At the time, Capshaw had recently traveled around the U.S. making portraits of unhoused young people for a series called “Unaccompanied.” Spielberg had begun working on his adaptation of West Side Story, which explores themes of division and connection. And they were considering what they wanted their legacy to be, beyond their bodies of work and rich family life. Thus, Hearthland was born, says Capshaw. They spent time traveling the country to hear from local communities to inform the organization’s priorities. “I think the responsibility for all of us is to take the time to listen to other people,” says Capshaw, “and to quiet down our own defenses or offenses.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the highest-grossing director in film history sees storytelling as a great unifier. His movies have brought audiences together around the world, threading the needle between emotional depth and blockbuster appeal to create shared experience on a vast scale. “We believe in the power of stories to heal, repair, to bridge divides, and to imagine something better for all of us,” he says.

Hearthland supports programs like the American Exchange Project, a domestic exchange program that sends recent high school graduates to different communities to help expand their perspectives and build civic understanding. As Spielberg puts it, “We depend on young people—our children and our grandchildren—to build the future that will save democracy.” 

As the U.S. turns 250, the couple are supporting projects that explore paths toward a connected and just shared future. One is an initiative led by the Innovia Foundation that aims to bring together communities that might not otherwise intersect, over free meals. They’re also backing a civic-engagement initiative for Gen Zers led by Made by Us, and a time-capsule project that would see Magnum photographers travel across the U.S. documenting American life with a focus on undertold stories, to create a visual archive. 

Another of their grantees is StoryCorps, which, alongside other programs, records interviews with Americans about their lives in an effort to remind people of how much they have in common. Its more than 700,000 recordings are collected in the U.S. Library of Congress and an online archive. 

The work of StoryCorps is not dissimilar to what another of Spielberg’s nonprofits, the USC Shoah Foundation, has been doing for more than three decades. Inspired by conversations Spielberg had with Holocaust survivors during and after the making of Schindler’s List, the foundation was set up to record and preserve their stories, in hopes that those firsthand accounts of hate and antisemitism would prove a bulwark against those forces in the future. In addition to running education initiatives and producing research, it has gathered more than 60,000 audio-visual testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, and of other tragedies including the Cambodian, Armenian, and Guatemalan genocides and those in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Around the same time that he established the Shoah Foundation, Spielberg also founded the Righteous Persons Foundation (RPF) with the profits from Schindler’s List, which he says he refused to keep. “That was blood money and it needed to be converted into something that would build tolerance and understanding through education,” he says. RPF is dedicated to strengthening Jewish life and identity through culture, community, and social justice. 

During a speech in 2024, Spielberg raised the alarm about rising anti-semitism and discrimination against Muslims, Arabs, and Sikhs, saying “the creation of the other and the dehumanization of any group based on their differences are the foundations of fascism.” Does he worry about a slide toward fascism today? “That’s always been a worry,” he says. “But it hasn’t just been the dangling sword for eight years. It’s been the dangling sword for hundreds of years.”

And yet, even under that ever present threat, he believes that bringing people together can prevent them from demonizing one another, by fostering empathy and human connection. “What gives me hope is when I hear people all laughing together,” he says. “Laughter always gives me hope.”

Correction, May 14, 2026

The original version of this story mischaracterized Kate Capshaw's portraits of unhoused people. They are paintings, not photographs.