The Story Behind Singing Our Way Back to Each Other

Every journey begins with a question.

For singer-songwriter Jerry Leggett, one question once carried him across the United States in a tiny traveling music venue known as the Peace Bubble Café.

The Peace Bubble Tour

In 2007–2008, Jerry organized the Peace Bubble Tour—a journey of more than 200 stops in forty states, including visits to twenty national parks and landmarks.

The small yellow trailer became a mobile gathering place where people could sing, reflect, and share their hopes for the future.

With a modest video camera in hand, Jerry invited thousands of people to consider a simple question:

What does a more peaceful world look like for you?

Throughout the journey, he carried a guiding belief:

If you want peace in your world, make space for it.

A Life of Music and Peacebuilding

Music has always been central to Jerry’s life, as has his work alongside people whose voices and stories are too often overlooked.

Earlier in his career, he served as Executive Director of the International Peace Museum in Dayton, Ohio—one of the few museums in the United States devoted to exploring the history and culture of peacebuilding.

Since his teenage years, Jerry has felt drawn to stand alongside people whose lives have placed them in harm’s way or at the margins of society.

Through music, storytelling, and community-building, he has sought to create spaces where people feel heard, where courage is recognized, and where stories at risk of disappearing can be carried forward.

The Peacebuilder Hub Tour

In 2018, Jerry was invited to help launch the Hub Peacebuilder Tour for the Rotarian Action Group for Peace.

Traveling along the West Coast and eventually across the country to Atlanta, Jerry used the tiny Peacebuilder Hub as a portable gathering space where conversations about peace and community could begin.

He sang at Rotary clubs, conferences, home gatherings, and community events, eventually bringing the Hub to the Atlanta Convention Center, where thousands of Rotarians encountered the project.

The tour began beneath the enormous Spruce Goose aircraft at the Evergreen Air & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. Jerry performed atop the tiny Hub trailer—a striking contrast between something immense and something very small.

It offered a lasting reminder:

Some of the biggest ideas begin in the smallest spaces.

Storytrail Garden

These experiences later helped inspire the creation of Storytrail Garden in Tubac, Arizona—a community place where art, sculpture, music, and storytelling honor lives of courage, compassion, peace, and justice.

Located in a town known as “Where Art & History Meet,” the garden lifts up stories that might otherwise be overlooked.

Visitors encounter installations celebrating everyday Peace Heroes—people whose choices and acts of compassion have strengthened their communities and widened the circle of belonging.

The garden reflects a belief at the heart of Jerry’s work:

Some of the most important stories in our world are the ones that almost disappear.

From Storytrail Garden to a National Initiative

The spirit of Storytrail Garden now travels beyond the garden through Singing Our Way Back to Each Other: A Musical Journey into the State of Belonging.

Rather than simply presenting a concert, Jerry partners with communities across the country to create shared experiences weaving together original music, storytelling, humor, reflection, local voices, and community singing.

Each gathering invites people to explore questions that feel increasingly urgent:

• What helps us feel that we belong?

• How do we become one without becoming the same?

• What divides us—and what might bring us back together?

• Whose stories have not yet been heard?

• How can we create, together, the kind of community we long for?

When possible, each event also includes a locally formed Together We Community Choir, giving people the opportunity not only to listen, but to add their own voices to the experience.

Local organizations, community storytellers, and everyday heroes may also be honored, allowing each gathering to reflect the character, challenges, and hopes of the place in which it is held.

Music as a Gathering Place

In this work, music becomes more than a performance.

It becomes a gathering place.

A place where stories can be shared.
Where people can listen more deeply.
Where every voice matters.
Where difference does not have to mean disconnection.
And where communities can begin imagining their way back to one another.

Singing Our Way Back to Each Other grows from a simple conviction:

We find belonging not by becoming the same, but by learning to hear, honor, and carry one another’s stories.

And perhaps that is how the journey begins—

one song,
one story,
one community,
and one voice joined with another.

The Story Behind Hope Beyond Borders

How a long engagement with life along the border - and one unforgettable encounter - shaped the song.

—  ✦  —

Roots in North County San Diego

My connection with border and immigration issues did not begin with Hope Beyond Borders. From 1988 to 1999, I lived in Carlsbad, in North County San Diego. During those years, I became active with groups working for migrant rights and responding to the human realities of life along the United States-Mexico border. That experience also gave rise to Born in a Carlsbad Canyon, a song that became a signature part of my work.

Those years taught me that the border is never simply a line on a map. It is a place where policy and politics meet real lives: families, workers, neighbors, people seeking safety, and communities trying to respond with courage and compassion.

An Encounter at Sasabe

In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I traveled to the Arizona-Sonora border near Sasabe and met Dora Rodriguez, founder of Salvavisión. Dora survived a crossing through the Sonoran Desert in 1980 and has devoted decades to accompanying migrants, asylum seekers, and deported families.

As Dora shared stories of people crossing the desert in search of safety, the human realities at the heart of issues I had cared about for years came vividly into focus again.

Meeting Dora was not my introduction to the border. It was an encounter that renewed and deepened a much longer journey - and eventually helped give Hope Beyond Borders its human center.

Beyond Geography

The song begins at the border, but it does not remain there. Each of us encounters borders: fear, prejudice, loneliness, misunderstanding, ideology, language, and culture. Some are visible. Others are carried within us. Hope Beyond Borders asks what becomes possible when we choose curiosity over judgment, welcome over exclusion, and relationship over distance.

At the heart of the song is a simple but powerful question:

How do we become one without becoming the same?

Belonging Without Sameness

This is not a call to erase difference. It is an invitation to honor difference while recognizing our shared humanity. Belonging does not require sameness. It asks us to make room for one another's stories, experiences, and dignity.

For the choral version, that invitation becomes communal. When people sing these words together, hope beyond borders is no longer only an idea. It becomes a shared practice - listening, breathing, and making space together. The Spanish text was developed in collaboration with Dora Rodriguez, helping the song carry not only another language, but also the spirit of communities whose stories helped inspire it.

An Invitation to Sing

Hope Beyond Borders is offered in honor of Dora Rodriguez and the compassionate work of Salvavisión. My hope is that choirs will sing it not simply as a performance, but as an act of welcome - one that inspires conversations, new friendships, deeper understanding, and a wider circle of belonging.

Because hope beyond borders does not begin with an argument or an answer. It begins with an encounter.

Learn more about Dora Rodriguez and Salvavisión: Salvavision.org

Music and choral resources: JerryLeggett.org/start-here

Storytrail Foundation

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”

Where Stories of Courage Become Songs of Hope