Meet Dr. Mark Bergel, Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Shared Humanity Project
Learn more about Dr. Mark Bergel’s lifelong work to end poverty and how it led to the creation of
The Shared Humanity Project.
For more than three decades, Dr. Mark Bergel has been a leader in the movement to end poverty. In the 1990s, he began speaking to audiences of all ages across the country about our individual and collective capacity to transcend a fragmented approach to life.
In 2001, he adjusted his focus to the wellbeing of the most vulnerable in our midst and founded A Wider Circle in the living room of his apartment. By the end of the decade, he had grown the organization into one of the country’s most successful grassroots efforts. His work was described by The Washington Post as “the very best of Washington,” and The Washington Examiner called his organization “the quintessential grassroots movement.”
Dr. Bergel is the only individual ever inducted into both the Montgomery County Human Rights Hall of Fame and the Montgomery County Business Hall of Fame. He has been recognized as Washingtonian of the Year and named one of People Magazine and Major League Baseball’s “All Stars Among Us.” His many honors also include the Cyrus A. Ansary Medal, the Dr. Augustus White III Award for Civic Engagement and Service, the Roscoe R. Nix Distinguished Community Leadership Award, and the CNN Hero Award.
In the fall of 2020, Dr. Bergel recognized that poverty across the United States was still not being addressed with the urgency or success he knew was possible. He co-founded The Shared Humanity Project in November 2020 to change that.
As he had done 20 years earlier, Dr. Bergel spent years talking with people in poverty about what was working in their efforts to achieve greater economic stability and what was not. In 2025, working with interns and a small staff, he developed the 5 Years or Less initiative to put a timeframe on solving our nation’s most enduring crisis, one community at a time.
Dr. Bergel earned his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and went on to receive both master’s and doctoral degrees from American University, where he taught for 15 years and where he has received the university’s highest honors. Dr. Bergel has presented to hundreds of thousands of people across the United States and been invited to help develop programs around the world.
“There is so much more to us than we believe as we live each day, and yet life is so much simpler than we make it. To realize our full potential as individuals and as a species, we must first ensure that everyone has the food they need to be healthy, the shelter they need to be safe, and access to the resources that will enable them to be free. These are all so easy to ensure if our focus is on community more so than ourselves. The irony is that once we do that, our individual lives can be whatever we want them to be. It may sound idealistic, but nonetheless, there is a transcendence we can each experience. I do not see any reason to wait.”