Living Room Conversations released the guide, Home for the Holidays: Dialogue Across Divides Among Family and Friends, which we found Fall 2017 (original publish date unknown). The guide give excellent pointers on how to hold living room conversations with family members taking into consideration all the challenges that family can bring. You can read the guide below, find a downloadable PDF here or the original on Living Room Conversation’s site here. From the guide… This year we’ve been hearing from all sorts of people that they want […] (continue)

The Civil Conversations Project seeks to renew common life in a fractured and tender world. We are a conversation-based, virtues-based resource towards hospitable, trustworthy relationship with and across difference. We honor the power of asking better questions, model reframed approaches to entrenched debates, and insist that the ruptures above the radar do not tell the whole story of our time. We aspire to amplify and cross-pollinate the generative new realities that are also being woven, one word and one life at a time. Better Conversations: […] (continue)

The Red Blue Dictionary, in partnership with Allsides, is a collaborative effort with dozens of dialogue experts from the NCDD network, to create a site that gives definitions for a wide variety of words to help those all across the political spectrum better understand each other. The idea for the website stemmed from the “Red Blue Dialogue brainstorming session” at the 2012 NCDD conference in Seattle, where Joan Blades, Amanda Roman and Jacob Hess decided to further develop the idea. Living Room Conversations, in early 2016, continued […] (continue)

The Not in Our Town Quick Start Guide: Working together for safe, inclusive communities, was created by Not in Our Town (NIOT) and updated March 2013. The guide gives five steps to begin a campaign in your town or school to stop hate, address bullying, and build safer communities together Below is an excerpt from the guide, which can be downloaded from NIOT’s site here or at the link at the bottom of the page. From the guide… You may be someone who is concerned about divisions […] (continue)

The article, Talking about . . . what’s next after the election? was posted on the Living Room Conversations site just before the US Election in Fall 2016. Living Room Conversations are a structured format of dialogue designed to hold space for participants across the ideological spectrum to come together and explore each other’s point of view. The original article can be found in full below and on Living Room Conversations’ site here. From the site… The presidential election brought attention to our political system… and […] (continue)

The Ben Franklin Circles (BFC) is a collaborative project of 92nd Street Y (92Y), the Hoover Institution, and Citizen University. BFC reflects a shared commitment to fostering civic participation, open dialogue, and ethics-based leadership. Ben Franklin Circles are based on the idea of a mutual improvement club started by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin gathered a group of peers once a week to hash out projects to improve their community and also, to discuss and debate 13 virtues that Franklin saw as the basis of personal improvement and […] (continue)

The 7-page article, Repairing the Breach: The Power of Dialogue to Heal Relationships and Communities (2014), by Robert Stains Jr was published in Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 10: Iss. 1. Dialogue has an incredible power to create a space for individuals to come together and work through difficult conversations that may have previously been felt by the participants as an insurmountable task. Public Conversations Project use of the Reflexive Structured Dialogue process creates an opportunity for a profound shift in conversations, as participants share their own personal stories, emotions […] (continue)

The article, Shining a Light Beyond Polarization by Jessica Weaver was published April 20, 2016 on Public Conversations Project blog. She reflects on the recent tendency in our National discourse to focus on division and how many is discourse often refuse to see the “other side”. Weaver shares a personal experience at a women’s leadership conference which reveals how experiences are greater and more complex that polarizing narratives often give describe. Below is an excerpt from the article and you can find the original in full on Public Conversations Project […] (continue)

The four-page conversation guide, Reaching Out Across the Red-Blue Divide, One Person at a Time (2009), was written by Maggie Herzig from Public Conversations Project. This useful guide provides a framework for navigating highly polarized conversations and includes several starter questions to help keep the dialogue open. Read the intro to the guide below and download the PDF, as well as, find the original guide on PCP’s blog here. From the guide… What this guide offers This guide offers a step-by-step approach to inviting one other person—someone whose […] (continue)

This 11-page essay by Greg Keidan, a public engagement specialist and writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, was written for the University of AZ’s National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD).  After the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, NICD called for essays to address the challenges of conducting constructive conversations about gun violence in the U.S. As part of their mission, NICD seeks to promote civil discourse on issues of public interest and does not take a policy position on gun violence or gun control but is committed […] (continue)