Category Archives: field news

Looking Back at NCDD 2016 and What Has Happened Since

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ncdd2016-logoThe 2016 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation brought together 350 innovators in dialogue and deliberation to discuss the conference theme of Bridging Our Divides. Over the course of three days we discussed how to tackle some of today’s toughest divides, including partisan, racial, economic, and more. For a recap of the conference in numbers, see our earlier blog post.

Since the conference, NCDD has been producing and gathering media that captures our time together and the stories of our work. And, we’ve been following up on the conversations that happened at the conference and continuing the important work that began or was renewed in our time together.

Sharing the Stories of the Conference

At NCDD 2016 Keith Harrington of Shoestring Videos recorded our plenary sessions as well as short videos of participants. Keith is in the process of producing several videos, and has shared with us the following two videos:

Panel on Philanthropy and Fundraising

Mark Gerzon of the Mediators Foundation moderated a discussion among a panel of philanthropists about the constraints and opportunities facing our field’s efforts to bring people together across divides. Panelists shared their experiences funding bridge building efforts and answered participant questions about how we can all be better advocates for our work.

Panel on Journalism and Public Engagement

Peggy Holman of Journalism that Matters moderated a panel discussion among journalists, discussing both their work in engaging the public and discussing the opportunities they see for public engagement practitioners to partner with journalists.

ncdd_podcast_200x200Sharing More Personal Stories

In addition to video, for the first time ever at an NCDD conference we offered participants the chance to record stories and conversation in an audio room, run by sound designer Ryan Spenser. We recorded several conversations that would become our first episodes of our new NCDD Podcast. Check it out on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Google Play. Our first episodes are now live:

  • Listen to Barbara Simonetti, NCDD’s Board Chair, and myself discuss her metaphor for the D&D field as a utility
  • Hear the story of Conversation Café from co-creator Susan Partnow and past steward Jacquelyn Pogue, as they speak with NCDD Resource Curator Keiva Hummel about the process and their hopes for it under NCDD’s stewardship

Stories of bridging our divides were shared throughout the conference – in workshops, informal gatherings, and particularly in our first plenary session where we asked all participants to share a story of a time they witnessed divides being bridged.

We welcome additional stories of how you or those you are working with are bridging divides. In particular, we’d love to have people share using our Storytelling Tool. Using the tool gives NCDD the details for a great case story that we can share on our blog, so your story is shared with more people!

Last but not least, last week we shared our Storify page – take a look at that for a great recap of the social media activity during the conference, along with great photos and quotes!

Continuing this Work

Lots of inspiration was drawn from our time with you all at NCDD 2016, and we have been working to continue to address the needs and desires that arose at the conference. Some of the ways we’ll continue to do that include:

  • The Race, Police and Reconciliation Discussion List: The racial divide was a central part of the conference theme. Many workshops addressed this divide and we heard from three panelists in our first plenary about their work in this area (video coming soon!). Many participants expressed a desire to connect with others on this work, and so NCDD has launched a discussion listserv for folks interested in connecting with one another. So far, more than one hundred of you have joined! Learn more here and then join the listserv.
  • Our #BridgingOurDivides campaign: NCDD has continued our conversation at the conference over the past several months through our #BridgingOurDivides campaign. We’ve been sharing information and resources on social media and the blog. We also hosted a call for our community to talk about our post-election work. We’ll keep this conversation going in 2017, as this work is more important than ever.
  • el_badge_web_03The Emerging Leaders Initiative: NCDD has worked hard to bring students and youth to our conferences in 2014 and 2016, and in between we have been talking with these young and emerging leaders about how to get them involved in NCDD. This has all culminated in our new Emerging Leaders Initiative, which we’ll be more formally launching in 2017. We need to foster long-term resilience for the field of dialogue & deliberation, and we can do that best by intentionally cultivating our field’s next generation of leadership.

We had such a great time at NCDD 2016 connecting and re-connecting with you all and discussing how we can continue to do this important work of bridging our divides in today’s world. Let’s use what has been generated from the conference and continue to build upon it – our communities and our country need dialogue and deliberation right now.

NCDD Podcast Episode 2 about Conversation Café Now Live

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NCDD’s second podcast episode is now live on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play! It features the story of Conversation Café as told by three stewards of this process: co-creator Susan Partnow, past steward Jacquelyn Pogue, and NCDD Resource Curator Keiva Hummel, who plays a key role in helping NCDD serve as the steward of the Conversation Café (CC) process.

cc_cardsAs you may remember from our post last week, the first series of episodes in the NCDD Podcast were recorded at the NCDD 2016 Conference, where we asked leaders and practitioners from the D&D field to share their stories and ideas, as well as discuss opportunities and challenges in our audio room. These episodes are being released over the next several weeks as we continue our conversation from the conference about #BridgingOurDivides. Additional episodes will be produced on an on-going basis.

In this episode, Keiva asks Susan and Jacquelyn to share the story of Conversation Café’s inception and history over the past fifteen years. They explain how this elegantly simple process works, talk about how it has been utilized, and their hopes and advice for NCDD as the recent steward. This is a fantastic introduction to the CC process and a great lead into our Confab Call being held next Monday, December 19th about Conversation Café – learn more about that event here.

We invite you to listen to this episode and share your thoughts here, including responses to these questions: What experiences have you had with Conversation Café? Or, what more would you like to learn about it? What opportunities do you see for Conversation Café in your community or in our nation generally?

Again, our thanks to Ryan Spenser for recording and editing these podcast episodes, to Barb Simonetti for her financial support of this initial series, and to everyone who participated in the episode recording sessions at the conference! Please continue to tune in and share the podcast with your networks!

A Look Back at NCDD 2016 on Storify

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With so much that’s happened since October, it’s a little hard to believe that the NCDD 2016 national conference was less than two months ago! Since the gathering, Bridging Our Divides has only become more relevant, and we want to remind our D&D community of the powerful conversations and experiences we had and the commitment we made when we were together.

So we’ve released an awesome Storify page for the NCDD 2016 conference! This compilation of the best photos, quotes from evaluations, links, and other gems from this engaging event will be great for seeing how it was if you missed out, or remembering some of the best moments if you were there.

We encourage you to check out the NCDD 2016 Storify below, and don’t forget that you can always continue the conversation by participating in NCDD’s ongoing #BridgingOurDivides campaign.


NCDD Launches First Episode of New D&D Podcast!

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NCDD is excited to announce the launch the first ever episode of our new NCDD Podcast! This podcast will bring together members of the D&D community to share tools and resources, as well as discuss ideas, opportunities and challenges in our work. We’ve launched the podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes.Small green NCDD logo

The first series of episodes in the NCDD Podcast were recorded at the NCDD 2016 Conference, where we asked leaders and practitioners from the D&D field to share their stories and ideas, as well as discuss opportunities and challenges in our audio room. These episodes will be released over the next several weeks as we continue our conversation from the conference about #BridgingOurDivides, and we’ll continue to add new episodes into the future.

This first podcast episode features a conversation between NCDD Board Chair Barbara Simonetti and me, NCDD’s new Managing Director. In the episode, Barb shares a powerful metaphor she came upon during her time at the conference that compares the D&D field to a multi-purpose public utility or smart grid, and we discuss other ways we’ve described the NCDD community in the past. We had an insightful conversation about thinking of our field as a generative network and what that means for opportunities that the network has going forward. We think will be good food for thought for many of our members!

We invite you to listen to this episode and share your thoughts here and in the comments on the episode and the main questions we’re raising: are dialogue & deliberation tools and processes a public utility? How should we describe our community and our work?

Many thanks to Ryan Spenser for recording and editing these podcast episodes, to Barb Simonetti for her financial support of this initial series, and to everyone who participated in the episode recording sessions at the conference! We are excited to launch this effort and hope you’ll tune in and share with your networks and on social media!

Support NCDD Today for #GivingTuesday!

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With the madness of the holiday shopping season now in full swing, it’s often easy to forget that this time of year is supposed to be about giving – sharing of what we have and supporting our communities. But today is “Giving Tuesday,” a day created to celebrate and support giving and philanthropy as a counterbalance to the “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday,” and NCDD wants to invite you to join in commemorating it with us.

This #GivingTuesday, we are encouraging all who are able to give in support of NCDD’s important work. After a tremendously polarizing election and increasing concerns over our ability to bridge our divides, the need is greater than ever to support the community of people dedicated to helping our nation listen to each other, learn from those we disagree with, and find common ground for action. NCDD does just that kind of crucial work, and we are inviting you to help us keep doing it by making a tax-deductible donation on this #GivingTuesday.

Many people recognize NCDD as a facilitative leader for this vital community of practice and the”go-to” organization for improving dialogue and deliberative capacity. But what many don’t realize is that NCDD is a small non-profit that depends on memberships and donations to remain a healthy organization. We run mostly on the our members’ yearly dues payments, donations, and a few small grants – that’s it.

With that meager funding, we are still able to bring the field together during our biennial conferences, maintain one of the largest online collections of D&D tools in our Resource Center, tackle challenges and explore innovations in the field through our Confab Calls and Tech Tuesday events, catalyze efforts like the #BridgingOurDivides campaign, and begin to support and connect rising young leaders in our field with our new youth program.

Just imagine what NCDD and the field could do if we had more.

We’re joining #GivingTuesday in the hopes of not only spreading awareness about the important work we do at NCDD, but encouraging you to actively support NCDD by joining as a member, renewing your dues, or making a donation.

Your involvement in and support of NCDD is critical to our organization and our field. Thanks for all you do in your own work and in your support of our network. We look forward to continuing to work with you and our vibrant community in the year ahead!

NCDD Launches Listserv on Race, Police, & Reconciliation

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Link to NCDD listservsThere were many connections made, collaborations started, and projects launched during our NCDD 2016 conference last month in Boston. But there’s one initiative that we want to specifically highlight today and encourage our NCDD members to support.

As NCDD 2016 participants dug into the conference theme of Bridging Our Divides, two important and related divides were clearly feeling urgent for participants – our nation’s racial divides, and the parallel divide between police and the communities they work in. During several conference workshops, conversations in the hallways, and during the plenaries, our NCDD members were also exploring and sharing ideas about the power of truth & reconciliation processes to possibly help our nation address such issues, asking themselves not only what D&D practitioners can do to play a more active role in growing work aimed bridging these fraught divides, but also, what are we already doing?

That’s why NCDD is launching a new email discussion listserv that we hope will serve as a space where we can continue to share and discuss ideas, tools, projects, and resources about race dialogue, community-police dialogue, and truth-telling & reconciliation work. We encourage anyone in our network who works on, studies, or has an interest in race relations, community-police relations in the face of violence, or broader truth-telling and reconciliation processes to join this email list to network and share with others who work in these areas.

Join the Discussion Today

You can subscribe to the Race, Police, & Reconciliation Discussion List by sending a blank email to race-dialogue-subscribe-request@lists.ncdd.org. Then once you’re subscribed, you can send messages to everyone on the list by emailing race-dialogue@lists.ncdd.org.

We know that there many NCDD members – and even more outside of our network – already engaged in ongoing dialogue efforts across historical racial divides and doing the difficult work of trying to help everyday people angry with police to hear and be heard by law enforcement officials. And we at NCDD want to try to harness that collective energy and catalyze even more collaboration among those who are seeking to strengthen that work or move it towards real healing and reconciliation.

We believe that our D&D field has a special role to play in making substantive progress about how we move forward together as a country on these difficult divides, and we invite you to join us on this new discussion listserv to begin figuring out just how we do that.

Learn more about NCDD’s many other discussion and updates listservs at www.ncdd.org/listservs.

Participate in NCDD’s #BridgingOurDivides Campaign

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As the election winds down, ballots are counted, and the debates about the many decisions on the ballot finally have clear outcomes, we have arrived at a time when we as a field need to take stock of what we should do next. A major theme of our NCDD 2016 conference in Boston was how D&D practitioners can help repair our country’s social and political fabric, both after this bruising and bitter election year, but also in light of many of the longer-standing divisions in our country.

NCDD has made an ongoing commitment to answering that question, and as part of that commitment, we are calling on our members and others to enlist in our new #BridgingOurDivides campaign!

In this new effort, NCDD is asking our members to help us collect information about the projects, initiatives, or efforts that you and others are undertaking to help our nation heal our divisions and move forward together, with a special focus onncdd_resources collecting the best shareable resources that folks are using to support or spark bridge building conversations in the aftermath of the election and beyond.

To do that, we ask that you share about those efforts and resources in the comments section of this post – post your links, write ups, reports, and descriptions that will help NCDD and others learn about divide bridging efforts you’re connected to, whether they are election-related or not.

In addition, we want to foster a broad conversation about what our field is doing and offering to bring people together to discuss difference and find common ground, so we are encouraging everyone to join the conversation on social media by sharing those comments, resources, links, and thoughts about this work using the hashtag #BridgingOurDivides. This will be a great way to increase the visibility of our field’s work, and we hope it also increases support for NCDD, so we encourage you to include a link to NCDD’s “Get Involved” page at www.ncdd.org/getinvolved, too! (You can also use the shorter bit.ly/ncddinvolve for tweets.)

There are already some great efforts to bring people together across divides in the NCDD network now:

  • The Utah Citizen Summit is being convened by the Salt Lake Civil Network and the Bridge Alliance as part of the ongoing effort to help bridge partisan divides
  • Essential Partners is working to start forward-looking, post-election conversations on social media with their #AfterNov8 hashtag, which we encourage everyone to participate in alongside the #BridgingOurDivides conversation
  • The Americans Listen project is calling on everyday people to have empathetic, one to one listening conversations with Trump supporters about both what they find appealing about his message and what keeps non-supporters from really hearing their concerns

These are just a few examples of projects that are #BridgingOurDivides, and we know that the NCDD network is full of thoughtful, creative people engaged in many more. So tell us – what are you doing or planning to do that is bridging our divides? Not just the divides exposed or widened during the election, but the ones that were there before as well? Share all about it in the comments section below and on social media!

Our nation’s divides, whether related to the election or not, didn’t emerge over night, and they certainly won’t be bridged overnight either. But we at NCDD believe they can be healed – one conversation at a time. Join us in helping the world see how, and support us in this effort.

Two NCDD Members Share IAP2 USA Research Award

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We are proud to share that two of our great NCDD members – Kyle Bozentko of the Jefferson Center and Tina Nabatchi of the Maxwell School at Syracuse – have been jointly awarded the Research Project of the Year Award by NCDD member organization IAP2 USA.

The award came as part of the US branch of the International Association for Public Participation‘s annual Core Values Awards, which it gives to outstanding organizations or projects that represent the best of the best in public participation.

Kyle and Tina’s project was called “Clearing the Error: Public Deliberation about Diagnostic Error,” and it used the Citizen Jury process to involve everyday medical patients in improving their common problems with health diagnoses. It was an innovative use of deliberation to really empower people to make an impact on a key issue in health care systems, and we congratulate them on a job well done!

You can learn more about the award-winning “Clearing the Error” project in the video below:

There is more info on Kyle and Tina’s project as well as all the other award winners at www.iap2usa.org/2016cva. But for now, please join us in congratulating Kyle, Tina, and their teams on winning this important award!

Join the #AfterNov8 Conversation on Bridging Our Divides

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During the NCDD 2016 conference, we focused on how our field can help bridge our divides after such a toxic and divisive election cycle, and now team at NCDD member organization Essential Partners have launched an effort to continue that conversation on social media. It invites us to share their hopes and goals for how we move forward as a country after Nov. 8th by making a video, a voice memo, or posting on social media, all using the hashtag #AfterNov8 – we encourage our members to participate!

We think this can be a powerful way for our field to shift the conversation to moving forward together as we transition out of the election, so we hope you’ll add your voice! You can read more about the #AfterNov8 campaign in Essential Partners’ blog post below or find the original version here.

#AfterNov8 Launches

Essential PartnersThis election season, we’ve spent a lot of time obsessing about November 8th. We watch debates, we share memes, we pore over maps, heralding the candidate of our choice and criticizing their opponent. But little attention has been paid to what happens after November 8th.

What do we do after the election? How do we heal? The fact remains that we have to live and work together. No matter the winner of this election, it will not undermine our responsibility to do meaningful work over the next four years.

Whether we have a President Trump or President Clinton will not change the need to volunteer in our schools, to work toward racial reconciliation, to commit to supporting refugees from war torn nations, to supporting our veterans and soldiers, to help families in need, to living out our professed beliefs that all people are created equal.

So we want to hear from you… not about your hopes for this election, but for our lives and our nation after November 8th.

  • What do you wish for us as a nation after Nov. 8?
  • What do you hope we can work on together?
  • What issues do you hope we will meaningfully address?

Using #AfterNov8, please share your perspective on social media. We’ll be sharing some of the ones we’ve collected. Email us your audio or video file(s) and we’ll integrate them into our story. Ask your family, friends, students, neighbors to join the conversation.

Please consider sharing your voice with us directly – we’ll integrate it into a video debuting next week!

Here are images for you to share on Facebook and Twitter.

You can find the original version of this Essential Partners blog post at www.whatisessential.org/news/afternov8-launches.

Attend the Everyday Democracy Nat’l Convening, Dec. 8-10!

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We want to encourage everyone our NCDD network to consider registering to attend the Everyday Democracy national convening, The Moment is Now: Democracy that Works for All. The gathering will take place Dec. 8-10 in Baltimore, and it will be a great opportunity to learn from and connect with EvDem’s national network of community leaders and practitioners who are working to create change for racial equity, economic opportunity, and deep democratic engagement through dialogue in their locales. Learn more in EvDem’s announcement below, visit the conference page, or register today!

EvDem LogoEveryday Democracy’s National Convening

There is no time like now to come together, share experiences, learn, and expand our impact.

At Everyday Democracy’s National Convening, The Moment is Now: Democracy that Works for All,  this December 8-10 in Baltimore, MD, you will join hundreds of active, engaged and influential individuals from across the country who are making positive change in their communities.

The Convening will be a space for changemakers of all backgrounds and sectors to share lessons and ideas on how to build equity, inclusivity, and increased voice and participation in our communities and our country. You will meet people doing great work – people like the residents of Wagner, South Dakota who, for the past nine years, have used Everyday Democracy’s coaching and materials to organize dialogue circles to work through issues of intergenerational poverty and racism. The program has decreased tensions and helped build trust between native and white residents. Results include a significantly higher native graduation rate and the establishment of a small business incubator with a racially diverse board. Read more about their work here.

This is just one of many examples of people coming together across divides for honest, productive dialogue on tough issues and then solving problems together. Let’s connect these local efforts for greater national impact.

Highlights of the Convening

This will be a collaborative, arts-oriented, multi-cultural event. Some of the noteworthy features include:

  • The release of the new edition of Everyday Democracy’s guide on community-police relations with a special focus on racial equity,
  • Panel of young community leaders,
  • Arts to connect and inspire us,
  • A photography/storytelling exhibit that will be created during the convening,
  • An opportunity to hear from John W. Franklin, curator for the newly opened African-American Museum, and
  • An opportunity to hear from national leaders in participatory democracy, criminal justice, education, and health.

The election is almost here, and afterwards, no matter what the outcome, we will need to build on positive examples of dialogue and deliberation and real work towards equity. Please join us in Baltimore, MD, December 8-10, and get ready to be inspired.

Click here for more information about the Convening and click here to register. More stories of change, and resources for all communities, are here at our web site, also.

We hope to see you there!