2014 was a great year for the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation! Designed by our co-founder Andy Fluke, this end-of-year infographic highlights NCDD’s growth and activity during the past twelve months.
Please share this post with all those you think should know there’s an amazing community of innovators in public engagement and group process work they can tap into or join in with.
Also be sure to look over the great Year-in-Review post at www.ncdd.org/17033, where we summarize 2014’s activities, accomplishments and highlights. It has been quite the year!
In addition to sharing this post and/or just the image above, feel free to download the print-quality PDF.
2014 was a pretty darn good year for NCDD. As I reflect on our work over the past twelve months, a few themes really stand out to me:
1. We made huge strides toward our goal of distributing leadership and responsibility for NCDD’s success more broadly.
The members of our amazing Board of Directors really stepped up this year, to launch new committees on membership, outreach and fundraising, to help plan a great national conference, and to strengthen the organization in numerous other ways. Special shout-outs to these Board members for especially huge lifts:
Marla Crockett for leading our local team for the 2014 conference
John Backman for moderating the NCDD Discussion list — a nuanced task I didn’t think I’d ever be able to let go of!
Roshan Bliss, our Blog Curator (pictured at right), began taking on more responsibility at NCDD by serving as our Student & Youth Outreach Coordinator for the 2014 conference. Thanks in large part to Roshan’s leadership and dedication, we inspired members of our community to donate over $15,000, enabling us to support the attendance of more than 60 young people and students at the 2014 NCDD conference.
And most importantly, we were able to bring on Courtney Breese as Program Director of NCDD! A young leader in the field, Courtney served on the NCDD Board of Directors for three years while working full-time at the Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration. She served as Conference Manager for NCDD’s last two national conferences. We have a wonderful working relationship, as is evidenced in the photo below — and the fact that we survived working on two conferences together!
In addition to all of this, we also distributed leadership to our members in new ways. Members are always involved in planning our conferences, creating content for the website, and so much more, but this year we started engaging some of our members in mini-contracts for critically important work that usually can’t be accomplished by volunteers. We contracted with talented members like Kathryn Thomson, Ben Roberts, Kim Crowley, Chris Berendes, and Kyle Bozentko for report-writing and interviewing tasks.
If you’d like to be on our list of potential contractors and didn’t fill out the “rolodex survey” we conducted earlier this year, it’s not too late. Complete the survey here so we can have a better sense of your skills and interests.
2. We really bumped up our level of professionalism in a lot of ways.
Though NCDD continues to serve everyone who work in dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement, and our website, online events, listservs, membership, and more are accessible and free to all who are interested, we allowed ourselves this year to find new ways to serve our field’s top leaders.
Due to our strong relationship with the Kettering Foundation, and my new role as part-time “Research Deputy” for Kettering, NCDD had the opportunity to convene top leaders in our field both in February at the Kettering Foundation, and in May in DC — in activities surrounding Kettering’s annual Public Voice event (group photo below). We also helped identify leaders in online engagement who were invited to Kettering in July to preview KF’s new deliberation platform Common Ground for Action.
We provided space at our conference for two groups to convene top leaders in transpartisan dialogue and civic infrastructure work. I was torn about using the limited space we had the day before the conference for invitation-only events, as NCDD’s style tends to be more open-to-all, but realized that all conference attendees would benefit if these meetings brought leaders to the conference who might otherwise not attend.
One of our most exciting initiatives in 2014, launched at the fall conference during Grande Lum’s speech, is NCDD’s work with the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service (CRS) to plan meetings between NCDD members and CRS staff at their regional offices across the country. CRS provides mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation services for communities in crisis, and is interested in finding ways to partner with NCDD members who can potentially increase their effectiveness and reach.
We continued offering regular Confab Calls and Tech Tuesday events for our community, with an average of more than 60 participants in each one! And we continued investing time and energy in collaborative projects we feel are important to the future of our field — including Creating Community Solutions (part of the National Dialogue on Mental Health) and its innovative Text Talk Act project, the CommunityMatters Partnership, Participedia, the Dialogue, Deliberation & Public Engagement Certificate Program at KSU, and numerous projects (many of which are still in progress) in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
3. And of course, much of the year was devoted to putting on a great national conference.
Our 2014 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation was a major highlight of the year, for us and for our 415 attendees. Words cannot express how amazing it feels to not only be in proximity to hundreds of what I consider to be the most important people on the planet — but to have the honor of hosting them, welcoming them, and organizing a one-of-a-kind event for them. Those of you who attended know what I mean when I say that the raw energy and excitement at the conference was palpable.
We may not solve the world’s problems at NCDD conferences, but we replenish each other’s energy for this critically important work, learn about myriad innovations in the field, and develop tons of valuable relationships and partnerships that last for years.
Please take a minute to watch this wonderful video of highlights from the conference…
NCDD’s Creative Director, Andy Fluke, outdid himself this year, designing gorgeous stage banners and signs, and what I think is our best conference guidebook yet.
And if you haven’t yet checked out our report on how the NCDD community thinks we should tackle our field’s biggest barriers to success (a conversation we began at the conference and continued on the listserv and Codigital.com after the event), please do take the time to look it over. The results of this engagement project give us valuable insight into the ideas and actions that resonate most with the dialogue and deliberation community.
You can also learn all about the exciting visual field mapping project we ran leading up to the conference, and see all ten of the gorgeous maps created by the graphic recorders we worked with. And be sure to peek into the conference here on Storify, where you’ll clearly get a sense of the energy, excitement, and absolutely wonderful people who came to the 2014 conference.
In addition to all of this, NCDD continues to grow steadily. Early in the year, we reached the milestone of 2,000 members (I was so excited!), and we’ve since grown to over 2,200 members. Our subscriber list for the monthly NCDD Updates grew to over 34,000 this year.
Does this make you want to support NCDD with an end-of-year gift? We need your support to keep this work going strong — so please think of us as you consider end-of-year donations. It’s super-easy to donate to NCDD using the short form at www.ncdd.org/donate. NCDD is a tax exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so your donations are fully tax deductible.
As always, our NCDD team is working constantly to create even more ways to support our members, and we are pleased to announce a couple new things we’ve recently changed so that we can support you even more!
First, we have officially changed the former “Student” membership category to “Student/Young Professional.” The new membership type will extend the benefits of discounted annual NCDD membership dues to rising members of the D&D community who are no longer students, but who didn’t exactly start rolling in the dough right after finishing school — as well as new professionals who are just starting to make their way in the field.
We recognize that people of many ages consider themselves “young professionals” and that the word “young” is a pretty fluid term, so for the sake of clarity, people who are 30 years old or younger should feel free to join or renew as “Student/Young Professional” members. The fee for this membership type is only $30/year.
This change was informed by the great small-group conversations we had with the student & youth participants during our recent National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, and it is only the first change we intend to make to help the D&D field become more accessible to young people. Keep an eye out for announcements about new ways NCDD will be supporting young people in our field early next year!
Got an idea for what NCDD can do for new or young professionals in our field? Please leave us a suggestion or idea in the comments section! Also, if you notice your membership or some part of our site still uses the “Student” label rather than “Student/Young Professional,” please send a note about it to joy@ncdd.org.
Second, we’ve created a Newest Members Page on our website where you can learn about & connect with folks who’ve recently joined NCDD. We encourage you to check it out at www.ncdd.org/newest-members, and join us in extending a warm welcome to all our new members! And as always, be sure to visit www.ncdd.org/map to see a geographic map of all 2,200+ NCDD members, and use the directory at www.ncdd.org/directory to search the member roll. (And if you’re not yet a member, please join today!)
We have had such an exciting year here at NCDD, and as 2014 closes out, we are looking forward to making 2015 the best year yet for our field! We wish you all a happy and safe holiday season, and a happy new year!
NCDD’s Twitter handle is quite a useful resource where you can keep up to date on headlines from and links to the latest posts on blogs from leading organizations in the dialogue, deliberation, public engagement, and conflict resolution field. We automatically share the news on our feed so that you never miss a beat.
As of this posting, our @NCDD Twitter handle has 2,936 followers, and we are trying to reach the 3,000 followers mark by the end of the year! We know that adding another 64 followers should be a piece of cake with all of the wonderful people in our NCDD network, so please follow us if you’re not already.
And if you are, please consider tweeting to encourage others to follow us! You could say something like:
“I follow @NCDD for the latest dialogue, deliberation, & public engagement news, and so should you! Follow NCDD at https://twitter.com/ncdd!”
Or make your own tweet! We know we can do it with you help!
Thanks for all you do and for continuing to support NCDD!
We wanted to share the great news that last month, the Creating Community Solutions Alliance received the International Association of Public Participation’s USA Project of the Year Core Value Award.
NCDD is one of six organizations that make up the core CCS alliance — including the National Institute for Civil Discourse (the lead partner), Everyday Democracy, the National Issues Forums Institute, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and AmericaSpeaks.
Creating Community Solutions won for its work in bringing people to the table for the national dialogue on mental health dialogue. To date, Creating Community Solutions has helped organize almost 200 community dialogues on mental health, and through our innovative Text, Talk, Act program, we have engaged thousands of young people in a conversation on mental health. Go to http://iap2usa.org/corevaluesawards2014 learn more about the award.
Congratulations also to NCDD members Doug Sarno and John Godec, who were recognized for their role in the St. Vrain Valley School District project “Leadership St Vrain – Empowering Parents through P2,” which won Research Project of the Year.
Creating Community Solutions has been an integral component of the National Dialogue on Mental Health, launched by President Obama and supported by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as well as other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.
CCS has organized or supported three main forms of participation around the question “How can we work together to strengthen mental health, particularly for young people?”:
In the cities of Albuquerque, Birmingham, Columbus, Kansas City, Sacramento, and Washington DC, one of the CCS organizations helped form a local steering committee, led by the mayor, for a large-scale deliberative process leading to a metro-wide action plan for strengthening mental health, with up to $200,000 raised in each city for the implementation of the plan.
In nearly 200 cities and towns thus far, CCS has helped local organizers host deliberative forums or town meetings.
On December 5th, 2013, April 24th, 2014 and October 6, 2014, CCS held “Text, Talk, and Act,” a nationwide, text-enabled, face-to-face discussion on mental health.
In all three formats, participants used an array of materials produced by CCS to learn more about mental health, survey some of the options for strengthening mental health, and recommend measures to be included in local action plans. Metro-wide action plans are being implemented in six cities.
Participant satisfaction levels were high for both the large-scale deliberative events and the “Text, Talk, and Act” dialogues. Throughout all the participation formats, participants consistently named the same core themes for strengthening mental health.
Over 1,500 people have been engaged in the six lead cities, over 1,600 in the other communities, and an estimated 3,500 in “Text, Talk, and Act.”
Join organizers of the award-winning #TextTalkAct in a live video chat hosted by @DocForeman tomorrow (Tuesday, November 18th) at 6:30 pm Eastern / 3:30 pm Pacific. Hear what happened during our national Text Talk Act contest on October 6. We’ll connect you with:
Winning youth organizers;
Ideas texted in by participants across the country;
Resources for taking action.
To participate, simply click on this link on Tuesday, Nov 18 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time. You’ll be connected to the live streaming video on YouTube that begins at that time, and you’ll be able to comment via Twitter or YouTube using the #TextTalkAct hashtag.
Dr. April Foreman is a Licensed Psychologist and innovator in using social media platforms like Twitter to connect with thought leaders in healthcare across the world. Currently, she works for the Southeast Louisiana Healthcare System, serving Veterans as a Suicide Prevention Coordinator in Baton Rouge.
Text Talk Act is a series of innovative experiments in texting-enabled dialogue. As part of our role in the National Dialogue on Mental Health project Creating Community Solutions, NCDD and our partners have been experimenting with how the fun and convenience of text messaging can be leveraged to scale up face-to-face dialogue — especially among young people.
In April, we featured Matt Leighninger and Michael Smith from the Text Talk Act core team on an NCDD Confab Call. Audio from the call and an archive of the collaborative doc we created during the call for Q&A and networking can be accessed at www.ncdd.org/14741.
We want to invite NCDD members to join an online & phone conversation event this Friday that former NCDD Board member Lucas Cioffi has set up so we can explore some of the topics that have been making waves on our discussion listserv recently. You can read his invitation below. NCDD is driven by members, and we love to see them taking initiative, so thanks so much to Lucas for leading on this!
Hello Everyone,
There have been some deep topics discussed on this discussion list over the past few weeks. I’d like to open up some space for people to continue the conversation by phone and/or video chat.
For you, this is a networking opportunity, chance to meet with some other NCDD members interested in the same topics. For me, this is a chance to test out a system I’m building for online conferences.
The format is similar to Conversation Cafe where you’ll join several small group discussions (2-4 people per virtual table). Similar to Open Space, participants will choose the topics, ranging from current events to changing the world.
This is an informal and fun event. Expect to join other participants by phone and/or webcam (if you have it). Final details will be emailed to all who register.
As we announced last month, NCDD is looking for input from our community on the important conversation we started during our national conference about overcoming the biggest barriers to and in our work, and today is the last day to add to that conversation via our online engagement space hosted by Codigital.
The period for input in the online space will end tonight at midnight, so if you haven’t already, please make sure to visit www.ncdd.codigital.com to help us identify new and existing strategies for overcoming the four barriers for effective dialogue and deliberation work that our NCDD community has said are most pressing:
Lack of trust in our democracy, in our leaders, and in one another
Unequal access to D&D practices and to government
Lack of cohesion as a clearly delineated field of practice with all parts in communication
Structural barriers within our democracy and in our own infrastructure
We want to hear your thoughts and ideas – what do you think we can or should do as a field to overcome these challenges?
At the same time, we also want you to hear each others, and there are a lot. As of last night there were 145 ideas being discussed, and nearly 4,800 votes cast on them! All of us have great ideas, and we want to hear yours, so make sure that you contribute to the conversation today before it’s over! could not be more excited to see such great participation from our members.
NCDD’s hope that the Codigital activity will help us get a sense of what ideas and actions resonate most with the whole community, which can then help us devise clearer paths forward on how to overcome our field’s most biggest challenges.
Thank you so much to all of you who have already made this post-conference engagement project a huge success, and we look forward to sharing the results with you soon.
One of the highlights of the recent National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation was Grande Lum’s speech on the final day of the conference. Grande is director of the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service, an extraordinary program that was established 50 years ago as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Known as “America’s Peacemaker,” the Community Relations Service (CRS) has worked with thousands of communities over the years, many of whom came together in crisis and emerged stronger and more unified as a result. CRS delivers four critically important services to communities facing intergroup conflict: mediation of disputes, facilitation of dialogue, training, and consulting.
See our August 25th blog post at www.ncdd.org/16015 for more details on the vital work that Grande and CRS do.
At the end of his speech (which we’ll be posting soon), Grande committed to holding a meeting between NCDD members and CRS staff at each of CRS’s ten regional offices. Grande is excited to move forward on these meetings, and we have been working with CRS to make these meetings happen in January!
This is an exciting opportunity on many fronts. For one, you will have the opportunity to start a productive relationship with staff of an important government agency based in your area — people who really “get” the importance of process and know what it’s like in the trenches. (As a CRS staff member told me on the phone the other day, “we’re in the same tribe”!)
CRS’s Regional Directors are highly trained professional mediators, facilitators, trainers, and consultants who are experienced in bringing together communities in conflict to help them enhance their ability to independently prevent and resolve existing and future concerns. Regional Directors oversee the regional conflict resolution teams in the development of customized and proactive local solutions.
This is also exciting for the NCDD community as a collective. We often talk about how we can be more responsive during times of crisis that call for dialogue. Developing relationships and making ourselves available to CRS regional directors whose mission, in part, is rapid deployment during crises, can only strengthen our work and increase CRS’s capacity in the process. We also often lament the gap between dialogue and deliberation practice and government, and this addresses that concern as well.
The 10 regional offices are located in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Their four field offices, where we may also be holding joint events, are located in Miami, Detroit, Houston, and San Francisco. The regional and field offices increase the availability of CRS services to rural communities and aid in rapid deployment during crises.
We have been working with CRS to coordinate meetings at each of these cities in late January. All NCDD 2014 attendees and supporting members of NCDD whose dues are in good standing are welcome to attend. Please send an email to NCDD’s office manager, Joy Garman, at joy@ncdd.org, if you are interested in taking part.
The meetings will be part meet-and-greet between NCDDers and CRS staffers (including the Regional Directors), part discussions of promising practices for helping communities communicate more effectively, and part exploratory sessions about how we might align our efforts going forward.
We’re thrilled to say that our friends at CRS are open to your ideas about what you would like to see happen at these meetings. Use the comments here to share your thoughts on what you’d like to see on the agenda, and what would be most beneficial to you. CRS and NCDD will carefully consider your input when designing the meetings.
Graphic recording of Grande Lum’s speech by the amazing Stephanie Brown.
As we come to the close of yet another contentious and at-times ugly election season, we are reminded again of the importance of the work that the NCDD community does. As reflected in our “Democracy for the Next Generation” theme for our recent national conference, we believe NCDD and the amazing innovators we represent are a part of the solution to the broken politics of our time. In helping people really communicate, bridging gaps and partisan differences, building better civic infrastructure, and engaging our communities, what we are all doing is working to build a better democracy.
That is why, as we recently announced, our NCDD annual membership rates are increasing tomorrow, Nov. 5th. We are committed to growing our work and its impact on the shape of our democracy’s future, and to support that growth, we will be relying on our amazing community for support.
So we are asking you on this Election Day to “vote” for NCDD and the better democracy we are building by joining or renewing as a member today. Your membership and continued support of NCDD is an investment in the growth of this work and of a new kind of politics, and we hope that you will decide to grow your investment today!
But if you act now and join or renew before midnight tonight, you can lock in the lower membership rates and access to all of our great NCDD benefits for two years instead of one! We want to let everyone take advantage of the old NCDD membership rates, but this is seriously your last chance, so you have to visit www.ncdd.org/join today.
We have not asked our members to pay higher membership rates since 2006, and we don’t take this change lightly. But we see this increase as our way of doubling down on building a more robust civic infrastructure and investing in the success of our wonderful D&D community.
John Backman for moderating the NCDD Discussion list — a nuanced task I didn’t think I’d ever be able to let go of!
One of our most exciting initiatives in 2014, launched at the fall conference during Grande Lum’s speech, is NCDD’s 
First, we have officially changed the former “Student” membership category to “Student/Young Professional.” The new membership type will extend the benefits of discounted annual NCDD membership dues to rising members of the D&D community who are no longer students, but who didn’t exactly start rolling in the dough right after finishing school — as well as new professionals who are just starting to make their way in the field.
Got an idea for what NCDD can do for new or young professionals in our field? Please leave us a suggestion or idea in the comments section! Also, if you notice your membership or some part of our site still uses the “Student” label rather than “Student/Young Professional,” please send a note about it to 
The period for input in the online space will end tonight at midnight, so if you haven’t already, please make sure to visit 
Known as “America’s Peacemaker,” the Community Relations Service (CRS) has worked with thousands of communities over the years, many of whom came together in crisis and emerged stronger and more unified as a result. CRS delivers four critically important services to communities facing intergroup conflict: mediation of disputes, facilitation of dialogue, training, and consulting.
The 10 regional offices are located in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Their four field offices, where we may also be holding joint events, are located in Miami, Detroit, Houston, and San Francisco. The regional and field offices increase the availability of CRS services to rural communities and aid in rapid deployment during crises.
That is why, as we