What is The Waymaker?
Has your love grown cold?
Are you afraid?
Has someone hurt you?
Are you struggling to forgive?
Are you estranged from a spouse, child, parent, or sibling?
Do you feel mistreated, unheard, unseen, or powerless at home or work?
Are you angry and frustrated with the direction your community or country is heading?
Do you feel far from God or your faith community?
Does the political polarization, economic instability, war and brutality, and the ever-looming fear of disease across the world overwhelm you?
For those who feel like conflict – internally, with our loved ones, in our communities or in the world– have consumed us, you are not alone. For thousands of years, people have experienced conflict in this destructive way. Some even gave it a name: exile.
Exile can be thrust upon us by others or it can be self-imposed.
Either way it comes with a sense of estrangement, fear, isolation and hopelessness that can only deepen the conflict.
The feeling of exile can be experienced most painfully, in the relationships we hold most deeply. To many, exile is a feeling of being disconnected from the people we most desire to be in relationship with.
Whether we choose to run from it, fight it, or resign our fates to it, the experience of exile can be frustrating at best and devastating at worst. It can be the destroyer of optimism.
Alongside the feeling or reality of exile lies its opposite – hope of return, of reconciliation, of restoration. Conflict is natural and inevitable in a world of difference. While it can certainly lead to despair, it doesn’t have to.
Behind every exile, is hope – a belief that while the outcome itself may be uncertain, things can and will be made better through action.
The Waymaker is a website and newsletter dedicated to bringing hope to those struggling to make a way out of no way and helping those in exile find their way back home.
Stay up-to-date
By subscribing, every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. You’ll also get updates on events, podcasts and more.
The newsletter is free to everyone, however, you have the option of donating $5 a month to support my work, both writing the newsletter and my broader work helping individuals, communities and organizations navigate their conflicts in a more hopeful way.
There’s even a founder option to get a free conflict coaching session via Zoom with me.
About Chad Ford
CHAD FORD is an international conflict mediator, facilitator, and peace educator.
While most people know him for his work at ESPN, being a basketball analyst and writer was actually his side-gig for most of the last two decades. Chad’s peacebuilding work is what defines him.
After completing a Master’s degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University and a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law School in 2000, Chad was poised to begin his career as a conflict mediator and facilitator.
Chad served as the Director of the David O. McKay Center for Intercultural Understanding at BYU-Hawaii. for nearly twenty years where he created a major and certificate program in intercultural peacebuilding.
In 2024, Chad left his position at BYU-Hawaii to join the faculty at Utah State University. Chad is serving a joint appointment with the Religious Studies department and the Heravi Peace Institute. Chad teaches courses in Religion, Violence and Peace; Bridging Religious Differences; Introduction to Peacebuilding; and Transformative Mediation.
Chad’s work has frequently taken him out of the classroom and into conflict zones around the world. He’s made more than 50 trips to the Middle East and has worked on numerous other conflicts around the world in Ireland, Cyprus, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Oceania, China and throughout the United States, as both a mediator and a facilitator. Chad has served as a speaker and conflict facilitator for numerous organizations — working with governments, NGOs and corporations like Nike and the US Olympic team. He’s been able to combine his expertise on both sports and conflict by serving as an executive board member of the non-profit peacebuilding organization PeacePlayers.
His first book, Dangerous Love, weaves Chad’s experiences into a deeply personal step-by-step exploration of how we transform fear and conflict. Dangerous Love has been described as the "single best book about conflict and peace for a general readership.”
His second book, 70x7, draws on Chad’s experiences as a Christian peacebuilder. What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus when we feel stirred up with anger in our families, neighborhoods, wards, workplaces, online communities, and public forums? He shows how Jesus’s path of practicing 70×7 has the power to repair relationships by transforming destructive conflict into constructive peace.
Chad’s work with young people in the classroom, athletes on the basketball court, struggling families in the living room, executives in the boardroom, and divided communities in some of the most challenging conflicts in the world gives him a unique perspective and voice to the conflicts that plague our families, our organizations, and the world.
