real questions over old verdicts, again and again. That is how a city of Belonging actually gets built: not declared, but practiced. I’m grateful to do this work alongside you, and I look forward to it in the months and years ahead.

Beverly