Join NCDD Confab Call on the Nevins Fellowship Program on Sept. 21st!

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We encourage our NCDD member organizations to register to join us for a special Confab Call on Wednesday, September 21st from 12-1pm Eastern / 9-10am Pacific that can help your organization build capacity while helping the emerging student leaders of our field gain skills and experience in D&D work!

NCDD is hosting an exciting presentation and discussion with the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, who will be sharing about the incredible opportunity for organizations to host a D&D-trained student fellow at no cost next summer through their Nevins Democracy Leaders Program! You won’t want to miss it!

This is a rare and competitive opportunity for leading organizations in our field, and this Confab Call will be one of the best ways to find out more about how your group can take advantage of this program, so make sure to register today to save your spot on the call!

The Nevins Democracy Leaders Program was founded in 2014 after a gift from David Nevins, an NCDD Sustaining Member. The program provides Penn State students with education and training in transpartisan leadership skills by exposing them to a variety of viewpoints and philosophies, as well as teaching critical thinking along with the tools of dialogue and deliberation.

But the flagship work of fostering the next generation of democracy leaders centers on the yearly initiative to place Nevins Program students in unique fellowship position with organizations focused on D&D, transpartisan dialogue, and civic renewal – that means organizations like yours! Stipends and living expenses are provided to the students through the program so that organizations can bring these bright, motivated students into their work for a summer at no cost to them. It’s an amazing opportunity for everyone involved! You can get a better sense of what the program experience is like by checking out this blog post from a 2016 Nevins Fellow about their summer fellowship with the Close-Up Foundation.

NCDD is proud to have partnered last year with the McCourtney Institute to help identify organizations in the field that can host Nevins fellows, and we’re continuing the partnership this year. This Confab Call is the best way to get your organization plugged into the process, so be sure to register today to learn more about the program and how to apply!

On this Confab, McCourtney’s Senior Scholar John Gastil and Managing Director Christopher Beem will provide an overview of the Nevins program and its aims, discuss the training that the future fellows are going through, and share more about how your organization can take advantage of this great chance to help cultivate the next generation of D&D leaders while getting more support for your work – all for FREE! We can’t wait to talk more with you on the call!

About NCDD’s Confab Calls…

NCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members (and potential members) of NCDD to talk with and hear from innovators in our field about the work they’re doing, and to connect with fellow members around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is encouraged but not required for participation. Register today if you’d like to join us.

Leading Organizational & Community Change

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

Leading Organizational & Community Change (LOCC) is an academic program available through Humboldt State University’s College of eLearning & Extended Education. Participants can take the courses individually to develop professional skills around collaborative decision-making processes; or may complete the five core courses to achieve a Leading Organizational & Community Change certificate.

To learn more about the courses and certificate program, check out the excerpt below or go directly to LOCC’s site here.

From the site…

The Program
Become a notably effective and engaging organizational leader, public official, facilitator, or consultant through practical, inspiring, and skill-based learning in the Certificate Program in Leading Community and Organizational Change.

Grounded in the behavioral and brain sciences, the curriculum is designed build your knowledge and develop your skills so you can work collaboratively and constructively with colleagues, constituents, neighbors, and clients to solve problems, resolve conflicts, build lasting agreements, develop public policy, and plan for the future.

Gain a solid understanding of the foundational and advanced skills of designing, convening, leading, and participating in collaborative planning and decision-making processes in order to strengthen organizations, boards, communities, and democratic institutions.

Designed for Professionals Like You
This program is designed for a broad audience: anyone who wants to be more effective in their roles and more skillful in creating desired change at work and in their communities or municipalities. This includes organizational managers, community leaders, elected officials, city managers and planners, facilitators and consultants, or members of communities and organizations in all sectors: government, business, education, and not-for-profit.

This certificate program is recommended for anyone who wants to either be more collaborative as a leader or who wants to help others find new and innovative solutions to tough issues through participatory planning and collaborative decision-making.

Five Core Courses
To earn a certificate, you must complete the five core courses. Courses are non-credit, with a credit option. Courses may be taken individually; completion of certificate is not required.

Graduates of the Cascadia Center for Leadership 10-day program need only complete Foundations of Meeting Mastery, Advanced Meeting Mastery, and Designing Collaborative Processes to be eligible for the certificate.

Foundations of Meeting Mastery: A Key to Vibrant Organizations & Communities: Learn and practice the essential elements of planning, opening, conducting, closing, and following up on meetings at work, in communities, or public “hearings.” Discover methods for collaboratively solving problems and finding mutually agreeable solutions among individuals, stakeholder groups, and organizations.
Advanced Meeting Mastery: Apply Theory, Tools & Skills: Increase and strengthen your process know-how as a facilitative leader or neutral facilitator. Add process tools and facilitative behaviors to your tool kit. Each participant will build on the knowledge and skills developed in Foundations of Meeting Mastery (or equivalent experience) and have the opportunity to practice leading or facilitating groups, dealing with difficult behaviors, and receive supportive and constructive feedback from participants and instructors including optional video review.
Designing Collaborative Processes for Communities & Organizations: Solve Tough Problems, Plan for the Future & Create Change: To effectively take on and solve complex issues, organizational and community leaders need to know how to design processes that involve a series of meetings over time with diverse stakeholders. Making such processes inclusive, understandable, transparent and collaborative is key to creating constructive and productive interactions. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about actual successful collaborative processes and receive help designing your own.Foundations of Meeting Mastery or equivalent experience is required. Advanced Meeting Mastery is helpful but not required.
Self Mastery: Who You Are Leads: Increase self-awareness and appreciation of your strengths so that you can make more conscious and considered choices about how to be as constructive as possible in your words and actions in everyday and difficult interactions.
Communication & Leadership Skills for Productive Interactions: Learn how to increase your ability to have your expertise and experience more fully utilized and your recommendations implemented. Whether you work as an independent consultant or in a staff position in your organization (e.g., planning, human resources, engineering, legal or financial), you will be better able to establish and maintain effective partnerships with your clients.

Above are the five available core courses; to see the complete list of current courses, check out LOCC’s site here.

Resource Link: www2.humboldt.edu/locc/

Organizing Study Circles with Young People

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The 24-page guide, Organizing Study Circles with Young People, was developed by Everyday Democracy [who used to be known as Study Circles Resource Center] and published in 2003. Oftentimes younger people are excluded from participating in engagement efforts, even though youth have much to offer on making decisions and building community. Study Circles are a style of dialogue process, where a small, diverse group of participants can discuss different points of view; usually with the goal of moving from dialogue to action. The guide gives detailed steps for designing a Study Circles process for young people to come together and dialogue. This process encourages youth to be engaged with a variety of perspectives, to hear and be heard, and ultimately to become more active citizens.

Below is an excerpt from the guide and it can be found in full to download on Everyday Democracy’s site here or at the bottom of this page.

From the guide…

With the growth of study circles as a tool for community dialogue and problem solving, more and more organizers in communities and organizations are reaching out to include young people in study circle programs. This is critical, since young people have a stake in helping our communities work — and they bring unique energy, insights, and assets to public conversations and to solving public problems.

Young people get involved in study circles in many different ways: in schools; as part of community-based or neighborhood programs; in after-school programs or youth organizations; as part of large youth events and conferences, and in other settings where young people spend time. Sometimes young people and adults are together in study circles; sometimes the circles are for youth only. Through this process, young people learn about issues, gain new skills, have a chance to hear and be heard, and find ways to work with others on the issues that are important to them. In short, they have a chance to experience their own potential as active and involved citizens.

Using this guide
The purpose of this guide is to help young people and adults organize successful youth study circles in a variety of settings.

Part 1 provides an Overview of youth study circles, including the rationale for participation, study circle principles, and universal guidelines.

Part 2 covers the basic steps of Organizing study circles with young people.

Part 3 describes different Settings where study circles with youth take place, and advice for organizing in each of those settings.

Part 4 offers a list of Resources.

Part 1: An overview of youth study circles
Young people are key to building our communities and strengthening our democracy. They offer vision, energy, and a distinct point of view about our public concerns. Yet too often, young people are left out of community conversations and decisions — even when the issues directly involve and affect them! Adding these voices to critical community conversations benefits everyone. Young people should be part of the discussions about issues that affect our neighborhoods, schools, congregations, and other organizations. A study circle is a very different kind of conversation for youth and adults alike. The process — making room for all voices, respecting different points of view, emphasizing listening, and searching for common understanding — helps participants address some of our most difficult public issues. Participants find their voice, get involved with others different from themselves, and find ways to make a difference.

Youth study circles …
– offer a different way of talking and listening.
– expand understanding of an issue beyond one’s own view.
– help resolve conflict and promote critical thinking.
– build relationships and bridges among all kinds of participants.
– connect teens with adults and the broader world.
– help teens solve problems and take part in solutions.

Some study circles involve only young people as participants. In this case, the circles provide a structured process for diverse groups of young people to talk about issues they care about. Fostering important peer relationships, study circles promote honest dialogue without adult interference.

In other settings, study circles bring young people together with adults. This approach builds trust and understanding between generations that are often distant or even pitted against one another. With the help of strong facilitation, these study circles provide a setting that offers a new way of hearing one another and then working together. Adults and teens alike attest to the power of this experience.

This is an excerpt from the guide, it can be downloaded in full at the bottom of this page or from Everyday Democracy’s site here.

About Everyday Democracy
Everyday Democracy (formerly called the Study Circles Resource Center) is a project of The Paul J. Aicher Foundation, a private operating foundation dedicated to strengthening deliberative democracy and improving the quality of public life in the United States. Since our founding in 1989, we’ve worked with hundreds of communities across the United States on issues such as: racial equity, poverty reduction and economic development, education reform, early childhood development and building strong neighborhoods. We work with national, regional and state organizations in order to leverage our resources and to expand the reach and impact of civic engagement processes and tools.

Follow on Twitter: @EvDem

Resource Link: Organizing_Study_Circles_with_Young_People

Divisive Discourse: The Extreme Rhetoric of Contemporary American Politics

Posted on August 16, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The 258-page book, Divisive Discourse: The Extreme Rhetoric of Contemporary American Politics, by Joseph Zompetti was published January 2015. In the book, he discusses the extreme rhetoric that currently prevails in American political discourse and its subsequent effects on people to disengage and the political environment to become polarized. Zompetti shares insight into this toxic political environment, sheds light on the extreme rhetorical practices performed in US politics, and offers critical thinking skills for people to better participate despite this.

Below is an excerpt from the book and it can be purchased on Amazon here.

From the book…

Divisive Discourse challenges assumptions about political ideology. The book examines the techniques and contents of the divisive discourse that pervades contemporary American political conversation. It teaches us about extreme rhetoric, thus enabling readers to be more critical consumers of information.

The book provides a framework for identifying and interpreting extreme language. Readers learn about rhetorical fallacies and the strategies used by political pundits to manipulate and spin information.

In subsequent chapters the author examines and analyzes how divisive discourse is used in discussions of specific political issues including homosexual rights, gun control, and healthcare.

Divisive Discourse provides insight into how divisive discourse leads to societal fragmentation, and fosters apathy, confusion, animosity, and ignorance. By exposing the rhetoric of division and teaching readers how to confront it, the book reinvigorates the potential to participate in politics and serves as a guide for how to have civil discussions about controversial issues. Divisive Discourse is an ideal teaching tool for anyone interested in contemporary issues and courses in political science, media studies, or rhetoric.

About Joseph Zompetti
Dr. Zompetti is professor of communication at Illinois State University where he teaches courses in communication and social issues, classical rhetoric, and political communication. Dr. Zompetti’s research interests include the rhetoric of critical cultural studies and the rhetoric of civic engagement.

Resource Link: Divisive Discourse: The Extreme Rhetoric of Contemporary American Politics

A Guide to Participatory Budgeting in Schools

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The 57-page guide, A Guide to Participatory Budgeting in Schools, was a project of the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) and published in 2016. The guide’s curriculum design was created by Valeria Mogilevich, with project support by Melissa Appleton and Maria Hadden of PBP. This thorough guide gives details for implementing a participatory budgeting process within schools. Participatory budgeting is a process where people decide where to spend a portion of a budget by engaging their community- or in this case- their school, and vote on projects to make final decisions. The guide is rich with process details, helpful hints, plan layouts, and useable worksheets. There are 18 lesson plans and 6 worksheets provided in this guide to get a PB process launched in schools over the course of a semester or school year.

Sections include:
– Planning
– Idea Collection
– Proposal Development
– Voting
– Implementation and Beyond
– Worksheets

Below is an excerpt from the guide, you can find it in full at the bottom of this page and directly from PBP’s site here.

From the guide…

So, you’re interested in doing Participatory Budgeting in your school. Great! This guide will help you plan it.

Participatory Budgeting is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend a part of a public budget. In this case, the community members are students and the budget is the school budget. Students collect ideas about the school’s needs, develop project proposals, and vote on projects to fund. We know Participatory Budgeting is a mouthful, so we’ll call it PB from now on.

The process was first developed in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989. In Porto Alegre, as many as 50,000 people have participated each year to decide as much as 20% of the city budget. Since 1989, PB has spread to over 1,500 cities in Latin America, North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In the US and Canada, PB has been used in Toronto, Montreal, Guelph, Chicago, New York City, and Vallejo (California). Most of these PB processes are at the city level, for the municipal budget. PB has also been used, however, for counties, states, housing authorities, schools and school systems, universities, coalitions, and other public agencies.

We heard from a lot of people (through a PB process, actually) that they wanted help bringing PB to their schools. We wrote this for educators and principals looking to incorporate PB into their classroom during the school day.

Why PB?
Participatory Budgeting is great to bring into your classroom because:

It’s democracy in action.
It gives your students a positive civic engagement experience.
It serves as a bridge for your students to be engaged in politics and their community.
It strengthens the school community by building positive relations between students and the administration.
It shows students the benefits of getting involved.

By participating in a PB process, students will:

Increase their ability to work collaboratively.
Develop research, interviewing, and surveying skills.
Develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
Develop public presentation skills.
Increase their awareness of community needs and their role in addressing those needs.
Understand budgetary processes and develop basic budgeting skills Identify ways to participate in governance.
Increase concern about the welfare of others and develop a sense of social responsibility.

How it works
This curriculum is set up to take place:
In 45 minute-class periods
Once a week
Over the course of a semester

The idea is to focus on Participatory Budgeting one day of the week and leave the rest of your week to your regular content. We know that might not sound exactly like you. That’s OK! Everyone’s schedule and needs are different, so you can compress it by meeting more times a week. What you’re seeing here is the most efficient way to get through a Participatory Budgeting process. You can also spend more time on specific phases of the process and stretch it out into a whole year.

“Once you give young people the opportunity to help shape their community, they are incredibly willing and able to step up to that challenge. And students’ expertise is so needed as we work to improve education across the country. Youth-driven participatory budgeting in schools is an excellent tool to harness that expertise to create positive, constructive change.”

-Mia Salamone, Democracy in Action Coordinator, Mikva Challenge, Chicago, IL

“In our school we are low income and there’s negative stereotypes about our school and who we are, yet [our principal] is trusting us to make decisions about our education and never doubted parents and students like me would make the best decisions, and that is being shown by the project proposals we all have the ability to vote on.”

– Stephania Perez, Sophomore, Overfelt High School, San Jose, CA

To learn more about bringing participatory budgeting to schools, check out the guide in full below or on PBP’s site here.

About the Participatory Budgeting Project
The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) is a non-profit organization that helps communities decide how to spend public money, primarily in the US and Canada. Their mission is to empower community members to make informed, democratic, and fair decisions about public spending and revenue.

Follow on Twitter @PBProject

Resource Link: Guide_to_Participatory_Budgeting_in_Schools

Checking In on the Nevins Democracy Leaders Program

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

As part of our commitment to cultivating the next generation of leaders in dialogue & deliberation, NCDD launched a partnership last year with one of our member organizations, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, to help recruit for their Nevins Democracy Leaders Program. The program matches D&D-trained college students with D&D and transpartisan organizations that host them for fully funded summer fellowships which help them gain skills and experience needed to continue on in the field. It’s a great deal for the students and their host orgs. We wanted to share a check in about how it’s going for one of the eleven 2016 Nevins Fellows, Ethan Paul, during his fellowship with the Close-Up Foundation – an NCDD member organization.
If you’re part of an organization that would like to host a Nevins Fellow, then save the date for our Confab Call with the McCourtney Institute on Sept. 21st at 12pm Eastern where we’ll be talking about how to get involved in the next round of fellowships. Until then, check out Ethan’s piece below or find the original McCourtney blog post here.

Report from Nevins Fellow Ethan Paul

This Friday marked the end of my third week spent as a Nevins Fellow in Washington DC interning with the Close-Up Foundation. Close-Up is a civic-education organization dedicated to cultivating civic skills, values and culture in the minds of America’s youth. These include: an understanding of and appreciation for democracy; an ability to develop and communicate one’s own political positions; and an awareness and sympathy for political and philosophical differences.

For these first few weeks, I have been shadowing the program in real-time, quietly observing students from a diverse set of backgrounds and life experiences interact, debate, deliberate and discuss. I watched students consider the benefits and drawbacks of the differing visions of government championed by Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and MLK Jr. I listened to a student-led debate over the future of American energy policy, the civic purpose of war memorials and the need for prison sentencing reform. I witnessed primarily Spanish-speaking students from Texas deliberate with Georgian students over immigration and the different role that drugs play in their respective countries.

While this work has technically been laborious, it has been a needed and rewarding respite from the disheartening nature of today’s political debate, in which grandstanding, posturing and partisanship is prioritized ahead of finding the common ground. In a world which consistently promotes cynicism and doubt, these kids and this program have given me hope in the human condition and the prospects for a healthy political dialogue.

I believe that if every child were to experience the essence of this program – that is, if they had to the chance to sit down across from someone with whom they disagree politically, whether that be for cultural, geographical, educational, or economic reasons, and actually put in the effort to understand the principles and experiences which make-up that person’s political perspective – we would have a thriving and elastic democracy, one that was able to respond quickly and effectively to political emergencies or controversial topics that today would put it under considerable stress, such as immigration reform or the unsustainable accumulation of federal debt.

If I took anything away from these first few weeks, it is that schools, at all levels, should place a greater emphasis on not only the nuts and bolts of politics, but deliberation and communication itself. It will not matter how able the rising generation is at math or science if we have no ability to cooperate effectively with each other and put aside our differences; it will not matter how many engineers we have trained if the political system has not created an environment in which engineers have available to them the resources needed to successfully utilize that training. For this to ever become a reality, however, both parents and school administrators will need to find the courage to allow open and honest dialogue about our country.

I have come to believe, from my experiences at Close-Up, that if skills promoting political and social efficacy are developed effectively through dialogue, any person, regardless of background, will have the ability to unlock the universal nascent potential lying dormant within themselves to make a positive and lasting difference on our society. When this is done, our differences will not be an impediment to progress, but rather a vehicle for reaching it; diversity will no longer be bemoaned as a source of division, but rather a source of unity and solidarity.

Close-Up has opened me to this truth, and I plan on carrying it, and acting upon it, into wherever the future takes me.

You can find the original version of this McCourtney Institute blog post at http://democracyinstitute.la.psu.edu/blog/report-from-nevins-fellow-ethan-paul.

OSU Launches Divided Community Project

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We were happy to receive the announcement below from The Ohio State University, which recently launched an important and timely project called the Divided Community Project, and they have selected NCDD supporting member Grande Lum, one of our featured speakers at NCDD2014 when he headed the US Dept. of Justice’s Community Relations Service. We congratulate Grande and look forward to seeing the Project’s work develop. Learn more at the Project’s website by clicking here.

Ohio State announces Divided Community Project – Grande Lum joins as Director

Today The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law announces the Divided Community Project. The project aims to strengthen community efforts to transform division into action and focuses on how communities can respond constructively to civil unrest as well as on how they can identify and meaningfully address the reasons underlying community division. Earlier this year the Project published its first publications:

Key Considerations for Community Leaders Facing Civil Unrest: Effective Problem-Solving Strategies That Have Been Used in Other Communities, provides background information and expertise for local community leaders to assist and strengthen their effectiveness in responding through collaborative approaches to civil unrest. Key Considerations proposes six suggestions for dealing with the immediate aftermath of a divisive incident and makes two suggestions for longer-term strategies for addressing the causes of conflict.
Planning in Advance of Civil Unrest, offers leaders a stepped process to plan in ways that will avert or deal constructively with these divisive community events. Such a plan can help a community deal effectively with community division. Planning in Advance suggests eight strategies whereby communities can tackle division.

Both documents are licensed using the Creative Commons so that (with attribution) they may be copied, shared, adapted and tailored to fit the needs of a community or interest group.

The Project is pleased to announce that Grande Lum, Gould Research Fellow and Lecturer at Stanford Law and former Director of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, has joined Ohio State’s Divided Community Project as the Director. In guiding the project, Grande will draw on his extensive experience dealing with civil unrest with the Community Relations Service, where he directed a staff of about 40 conciliators intervening in major domestic conflicts over the last few years, as well as his past experience working, writing and teaching in the dispute resolution field. Grande will advance the Project’s initiatives to establish pilot programs which plan in advance of civil unrest, offer suggestions for improving practice, develop conflict assessment tools, and advocate for the use of collaborative methods for turning community division into positive action.

On joining the Divided Community Project, Grande wrote: “I am thrilled to be joining the Divided Community Project, at a time when the country is grappling with polarization at seemingly every turn. I look forward to working with the Project’s extraordinary team to move divided communities toward peace and justice.”

The Divided Community Project’s steering committee is composed of seasoned dispute resolution practitioners and academics: Nancy Rogers, Josh Stulberg, Chris Carlson, Susan Carpenter, Craig McEwen,Sarah Rubin, and Andrew Thomas. Bill Froehlich, Langdon Fellow in the Program on Dispute Resolution at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, serves as the Project’s Associate Director.

The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law Program on Dispute Resolution serves as the host institution. The JAMS Foundation provided significant funding for the creation of the Project and the Kettering Foundation partnered in its early work. The OSU Democracy Studies Program and Emeritus Academy have both awarded financial assistance that has supported valuable student research assistance for the project.

Dialogue on Sexual Assault

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Keiva Hummel

The article, Dialogue on Sexual Assault, by Natasha Dobrott was published April 2016 on Public Conversations Project‘s blog. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Dobrott discusses how college campus are talking about sexual assault. Many universities and colleges have come under scrutiny for both their Title IX violations and prevalence of sexual assault. The article uplifts some of the different ways that the conversations are taking place around addressing sexual assault on college campuses and the opportunity for more conversation around “healthy relationships, masculinity, and social norms”.

Below is an excerpt from the article and you can find the original in full on Public Conversations Project blog here.

From Public Conversations Project…

Engaging in Dialogue
The good news is that, at least in part due to the conversations that added scrutiny has inspired, students and administrators are talking about this issue on campus through formal and informal means more than ever. According to one Title IX administrator from the Boston area, sexual assault prevention is most successful when it is a “collaborative and iterative process” that involve the partnership of different stakeholders on campus. This includes raising awareness, teaching students how to keep themselves and their friends safe, and having adequate response teams in administration, law enforcement, and health services in the event that sexual assault does occur. One university embodied this idea of a collaborative and iterative process when it involved representatives from students, faculty, and administrative groups in revising its Title IX policies. This kind of opportunity allowed students to feel as though “they had agency and ownership in the process” and that their ideas were heard and taken into account. The schools that are most successful in sexual assault prevention have created multiple avenues such as this through which students, faculty, administrators, and law enforcement can discuss the issue, build trust, and maintain accountability.

Where is conversation about sexual assault happening?
Conversations about sexual assault take many forms on college campuses. Bystander Intervention is the most widespread avenue for conversation on this is issue. Teaching students to intervene in questionable situations they see that could result in sexual assault, programs like these focus largely on providing students with skills to recognize potentially risky situations and to safely intervene or diffuse the situation. Students can also participate in self-defense classes or student awareness and activism groups that focus on bringing attention to the problem with the intent of starting a conversation. Although programs like bystander intervention don’t address the problem from all angles, such discussing underlying gender norms, it does serve as a good way to encourage proactive conversation amongst students.

Where do we need more conversation?
A conversation lacking at many schools is the opportunity for discussions about healthy relationships, masculinity, and social norms. Sexual assault prevention is an “intrapersonal as well as an interpersonal problem,” said a women’s center program coordinator, meaning that students need to be able to explore their own internal influences and motivations. Conversations that help students explore the pressure to conform to gender norms or learn what healthy relationships actually look like are important in helping students to understand one another and “build a strong culture for each other,” as one Title IX administrator in New Hampshire pointed out. I have seen these on my own campus through student discussion groups about masculinity, sporadic events about gender norms, and even just this past week, a panel on healthy relationships. Creating more opportunities for students to learn and discuss these underlying problems helps students to connect with others, building that culture for others. Genuine curiosity and caring about other people’s experiences and how other people experience things can enhance the feeling of community and address sexual assault as not just an interpersonal problem, but also as an intrapersonal one.

About Public Conversations Project
Public Conversations Project fosters constructive conversation where there is conflict driven by differences in identity, beliefs, and values. We work locally, nationally, and globally to provide dialogue facilitation, training, consultation, and coaching. We help groups reduce stereotyping and polarization while deepening trust and collaboration and strengthening communities.

Follow on Twitter: @pconversations

Resource Link: www.publicconversations.org/blog/dialogue-sexual-assault

Mathews Center for Civic Life Seeks Summer Interns

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We encourage our younger and student members to take note of the announcement below from the David Mathews Center for Civic Life – one of our NCDD member organizations. The internships they are offering this summer are great opportunities to gain experience in deliberation, and we encourage you to apply today! Learn more in their announcement below.

Looking for Interns

Our Jean O’Connor-Snyder Internship Program (JOIP) provides experiential civic learning opportunities for college students across multiple disciplines. Students research deliberative practices and asset-based approaches to working alongside Alabama communities in capacity-building projects. We at the DMC administer the JOIP program and collaborate with faculty mentors across the state.

Participating students build civic and professional skills while implementing asset-based, capacity-building projects in Alabama communities. JOIP interns apply their immersive civic learning experiences to their future studies and careers. Through JOIP, we hope to build upon the millennial spirit of civic engagement in Alabama.

For information about eligibility, project guidelines, proposal requirements, and other details, contact Rebecca Cleveland at rcleveland@mathewscenter.org.

We originally found this announcement on the NIF website at www.nifi.org/en/david-mathews-center-looking-interns.

PB Processes Grow Campus Democracy for NY Students

Posted on May 18, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

This week is the N. American PB conference in Boston, and given that one of its themes is “Youth Power through PB,” we thought we’d share the post below from the Participatory Budgeting Project. The piece shows what the concept behind that theme looks like in practice, as student-led pushes to have a say in how their schools spend their money through PB spread across NY state and beyond. Check out PBP’s piece on recent developments below or find the original here. And be sure to connect with us NCDD staff (myself included!) who will be at the PB conference this weekend!

College Students Learn Democracy through PB

All the buzz was around Queens College campus during the Participatory Budgeting 101 workshop. Over 25 students from at least 6 campuses attended and networked over complimentary bagels and coffee. Students were eager in learning how to gain decision-making power over spending $5,000 of the student government budget. The workshop engaged with student interests on equity and the role of tech tools.

Providing contracted technical support, our staff gave QC students a crash course on managing their own PB process. Students gathered around discussing the need for “transparency and accountability from their student government and campus administration” said Alex Kolokotronis, PB Queens College Coordinator and Founder/Lead Organizer of the Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives (SODA).

The common goal that students had: to have a say in the quality and future of their education. Many students also want to build skills that they can use in their post-college life and career. QC and CUNY students voiced a desire to open opportunities for those who don’t have equal access to higher education, keeping tuition down, and wisely allocating the existing school budget to improve school infrastructure. “Some students and even faculty hope PB can be part of a push to more broadly democratize CUNY” said Alex.

PB in a university setting was first launched at Brooklyn College in 2012 and is still going strong with students managing a budget of $25,000, which has grown over the past four years. “I believe finding out that Brooklyn College did PB gave Queens College students additional confidence that it could be done at a university level…” shared Mike Menser, PBP Chairman of the Board and Professor at Brooklyn College. Queens College has about 20,000 students, however, this process cannot be done successfully without support from the faculty and administration. PB offers a great platform for everyone on campus to engage in discourse that prioritizes the needs of students and faculty and streamlines this to the administration.

Follow Queens College Participatory Budgeting on Facebook!

You can find the original version of this post from the Participatory Budgeting Project blog at www.participatorybudgeting.org/blog/college-students-learn-democracy-through-pb-2.

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