Bruce Bond | Source | Co-Founder and CEO at Common Ground Committee

Finding the middle ground in today's charged political climate is what the Common Ground Committee, a Wilton-based non-profit, aims to encourage. And they're doing it one face-to-face event at a time. "We needed to get people on different sides of an issue on stage to have meaningful conversations to demonstrate that they could take place and to inspire people to think differently," said Co-Founder and CEO Bruce Bond on what inspired the organization's creation. The Common Ground Committee hosts forums that push prominent figures on the opposite ends of issues to listen to each other and find the places in which they agree, with luck demonstrating that the chasm between them is not so wide after all. The idea came to Bond and his longtime friend Eric Olsen while they were on vacation together in 2009. "We realized we were part of the problem," Bond said. "We're both very politically opinionated and we would try to win the argument rather than understand where someone else was coming...