March, 30 2026 By Tim Miller-Dempsey for the Hingham Human Rights Commission
The Hingham Human Rights Commission is hosting a free bystander intervention
training on Zoom, April 6th at 7:00-8:00 p.m.
On April 6th at 7:00 p.m., the Hingham Human Rights Commission is sponsoring a free,
one-hour bystander intervention training on Zoom, hosted by the national nonprofit
Right To Be (righttobe.org). It is open to every resident of Hingham, and it will not ask
you to be a hero. In fact, that is precisely the point.
Most of us want to do the right thing when we witness someone being harassed or
targeted. The problem is that wanting to help and knowing how to help are two very
different things. When the moment comes, people freeze. Not out of indifference, but
because nobody ever gave them a roadmap. That gap is what this training is designed
to close.
Why This Matters Right Now
We are living through a significant and sustained rise in bias-motivated incidents. The
FBI recorded 11,679 hate incidents in 2024, the second highest total since the bureau
began tracking the data in 1991. Anti-Jewish hate crimes reached their highest level on
record that same year. Anti-Black hate crimes have risen 81% over the past decade.
Crimes targeting the LGBTQ+ community have more than doubled since 2015.
As I wrote in these pages in January, the work of building a genuinely inclusive
community belongs to all of us, in every season, regardless of the political moment.
Massachusetts recorded 467 hate crime incidents in 2024, with vandalism and
intimidation among the most frequently reported. These are not distant numbers. They
describe a climate in which bias can surface anywhere, including in communities that
consider themselves welcoming, including ours.
No community can eliminate bias entirely, but we have real power over how we respond
when it surfaces. Those responses, made consistently and with intention, are how we
build the kind of community we actually want to live in. What we can control is whether
we feel equipped to act when we witness something wrong, not after the fact, not with a
statement, but in the moment, with confidence and without putting ourselves at risk.
What Right To Be Teaches
Right To Be is a national organization that has trained hundreds of thousands of people
to respond to harassment safely and effectively. Their framework is called the 5 D’s:
Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay, and Direct.
What makes it worth your Monday night is the philosophy behind it. This is not a training
that asks you to be brave or confrontational. It does not ask you to put yourself at risk or
step so far outside your comfort zone that you’d never actually use what you learned.
Four of the five strategies are completely indirect.
Distract means engaging the person being targeted, striking up a conversation or
creating a small interruption that breaks the moment without escalating it. Delegate
means finding someone nearby to help, another bystander, a manager, a teacher.
Document means creating a record of what’s happening, always with the targeted
person’s needs in mind. Delay means checking in afterward, a hand on the shoulder, a
simple “are you okay,” so someone knows they weren’t invisible. Only Direct involves
speaking to the person causing harm, and the training is specific about when that
makes sense and when it doesn’t.
The underlying idea is a simple one. Harassment depends on silence. It depends on the
sense that nobody around you sees what is happening, or that they see it and have
decided it isn’t their business. Even a small gesture can change that experience entirely
for someone being targeted. And when enough people in a community learn to
intervene, something larger starts to shift. It is not just about individual moments. It is
about the kind of town we want to be.
A Community-Wide Effort
The efforts of the Human Rights Commission complement the work of the Hingham
Public Schools in supporting anti-bullying efforts. Bystander and upstander concepts are
embedded throughout the curriculum, with a particular emphasis at the middle school
level. For parents, April 6th is a real opportunity to learn the same framework your
children are already encountering in school. That kind of shared language opens doors
that are otherwise hard to find. Imagine a conversation at the dinner table that goes
beyond "how was your day" and into something more meaningful: what would you do if
you saw someone being treated that way? That common understanding, across
generations and across neighbors, is how communities actually change their culture.
Join Us on April 6th
The training is free. It is one hour on Zoom, so you do not even have to leave your
house. It is for everyone, parents, town employees, teachers, students, retirees,
longtime residents and people who just moved here. You do not need a particular
political view or any prior experience with this kind of work. You only need to believe
that the people around you in this town deserve to feel safe here.
You can register in advance, Click Here. Right To Be, the organization
leading the training will email you the link for the Zoom.
Hingham is a community that shows up for its own. On April 6th, we hope you will show
up for this one hour training, so that more of us will be ready the next time someone
here needs us to be.
Tim Miller-Dempsey serves on the Hingham Human Rights Commission as a
representative of the School Committee.