Category Archives: field news

Participate in IAF’s International Facilitation Week, Oct. 19-25

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Every year, our good friends at the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) host something called International Facilitation Week – an event aimed at showcasing the power of facilitation to new and existing audiences and at creating a sense of community among facilitators and our groups worldwide – and we strongly encourage NCDD members to consider participating!

This year’s International Facilitation Week (IFW) will be celebrated from October 19th – 25th, 2015. Facilitators from around the world and across the NCDD network can celebrate IFW by organizing trainings or showcases, publishing articles or blog posts, beginning collaborations or projects – the list goes on. Basically, participate however you’d like to, and gain exposure for your work by the affiliation to IFW.

Here’s a bit of what IAF says about the Week and some of their suggestions for how you can participate:

The IAF is simply the catalyst for International Facilitation Week. The invitation to celebrate the week is open to everyone.

Generally, the Association holds its virtual Annual General Meeting during IFW, as well as a number of international live Twitter chats. We also announce our new inductees to the IAF Hall of Fame.  IAF regions and chapters hold numerous activities too, both virtual and face-to-face.

Here are some ideas to inspire your activities:

  • Publicise your best facilitation case studies  – now is the time to write those up and announce them on your own and your clients’ websites! Get creative – use video and podcasted interviews.
  • If you are an internal facilitator, encourage your employer to showcase how you use facilitation for the benefit of your organisation. Hold a “lunch and learn” or “coffee break case study” in your workplace during the week.
  • Organise a training or learning event with others who also work on collaboration, dialogue, mediation, conflict resolution and group process.
  • Set up an event for potential clients in which you showcase the benefits of facilitation. Need inspiration? Consider interviewing recipients of the Facilitation Impact Awards.
  • Offer free or discounted facilitation services to groups who could benefit from professional facilitation. Use IFW to announce a commitment to doing some new pro-bono work, or to release the results from some previous pro-bono work.
  • Approach your local school, college, university, teaching hospital or training providers to see if they’d like to collaborate on an IFW event or program.
  • Talk to your local or national health and social care organisations to discuss the possibility of a training or other facilitation event during the Week.
  • Use your networks – What other professional organisations do you belong to that might be interested in joining in celebrating IFW?
  • Make use of the media. Local papers and radio stations are may include coverage if given a strong local angle or link to issues currently in the news.
  • If you blog, make sure you write about facilitation in the run up to and during the Week. Think of an especially strong example or compelling facilitation story.

And of course, you can always come up with your own creative way to participate in IFW! The IAF keeps an international calendar of facilitation events taking place and encourages IFW participants to add their events to it. All you have to do is send the details of your event (who, what, where, when, and how) to conference@iaf-world.org.

To learn more about International Facilitation Week, be sure to visit www.iaf-world.org/site/pages/international-facilitation-week and check back frequently. We hope to see many of our NCDDers participate!

Public Agenda Launches Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment

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We were excited to hear a recent announcement from the team at Public Agenda – one of our great NCDD organizational members – about the creation of the new Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment, and we encourage you to join us in congratulating PA and its co-founder, Dr. Daniel Yankelovich, on the accomplishment!

PublicAgenda-logoThe Center’s official inauguration took place at PA’s celebration of both its 40th anniversary and Dan’s 90th birthday, which you can read more about here. The Yankelovich Center was made possible with the generous support of another wonderful NCDD member organization, the Kettering Foundation, and Kettering has committed to a robust program of joint research through the Center. Kettering’s president David Mathews created a video to commemorate the occasion, which you can see here.

Here’s some of what PA said about the new Center:

…Public Agenda is pleased to announce the inauguration of the Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment. The Center will develop, disseminate and apply Dan Yankelovich’s seminal ideas about democracy, including how the public comes to judgment, the public’s critical role in the functioning of a just and effective democracy and the conditions that help the public to play that role. We surprised Dan with an announcement of the Center during Public Agenda’s 40th anniversary celebration, which coincided with Dan’s 90th birthday.

The Yankelovich Center will  conduct original research, create tools, convene practitioners and thought leaders and join public conversations relevant to its mission. Its audiences will include public officials, public engagement practitioners, community leaders, and the fields of public participation, deliberative democracy, civic education and governance….

The Yankelovich Center explores questions including:

  • How do our increasingly fragmented news media, highly polarized national politics, fast-changing information and communications technologies and changing demographics affect the public’s ability to engage issues productively and come to public judgment?
  • What are the prime obstacles and enablers of public judgment in communities on community problems and nationally on national and international problems?
  • How does public judgment affect important changes in public policy or community life?
  • What are the best ways to cultivate public judgment and civic engagement among millennials, groups with low voting and political participation rates, or among and across people from very different cultural backgrounds?
  • What can be done to encourage a broader understanding of the concept of public judgment among elected officials and the media? How can existing institutions better support a more active, engaged and informed public and what are the most promising new institutions, tools and strategies?
  • What role should the ideas and practices of public judgment and civic engagement play in K-12 and higher education?

Along with the new Yakelovich Center, the Public Agenda team also announced their new Restoring Opportunity initiative, a 10-year commitment to tackling the issues surrounding the decline of educational, economic, and civic opportunities in America.

We can’t wait to start seeing some of the work that Public Agenda is gearing up for, and we congratulate them and Dan on their wonderful history and bright future!

You can find more information from Public Agenda on the Yankelovich Center for Public Judgment at www.publicagenda.org/pages/yankelovich-center-for-public-judgment#sthash.mf5Z8rhs.dpuf.

An Update on the NCDD-CRS Meetings

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As many of you know, NCDD has been working with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service since last October’s NCDD national conference, to organize meetings between NCDD members and CRS staff at their fourteen regional field offices. This was inspired, in part, by CRS director Grande Lum’s speech at the conference.

We wanted to let the network know that meetings have begun taking place in several cities over the past few months, and more are in the works!

GrandeLum-NextStepBubble-borderThese meetings are an exciting opportunity to start a productive relationship with staff of an important government agency based in your area. They are also providing the supporting NCDD members who attend with an opportunity to talk about how we can be more responsive during times of crisis that call for dialogue, and to build relationships that strengthen our ability to respond. See our November 6th blog post at www.ncdd.org/16724 for more information on CRS and our initial plans for these meetings.

Meetings took place this past winter and spring in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Seattle, where our members came together with CRS staff to learn more about one another’s work and discuss opportunities to collaborate and support each other. Some exciting ideas have emerged from these initial discussions, including:

  • Supporting CRS and NCDD members alike by inviting one another to trainings
  • Sharing resources, including facilitators and mediators, and making referrals from CRS to NCDD members, and vice versa
  • Involving one another in regional networking
  • Working together on initiatives, such as CRS’ Student Problem Identification & Resolution of Issues Together (SPIRIT), or building a community responders network in members’ communities

NCDD members have reported back that they learned a lot about CRS and the kind of work that they do in communities in their region, and that CRS staff and NCDD members alike were very eager to explore ways to support one another and possibilities for working together. These initial meetings were just that – the start of what we hope will be a growing relationship between CRS staff and our members in their respective regions.

Meetings are still being planned this summer and in early fall for the following cities: Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. All NCDD 2014 attendees and supporting members of NCDD whose dues are in good standing are welcome to attend. If you would like to attend one of these upcoming meetings, please send an email to NCDD’s program director, Courtney Breese, at courtney@ncdd.org.CRS-offices

Many thanks to the NCDD members who have stepped up to serve as lead contacts in each of the cities where a meeting is being held. We couldn’t pull this off without their help! Lead contacts for the meetings that already took place were: Nicole Hewitt & Susan Shelton (New York), Elizabeth Hudson (Detroit), Kathryn Hyten (Boston), John Inman (Seattle), and Janice Thomson (Chicago). Our most heartfelt thanks for their help in organizing these meetings.

We are beyond thrilled with the next steps coming out of the meetings held to date, and look forward to engaging more of our members with CRS staff in their region. If you have any additional thoughts about how NCDD members might collaborate with CRS, please share them with us in the comments below. NCDD will share these ideas with the CRS staff and local members in each region as they continue to explore possibilities for these budding connections.

Call for Papers for New Journal of Dialogue Studies

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We are happy to share the announcement below from Elena Liedig of the Dialogue Society. Elena’s announcement came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Call for Papers for Journal of Dialogue Studies
Autumn 2015, Volume 3, Number 2
Dialogue and Democracy

Paper submission deadline: 07/11/2015

This is a call for papers for the Journal of Dialogue Studies, a multidisciplinary, blind-peer-reviewed academic journal published twice a year. The Journal seeks to bring together a body of original scholarship on the theory and practice of dialogue that can be critically appraised and discussed. It aims to contribute towards establishing ‘dialogue studies’ as a distinct academic field (or perhaps even emerging discipline). It is hoped that this will be directly useful not only to scholars and students but also to professionals and practitioners working in different contexts at various cultural interfaces.

The Editors would like to call for papers providing ‘dialogue and democracy’ for the forthcoming issue. However, authors are also welcome to submit papers that address the topic of the previous issues, namely ‘social scientific and historical analysis of dialogue practice’, ‘dialogue ethics’, ‘critiquing dialogue theories’, or indeed any other paper that comes within the remit of the Journal as described below. All papers, regardless of their particular theme, will be considered so long as they are in line with the aims and focus of the Journal. Please see below for more information.

For the Journal’s Editorial Team, Editorial Board, article submission guideline, style-guide and past issues please click here or visit: www.DialogueStudies.org.

Papers within General Remit of Journal

The Journal publishes conceptual, research, and/or case-based works on both theory and practice, and papers that discuss wider social, cultural or political issues as these relate to the practice and evaluation of dialogue. Dialogue is understood provisionally as: meaningful interaction and exchange between individuals and/or people of different groups (social, cultural, political and religious) who come together through various kinds of conversations or activities with a view to increased understanding.

Some scholars will want to question that description of dialogue, and others may be sceptical of the effectiveness of dialogue as a mechanism to produce increased understanding. The Editors of course welcome vigorous discussion and debate on these and other fundamental questions.

The Editors do not have any preference as regards the general disciplinary background of the work. Indeed contributions will be welcome from a variety of disciplines which may, for example, include sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, the study of religion, politics, international relations or law.

Papers on ‘Dialogue and Democracy’

The Editors invite papers on dialogue and democracy, including papers critically appraising the following areas:

  • What is the relationship between dialogue and democracy?
  • How is dialogue espoused by different practitioners of democracy, from leaders to the general public?
  • The positive and negative impact dialogue can have on democracy.
  • What can democracy learn from dialogue?
  • Are politics and/or power structures within the context of a democratic system compatible with dialogue values and processes?
  • What role if any can dialogue play in supporting the processes that produce and develop government policies?
  • Are political ambitions and dialogic aspirations mutually exclusive?

Papers on ‘Social Scientific and Historical Analysis of Dialogue Practice’

  • Where do dialogue practices come from, sociologically and intellectually?
  • How has dialogue practice changed/developed over time in a particular place, religious/interreligious context and/or post conflict context?
  • How have dialogue practices been shaped by overlapping areas of theory, policy and practice?
  • How have dialogue practices themselves impacted upon societal issues or discourse?
  • Mapping the existing field of practice and study.
  • Sociological and historical analysis of the perception of the need for ‘dialogue’ given its current status as a preferred means of community engagement or management of community/intergroup tensions or conflict.
    (See Fern Elsdon-Baker, JDS 1:1)

Papers on ‘Dialogue Ethics’

The Editors invite papers with a focus on dialogue and ethics, including papers critically exploring the following areas:

  • Dialogic ethics as conceived by dialogue theorists such as Buber, Gadamer, Freire (and developed by others)
  • Ethics espoused and/or enacted by leaders of/participants in dialogue
  • Dialogue as a process of ethics formation/refinement
  • Underlying and perhaps unstated values in dialogue:
    • What kind of interaction is seen valid or as meaningful? What are the criteria? Who decides? (Fern Eldson-Baker, JDS 1:1)
    • Where building understanding is conceived as goal of dialogue, ‘what understandings are valued and how [are] such understandings… defined’? (Michael Atkinson, JDS 1:1)
  • Ethical pitfalls in the practice of dialogue

Papers on ‘Critiquing Dialogue Theories’

By dialogue ‘theories’ is meant developed, significant understandings or principles of dialogue. The Editors are open to papers exploring theories extrapolated by the author from the significant and distinctive practice of a dialogue practitioner who has perhaps not elaborated his/her ideas in writing. They invite papers which address critical/evaluative questions such as the following:

  • Which dialogue theories are/have been most influential in practice?
  • Do dialogue theories make sense in relation to relevant bodies of research and established theories?
  • Do dialogue theories sufficiently take account of power imbalances?
  • How far are dialogue theories relevant/useful to dialogue in practice?
  • Do normative dialogue theories have anything to offer in challenging contexts in which circumstances often suggested as preconditions for dialogue (for example, equality, empathetic listening, the bringing of assumption into the open, safety) simply do not obtain?

The Editors welcome papers which address these questions in relation to one or more than one specified dialogue theories. They also welcome critical case studies of the application of specified dialogue theories in practice.

In all papers submitted, a concern with the theory or practice of dialogue should be in the foreground.

While the Editors do not wish to be prescriptive about the definition of dialogue, they do specify that papers should have a clear bearing on ‘live’ dialogue – actual interaction between human beings; papers which analyse written, fictional dialogue without relating this clearly and convincingly to ‘live’ dialogue are not suitable for the Journal.

Case studies should include a high level of critical evaluation of the practice in question, and/or apply dialogue theory in a way that advances understanding or critique of that theory and/or its application.

Papers should be submitted by email attachment to: journal[at]dialoguesociety[dot]org and must be received by July 11th, 2015 in order to allow sufficient time for peer review. Manuscripts should be presented in a form that meets the requirements set out in Journal’s Article Submission Guidelines, provided here, and Style Guide, provided here. The running order for Volume 3, Number 2, listing the papers to be published in that issue, will be announced by the beginning of September 2015. For further information please click here.

Please send any queries to the Editorial Team via journal[at]dialoguesociety[dot]org.

Join the Transpartisan Conference in Boston this June 20th!

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Those of you within driving distance of Boston won’t want to miss this event at UMass Boston on the 20th…

A partnership involving the Public Conversations Project, University of Massachusetts Boston’s Center for Peace, Democracy and Development, and the Bridge Alliance (which NCDD is part of) is hosting Boston’s first Transpartisan movement event at UMass Boston on June 20th, from 10am to 4pm.

This event is part of a national series of gatherings aimed at shifting our polarized political landscape, and finding more constructive ways to communicate across difference. Whether the conflict at hand is Boston 2024, tension between law enforcement and communities, or local disagreements around planning and development in our cities, we have to find better ways to talk with one another.

The gathering is part of an effort – spearheaded in part by NCDD organizational members Mark Gerzon and John Steiner of the Mediators Foundation – to help move our country’s politics beyond the partisan divides and gridlock to start making better decisions that move us all forward. This gathering will be building momentum from previous Transpartisan gatherings including the pre-conference gathering NCDD hosted in conjunction with our 2014 conference as well as gatherings in Colorado and San Francisco, and upcoming events planned in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

Here’s how the organizers describe the conference:

The goal of this particular conference is to offer Boston’s leaders an opportunity to think collaboratively about how to shift the  electoral culture regionally and nationally, and find alternatives to the partisan political paralysis that dominates our public sphere…

Over the course of the day, eight speakers will share their vision for embedding the Transpartisan movement in our culture, and offer practical skills from cross-spectrum bridge-builders to transcend polarization. Speakers include Christian Science Monitor editor Marshall Ingwerson, representatives from No Labels and the Mediators Foundation, bridge-builders from across the political spectrum and educators from University of New Hampshire, Gordon College, and UMass Boston (full list available in the press release).

This gathering promises to be a pivotal conversation on how we in the D&D field can help transform the political climate in our country, and we encourage you to register today! There is a nominal $30 fee to attend.

You can check out the press release for the Transpartisan Conference here and find more information by visiting www.publicconversations.org/transpartisan.

We hope to see you there!

Director of Public Engagement Opening at Public Agenda

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We are pleased to announce that the good people at Public Agenda, one of our NCDD member organizations, recently announced that they are hiring for a new Director of Public Engagement.

PublicAgenda-logoIt’s a great job opportunity that many of our NCDD members would be an excellent fit for, so make sure to apply as soon as you can!

Here’s some of how Public Agenda describes the position:

The director of public engagement leads a team in the development and execution of public engagement projects on a variety of local and national issues, and leads the ongoing development of our public engagement methods, products and services. Reporting directly to the president, the PE director:

  • Is instrumental in helping the organization design and fund new public engagement projects aligned with our strategic goals, including cultivating funder/client relations and playing a leading role in project design, proposal writing, and budgeting. In this, s/he often works in close coordination with the president and always with our directors of project development and finance.
  • Oversees all public engagement projects, personally leading some and coaching/supervising team members in leading others. Also, ensures the coordination of occasional cross-departmental initiatives that combine members of the public engagement, research and/or communications teams in an integrated program.
  • Builds and supervises the public engagement team and facilitates their professional development…

You can find the full job description and directions for how to apply by visiting www.publicagenda.org/pages/opportunities-at-public-agenda#sthash.XdGQ4RjK.dpuf.

Good luck to all the applicants!

Can Participatory Budgeting Democratize School Budgets?

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We encourage you to check out what promises to be a fascinating webinar that the Participatory Budgeting Project, an NCDD member organization, is hosting on Thursday, June 4th from 2-3pm EST / 11am-12pm PST. 

The webinar is titled PBP-logo“Democratizing Schools with Participatory Budgeting” and will be an in-depth discussion of the nation’s first school-based participatory budgeting (PB) processes, featuring representatives from PB projects at schools in San Jose, CA and Chicago, IL. The webinar will seek to use insights from these cases studies to explore the impact that democratic processes like PB can have on young people, schools, and neighborhoods.

Here’s how PBP describes the webinar:

Schools and school districts operate large and complex budgets – often with minimal participation from the community members and youth they work to serve. But it doesn’t have to be this way!

Join the Participatory Budgeting Project to learn about how participatory budgeting (PB) can encourage transparency in school budgets, reveal the most pressing needs of students, and promote democratic decisions that result in better schools and neighborhoods…

The webinar will include an in-depth look at the first school-based PB processes in the U.S., highlighting three high schools around the country that are leading the charge to lift up student and parent voice. We’ll be joined by representatives from Californians for Justice to discuss the PB process at Overfelt High School in San Jose – recently profiled in EdSource – and from Mikva Challenge and Embarc Chicago to discuss the PB process at Chicago’s Sullivan High School.

Join us to learn about these case studies and explore how participatory budgeting could work in your school or school district.

This webinar promises to be a great opportunity to hear from people directly involved in some of the most cutting edge work on participatory democracy in schools, so be sure to mark your calendars for June 4th! You can register and receive more information on the event by clicking here.

Not familiar with PB?

Participatory Budgeting is a democratic process in which ordinary community members directly decide how to spend part of the public budget. It has been used around the world for 25 years, in over 1,500 cities, to lift up the needs of communities and make public spending more equitable. You can watch a short video about PB here:

You can find the original Participatory Budgeting Project post about this webinar by visiting www.participatorybudgeting.org/blog/democratizing-schools-with-pb.

Newest Issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation

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We want to encourage our members to take a look at the newest issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation, which is not just a great resource for our field, but also features the work of some of our great NCDD members.

The JPD itself is a joint effort between two NCDD organizations – the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the International Association of Public Participation. You can find the list of articles in this issue below with links to their abstracts and full PDF downloads. We encourage you to learn more at about the Journal of Public Deliberation at www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd.

DDC logoIAP2 logo

Current Issue: Volume 11, Issue 1 (2015)

Articles

Journal of Public Deliberation is a peer reviewed, open access journal with the principal objective of synthesizing the research, opinion, projects, experiments and experiences of academics and practitioners in the multi-disciplinary field of “deliberative democracy.”

Context and Medium Matter: Expressing Disagreements Online and Face-to-Face in Political Deliberations by Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Lauren Bryant, and Bruce Bimber

Variations of Institutional Design for Empowered Deliberation by Carolina Johnson and John Gastil

Inclusion, Equality, and Discourse Quality in Citizen Deliberations on Broadband by Soo-Hye Han, William Schenck-Hamlin, and Donna Schenck-Hamlin

Understanding Participant Representativeness in Deliberative Events: A Case Study Comparing Probability and Non-Probability Recruitment Strategies by Jamie Griffin, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Alan Tomkins, Amanda Richardson, and Stacia Jorgensen

Diverse Discourse: Analyzing the Potential of Public Affairs Magazine Online Forums to Reflect Qualities of the Public Sphere by David Wolfgang and Joy Jenkins

Deliberating While Voting: The Antecedents, Dynamics, And Consequences Of Talking While Completing Ballots In Two Vote-By-Mail States by Justin Reedy and John Gastil

Democratic Innovations in Deliberative Systems – The Case of the Estonian Citizens’ Assembly Process by Magnus E. Jonsson

Does Culture Matter for Deliberation? Linguistic Speech Cultures and Parliamentary Deliberation in Switzerland by Seraina Pedrini

Deliberation for Reconciliation in Divided Societies by Magdalena Dembinska Dr. and Françoise Montambeault Dr

Balancing Act: An Online Deliberative Budgeting Simulator

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We want to encourage our members to check out a neat tool developed by NCDD organizational member Engaged Public. Their Balancing Act tool is an online budget simulator that lets citizens experience the challenges and trade-offs of public budgets, and it can be a useful tool to apply in many D&D settings. We encourage you to learn more from Engaged Public’s description below.

We at Engaged Public have been working on public budget simulation since our 2007 launch of Backseat Budgeter, which originally started as a learning aid at Colorado State University and eventually became the tool of choice for thousands of Coloradans who wanted to engage more deeply in their state’s fiscal decisions by trying their own hand at balancing the budget.

Well, we’re excited to announce that we have recently launched Balancing Act, our new and improved online budget simulator for school districts, special districts, towns, cities, counties, and states. Balancing Act is a web-based public engagement tool focused on the budget process. It not only increases fiscal transparency by publishing an entity’s budget in an easy-to-understand fashion with graphics, intuitive descriptions, and contextual details of revenue and spending items, but it also goes a step further with its interactive, built-in budget simulation, where residents can attempt to balance the budget as they see fit, subject to the same constraints decision makers have. These budget priorities are then sent back to the public body to be incorporated into its budget process.

Our partners include the City of Hartford, Connecticut – which integrated Balancing Act into its series of People’s Budget meetings and later expanded its use to the wider public – and the State of Colorado (via the Office of State Planning and Budgeting), which helped release a simulation of its 2015-16 General Fund budget. In time for Tax Day, we also unveiled a tool where Coloradans can view an estimate of their 2014 state income, sales, and gas tax, as well as see what those tax dollars paid for – the Colorado Taxpayer Receipt.

While Balancing Act is not a magic bullet for budget-related public engagement, it has proved effective at increasing the number and diversity of citizens who take part in the budget process, not to mention their appreciation of the often-difficult tradeoffs required in balancing public budgets, particularly in these difficult fiscal times. It has also given public officials valuable qualitative and quantitative data on residents’ own budget priorities in an easy-to-use, downloadable format.

We encourage you to learn more about Engaged Public’s Balancing Act tool by visiting http://abalancingact.com.

A Resounding “Thank You” to Andy Fluke

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NCDD Co-Founder Andy Fluke’s role as Creative Director is coming to a close in July. While many of you know Andy, you might not realize the scale of the contribution he has made over the years. It’s a story well worth telling.

Andy-pumpkin-borderAs creative director, Andy has been the graphic design force behind our website and publications, quietly anchoring NCDD’s infrastructure and fostering its growth for the past 12 years.  He may be best known for developing the website from a handful of pages to what it is today: a 6,000-page compendium widely regarded as the leading source for news and resources in the field. In NCDD’s first 12 years, Andy redesigned and expanded the website four times, in response to the needs of our community and the growth of the organization.

His first love has always been graphic design, a skill he learned in his father’s printing business and wielded to create the conference guidebooks, reports, signage, infographics, and other NCDD materials that have drawn praise from professionals throughout the dialogue and deliberation community.

To focus only on Andy’s creative skills, however, would be to miss the myriad other ways he has helped to shape NCDD since its founding in 2002. As co-founder, he played a critical role as sounding board and thinking partner for Sandy over the years. His contributions to NCDD’s day-to-day operations have also been significant: he has assisted with office tasks, written and edited content for the website, helped behind the scenes at NCDD’s events, maintained the staff’s computers, and much more.

AndyOnRock-borderAbove all, Andy has been essential as a problem solver, stepping into new responsibilities and mastering new skills on the fly. “There is no accomplishment that I’m more proud of than my overall ability to solve problems and create opportunities with little or no financial investment,” he said. “In every task, I’ve dedicated myself to seeking the most cost-efficient and productive ways to make things happen for NCDD.”

This ability has been indispensable to NCDD’s success. When Sandy and Andy co-founded NCDD in 2002 after running the first National Conference on Dialogue and Deliberation, planning conferences and running organizations were new territory for them. NCDD has always been a lean operation, and the desire to do as much as possible for NCDD members required them to be thoughtful, frugal, and clever when attempting anything new, especially online.

As Andy moves into the next phase of his career, we know that his resourcefulness and “keep it simple” approach will serve organizations well for years to come. At the same time, as Andy says, “I look forward to acting as an ambassador for the fantastic work that NCDD continues to do and continuing to support the dialogue and deliberation community.”

Andy will continue offering his skill and experience to the dialogue and deliberation community and is available to consult on or engage in any publication or internet design projects. His personal email address is afluke@gmail.com and you can also learn more about him at andyfluke.com.