Live Music & A Lecture: Why Is It So Hard To Be Good?

Join us for an evening of live music and a lecture featuring a performance by , a New York– and Florida-based married indie-rock duo, and a talk by Andrew Oliver, founder of Do For One, a nonprofit that builds freely given, one-to-one relationships for socially isolated New Yorkers.

6:30PM Doors

7PM Live Music by Washer Dryer

7:30PM Lecture by Andrew Oliver

8:20PM Live Music and Mingling til 9PM

Snacks and non-alcoholic refreshments will be available throughout the evening.

Washer Dryer is the married musical duo of Karen and Alex Taylor, whose sound blends indie rock, alternative, and dream-pop influences with intimate storytelling drawn from their years living between New York City and Florida. Critics have compared their dynamic to artists like Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile, praising the pair’s natural chemistry and reflective lyricism.

Andrew Oliver is the founder and Executive Director of Do For One, a New York City–based organization that facilitates one-to-one relationships between isolated people and supportive neighbors who can offer a bridge to a wider community. A social entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience, he has supported adults with developmental disabilities and other marginalized groups in building belonging through work, volunteering, and community life.

His work is shaped by the ideas of Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger and by his ongoing teaching at the Training Institute for Human Service Leadership at Syracuse University. Drawing on both theory and lived practice, Andrew works with leaders and communities across the country committed to relationship-centered efforts that seek the common good.

Community engagement of all kinds has seen a significant drop in recent decades. As neighborhood meetup groups have decreased, neighborhood watch groups have increased. We have become less connected and more suspicious.

Cultural fragmentation, political polarization, and rapid technological change have conditioned us to focus more on what separates us than on what holds us together, making it very hard to want good things for people we disagree with.

The sense that we are “in this together” has been replaced by a more fragmented and isolated experience of the self, leading to loneliness, anxiety, and anger.

What choice do we have but to rebuild the common good? Without it, we cannot be a functioning society.

Dreaming up an ideal society on the sidelines is not enough.

The harder work is naming what "good" we still might have in common, and then committing to the slow, demanding work of weaving the social fabric.

To understand how to weave common life in an unraveled world, we’ll consider three things:

• the moral and political shifts that have made it harder to be good
• the foundations of a society that make it easier
• the practical ways each of us can help strengthen our communities

Taken together, they point to how we can practice enduring hope and love even as we face powerful, never-ending forces attempting to pull us apart.

Shaped by a Judeo-Christian perspective, the lecture warmly welcomes people of all worldviews and explores shared themes of community, responsibility, and the common good.