Conversation Week

Welcome! Your partnership as a City-Hub Coordinator is key to making Conversation Week a truly global initiative. By creating regional hubs for CW you help generate widening circles of conversations that will ultimately spread to every corner of the globe. With your help, we will achieve the purpose of Conversation Week: build trust, connections and relationships, deepen capacity to solve problems, learn something new, and challenge our thinking. Conversations have the power to change the world.

You are an important part of a growing movement that is teaching conversational literacy to people around the globe, facilitating deep dialogue — and real change — around the Big Questions facing humanity. Your role is as facilitator, educator, capacity builder, and organizer.

The resources provided here will enable you to bring CW conversation to your region in ways that will honor Conversation Week (CW) principles and take the conversations from small talk to big talk so that everyone can feel respected, safe and heard. Please note – these are suggestions, not requirements. Some of you will have lots of energy and ambition and will develop a major campaign. Others may just pick and choose to do a few actions. In all cases: enJOY the process and have great conversations!

How to begin convening a regional hub?

Start small and build the local leadership network one step at a time. It’s often more fun if you can find one or two other people to share the leadership as Hub Coordinators.

In the words of our City Hub Champion, Ron Gross, ““My strategy is shamelessly opportunistic, serendipitous, and un-standardized. As I think of them, I jump on opportunities and ideas (e.g., enlisting the networks of Independent Scholars, ESL instructors, General Semanticists, members of other groups, etc.)”

Suggested first step: Bring together a core group, brief them on the vision and status of CW and brainstorm ways to launch CW in your region.

Then, from this base of organizers, explore who would be interested in becoming hosts (individuals) or in sponsoring conversations (organizations).

Develop Networks of Partners: Begin building your hub by seeking partners who have access to networks of members and who represent the widest possible spectrum of constituencies in the community. The kinds of people who may be very attracted, supportive and helpful in getting you started: networkers, university faculty (especially public administration, sociology, political science and communications departments), city clubs, municipal leagues, league of women voters, youth groups (many working to network young adults and engage them in volunteerism), interfaith community, leadership programs, facilitators, organizational consultants, mediators, personal coaches, dialogue organizations (i.e. race issues etc.) – and your friends and colleagues. College campuses and high schools. Churches, mosques and synagogues. Libraries. Some examples from NYC, where partners will be recruited to help promote and publicize the project, and provide venues: The Learning Annex, Starbucks, NY Dept. of Cultural Affairs, Public Libraries, Barnes and Noble, WNYC, the New York City Public Library, Department of Parks, Penguin-Putnam Publishers.

Schedule events: Book some of the public events well in advance so you can get into the spring catalogs of key partners such as libraries, Learning Annex, etc. Seek an array of venues to give participants a variety of times and locations. Many free sites can be found: cafes and restaurants, bars (popular with many young conversationalists), libraries, churches, community centers.

Plan a Super Café: You may want to hold a large CW community wide dialogue on the first and/or last day of CW. If you do this on the first day, each participant can invite several more guests to bring to the next conversation. They may be inspired to host there own conversations during the week with their friends and neighbors.

Recruit and Train Hosts: The more hosts you recruit, orient, train, network, and support the more conversations you can spawn. Offer several face-to-face trainings in your community. Susan Partnow can help coach you in planning your training session. Also, there is a suggested outline for a two-hour training session. In addition to all the free and ready available materials on the website (including posters, flyers, checklists, releases, etc.) – you can offer individualized “Mentoring” on planning, organizing, and conducting their groups. CW can also provide mentors.

We can help you find Dialogue and Deliberation professionals in your area: send an email to: sandy@thataway.org with your email and location and Sandy will send you The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) members in your area.

Maximize Publicity: Adapt the press releases we provide and seek interviews and articles in local neighborhood papers, radio and public access TV as well as the major outlets. Do as widespread postering and leafleting as you can: what relevant conferences and public events occur in your community where you could do tabling or leafleting? You can begin this in Febrary and March to attract potential hosts: e sure to announce your planned training sessions. Can you get the mayor of your city to declare Conversation Week (sample is available)?

Keep the Website up-to-date: Be sure to list all meetings and events on our website so visitors to the website can find you.

Join in the Harvesting of Learnings: Please be sure to complete the feedback questionnaire after each session regarding themes and patterns as well as what works and what needs refining in these fledgling dialogues to help guide the CW initiative. CW’s new website will make it easy for each host to upload photos, quotes, themes, insights etc. to share from their conversation. Viewers will be able to seek other conversations around their chosen question from around the world – or see what other questions were discussed in their region. We will have a Champion for each question to harvest the learning and insights around each question/theme so we can share our wisdom through our website as well as news articles: all of our efforts will make CW 2009 truly a Global Conversation.

Principles for any Conversation Week Conversation

Organize the conversation in a way that honors these principles:

• Inclusive – all people and all perspectives welcome:
  • Invite friends and neighbors including individuals you don’t usually get to talk to and those who may think differently than you and hold different views.
• Non-partisan – bring your views, but no lobbying for your causes, candidates, movements or parties
  • Think of these as “commercial free zones” – no marketing of a product, service, event or particular agenda, point of view, outcome, solution or cause.
  • Refrain from political networking, creating task groups or enrolling others in collective actions so that “no committees will be formed” between the opening and closing rounds of an CW/Conversation Café.
• Respectful – there is a host and “ground rules” to assure that everyone has a chance to be heard
• Use the Conversation Café Agreements and Process
• Open – new people, new ideas, new information, open up new insights, and possibilities for action
  • Foster the spirit of inquiry – discovery and curiosity rather than persuasion or debate.
  • Report on the themes and insights from all conversations and gatherings by filling out the questionnaire on the CW website.