Category Archives: NCDD News

Important 10-question survey for NCDD volunteers and contractors

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To all members of the NCDD community:

With our small staff and modest budget over the years, we’ve always relied on NCDD members to step forward as volunteers to plan the national and regional conferences, organize our online events, host our book clubs, contribute content to the website, create videos, provide each other with advice, and so much more.  We are a Coalition after all, and that’s part of our culture.

I hope you’ve noticed that NCDD has a lot going on these days — now more than ever before, from my vantage point. We have our new member map and directory, regular confab calls and tech tuesdays, lots of rich collaborative projects like Creating Community Solutions (the national dialogue on mental health project) and the CommunityMatters partnership, a news blog that keeps getting better and better.  And we want to keep up this momentum as well as the high quality of our activities and products.

NCDDSeattle-GRs-borderWe’re looking to create a go-to list of NCDD members we can tap into when we need volunteers — and when we have opportunities to contract with NCDD members.

There are many opportunities on the horizon for you to participate more deeply in NCDD.  We’ll need researchers and report writers, people who can theme and summarize the best listserv conversations and blog threads, people who can help us do systems mapping and geo-mapping, people who can interview leaders in the field for the blog, collect mini case stories for the Dialogue Storytelling Tool, share their own stories and cases, do graphic recording, help manage our social media accounts, and so much more.

Some tasks will be volunteer tasks, of course, but some that require a greater time commitment or a specialized skill set will be compensated.

If you’re interested in volunteering or contracting with NCDD in the coming months and years, please take a few minutes and fill out the 10-question survey that’s up at:

www.surveymonkey.com/s/ncdd-rolodex

This survey will help us develop a rolodex of great members who are willing to be contacted about volunteer and paid opportunities that arise, based on your skills, experience and interests.

Request your free copy of David Mathews’ new book The Ecology of Democracy

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Our friends at the Kettering Foundation are offering to send complimentary copies of David Mathews’ new book out to anyone in the NCDD community who requests one.

Ecology-coverAs you may know, David Mathews is president of the Kettering Foundation and former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Ford administration. I know him personally, and he’s an extremely kind, thoughtful, intelligent, and humble guy.

The Ecology of Democracy: Finding Ways to Have a Stronger Hand in Shaping Our Future is for people who care deeply about their communities and their country but worry about problems that endanger their future and that of their children. Jobs are disappearing, or the jobs people want aren’t available. Health care costs keep going up, and the system seems harder to navigate. Many worry that our schools aren’t as good as they should be. The political system is mired in hyperpolarization. Citizens feel pushed to the sidelines.

Rather than giving in to despair and cynicism, some Americans are determined to have a stronger hand in shaping their future. Suspicious of big reforms and big institutions, they are starting where they are with what they have.

From the introduction:

This book is about people who are trying to help our country realize its dream of democracy with freedom and justice. However, they would never describe themselves that way: it would be far too grandiose. They would just say they are trying to solve a problem or make their community a better place.

This book is also for governmental and nongovernmental organizations, as well as educational institutions that are trying to engage these citizens. Their efforts aren’t stopping the steady erosion of public confidence, so they are looking for a different kind of public participation.

The book is divided into three sections — Democracy Reconsidered (Part I), Citizens and Communities (Part II), and Institutions, Professionals, and the Public (Part III).  It is chock-full of ideas about how the work of democracy can be done in ways that put more control in the hands of citizens and help restore the legitimacy of our institutions.

The 230-page book can be ordered from the Kettering Foundation here for $15.95. A 16-page preview is also available as a free download.

To get a free copy of the book mailed to you, send an email to customerservice@ait.net with your mailing address and a note that you’re affiliated with NCDD.

Deal for NCDDers on Tamarack’s Evaluating Community Impact workshops

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Many of us in the NCDD network are part of community-based initiatives for creating change, in local government, healthcare, poverty, education, and numerous other arenas. And while we know it is important to stand back and evaluate the impact we are making on these issues and how to do things better, we often don’t know how to evaluate the effects of our work in meaningful ways.

That is why we are pleased to invite NCDD members to participate in a great program run by our friends at the Tamarack Institute called Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes. This high-quality program is being offered this June in Halifax, and again in Winnipeg in November.

We are so impressed by the program and its potential to benefit our community of practitioners that NCDD recently signed on as a sponsor of the initiative. In fact, we are willing to subsidize part of the registration costs of supporting NCDD members (whose dues are in good standing) if you commit to sharing some of your learnings and observations from the workshop with the rest of the network here on the blog. If you are interested in learning more about attending with an NCDD sponsorship, please email sandy@ncdd.org for more information.

So what is the program all about? Tamarack describes the initiative this way:

Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes is a three-day workshop intended to provide those who are funding, planning, and implementing community change initiatives with an opportunity to learn the latest and most practical evaluation ideas and practices.

This workshop is best suited to those who have an interest and some basic experience with evaluation but are eager to tackle the challenging but critical task of getting feedback on local efforts to change communities.

EvalCommImpactBanner

There is a lot that goes into doing quality program evaluation, so the workshop focuses on covering key skill sets and topics for evaluation. The learning agenda for the workshops includes:

  • Models and dynamics of community change, i.e. theories of change
  • Evaluative thinking, utilization focused evaluation, and developmental evaluation
  • Program evaluation and the evaluation of community change evaluation
  • “Measuring” systems change, dealing with unanticipated outcomes, attributing outcomes to change activities and participatory sense-making
  • Evaluation Planning Tools and Outcome Evaluation Tools

You can get a taste of some of the content of the Evaluating Community Impact initiative by checking out Tamarack faculty member Liz Weaver’s recent article in Engage! magazine, Evaluation: An Essential Learning Resource.

We highly encourage NCDD members to find out more about the Evaluating Community Impact program at http://events.tamarackcommunity.org/evaluating-community-impact. The program was overbooked last year, so we encourage you to register today for the Halifax event this June or sign up for the Winnepeg event in November.

We hope that many of you will take advantage of this great opportunity and the chance to share what you learn with the NCDD community. Don’t forget to write to Sandy at sandy@ncdd.org if you plan on attending. We hope to see you there!

Should NCDD become the new steward of Conversation Cafe?

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NCDD is engaging our members and the broader dialogue and deliberation community on an important decision we’re facing, and we are seeking our members’ input, ideas, and reaction.

CC-walletcard2Our good friend Jacquelyn Pogue has reluctantly decided to retire from her stewardship of the process known as Conversation Café, leaving a powerful form of dialogue at risk. Jacqueline, as well as Vicki Robin and Susan Partnow (the co-creators of Conversation Café), approached me about whether NCDD would be interested in stewarding the tool, and I believe NCDD has the skills and resources to help.

In case you don’t know, Conversation Cafés are 90-minute dialogues usually held in public settings like coffee shops or bookstores. The format is simple (it fits on the back of a business card!), anyone can join, and the goal is to simply give people a chance to talk informally with neighbors around an issue of shared interest. We have a nice primer on CCs on our site here.

This idea intrigues me for several reasons…

First of all, I’m a big fan of Conversation Café. It’s an elegantly simple process that gets people talking to strangers about issues we usually avoid. CCs are quick, easy to host, low-resource, and are open source (no trademark or sensitivity about ownership).

Secondly, I’ve wondered for years if CCs could be leveraged as an entry point for citizens to experience other, more nuanced types of engagement, and as a stepping stone for broader and wider use of dialogue and deliberation.

And thirdly, the NCDD community as a whole struggles to be able to respond quickly to crises and conflicts as they arise, and to provide citizens with the tools they need to self-organize their own dialogues as needed. If NCDD were to shepherd a self-organized, open source dialogue method that is simple enough for anyone to use, we would be enabling much-needed dialogue to take place more readily and efficiently than is possible now.

So what do you think? Should NCDD move on this opportunity? And if so, how could we do it in a way that best serves our whole community? And if not, what concerns you about this?

Can you see Conversation Cafés being leveraged as a rapid response mechanism in times of national crisis? How best might we make this happen?

Invitation to join the new Transpartisan Listserv

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On behalf of all the founding participants, NCDD is pleased to invite you to join the new Transpartisan Listserv. Our intension for this moderated email discussion list is to provide a simple, safe communication channel where individuals and organizations that are active in this boundary-crossing work can connect and learn from each other.

The list is hosted by NCDD through a partnership of NCDD and Mediators Foundation.  The following amazing group of people are co-founding the list:

  1. Austin2008-NiceToMeetYouMark Gerzon, Tom Hast and John Steiner of Mediators Foundation
  2. Sandy Heierbacher, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)
  3. Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute
  4. Steve Bhaerman, humorist and author
  5. Dr. Don Beck, The Spiral Dynamics Group
  6. Joan Blades and Debilyn Molineaux, Living Room Conversations
  7. Laura Chasin, Bob Stains, Dave Joseph and Mary Jacksteit, Public Conversations Project
  8. Lawry Chickering and Jim Turner, co-authors of Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life
  9. Jacob Hess and Phil Neisser, co-authors of You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong)
  10. Margo King, Wisdom Beyond Borders-Mediators Foundation; John Steiner’s networking partner
  11. Mark McKinnon, NoLabels.org
  12. Ravi Iyer and Matt Motyl, CivilPolitics.org
  13. Evelyn Messinger, Internews Interactive
  14. John Opdycke, IndependentVoting.org
  15. Michael Ostrolenk, transpartisan organizer and philosopher
  16. Pete Peterson, Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute
  17. Amanda Kathryn Roman, The Citizens Campaign
  18. Michael Smith, United Americans
  19. Kim Spencer, Link TV and KCETLink
  20. Rich Tafel, The Public Squared
  21. Jeff Weissglass, Political Bridge Building Advocate

The purpose of this listserv is to introduce potential colleagues to one another, to expand our knowledge of transpartisan theory and practice, and to showcase ongoing activity in the transpartisan field.

Please consider being part of the Transpartisan List if any of the following are true:

  • You are interested in learning more, and sharing what you know, about current efforts to transcend and transform unproductive partisan politics.
  • You want to meet potential colleagues who share your concern and are working to improve research, dialogue, deliberation, collaboration, and improved decision making across party lines.
  • You want to share what you (or your organization) do in this field that you consider “transpartisan” – conversations that break out of the narrow, predictable ideological exchanges.
  • You believe this subject is vital to our country’s future and simply want to learn more about how you might get involved.

You can subscribe to the Transpartisan List by sending a blank email to transpartisan-subscribe-request@lists.thataway.org. Together, we can ask the questions that need to be asked about this challenging field, and seek the answers as a learning community.

This listserv is one of several exciting transpartisan developments that will be rolling out in the next few months thanks to the leadership of Mediators Foundation – including a strategic convening of transpartisan leaders that will take place the day before this year’s National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation (October 16th if you’d like to mark your calendar!).

About a week from now, Mark Gerzon and others at Mediators Foundation will share some new resources that may be of interest, including:

  1. “Transpartisan:”An Evolving Definition
  2. A Map of the Transpartisan Field
  3. The Transpartisan Reading List 1.0

As Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in her Washington Post editorial on January 27th, “The Promise of Transpartisanhip”:

“At a time of paralyzing political polarization, partisanship has naturally gotten a bad rap. But a reactionary shift toward bipartisanship — toward an anodyne centrism — isn’t the solution. Passion, deftly deployed, is actually an effective political tool with which to advance good ideas. That’s the promise of transpartisanship.”

If you decide to join us on the Transpartisan Listserv, take a moment to read over the listserv guidelines first. The list will be moderated according to this set of ground rules, in order to ensure the list remains safe, productive, civil, and focused.

NCDD welcomes two extraordinary new Board members

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This post was submitted by Barb Simonetti — the new chair of NCDD’s Board of Directors as of January.

It is my extreme pleasure to announce two wonderful new additions to NCDD’s Board of Directors. Both are longtime members and active friends of NCDD with impressive credentials.

SusanAndMartinSignsSusan Stuart Clark is the founder and Executive Director of Common Knowledge with the mission of exploring and demonstrating more inclusive and innovative approaches to achieving sustainable social change. She works with state and local government agencies, nonprofits, foundations and businesses, often facilitating multi-sector collaboratives.  New insights and possibilities generated by dialogue are the core of the work.  Susan and her colleagues gravitate to projects that that debunk the myth that the public is apathetic, that identify common ground on contentious issues and discover new resources hidden in plain sight in our communities.

Martin Carcasson is an Assistant Professor, founder and Director of the Center for Public Deliberation (CDP) at Colorado State University. The CPD is dedicated to enhancing local democracy through improved public communication and community problem-solving. The CPD was founded in August of 2006 within the Speech Communication Department at Colorado State University, and serves as an affiliate of the National Issues Forum (NIF) network. CSU undergraduates and local citizens are trained as impartial facilitators, and work with the local governments, media, the school district, and citizen organizations on various deliberative projects. Deliberation requires safe places for citizens to come together, good and fair information to help structure the conversation, and skilled facilitators to guide the deliberative process. The CPD is dedicated to providing these three key ingredients to Northern Colorado.

Susan and Martin join existing board members John Backman (Treasurer), Courtney Breese (Past Secretary), Marla Crockett (Past Chair), and Diane Miller (Secretary) and me, Barbara Simonetti (Chair). Lucas Cioffi, our previous Treasurer has stepped off the board as his term ended. We are a working board and we would all like to thank Lucas and all of our previous officers for their many contributions as we welcome Susan and Martin.

It is going to be another great year of serving and growing this extraordinary NCDD community. Learn more about all of NCDD’s Board members (and staff) at www.ncdd.org/contact.

Barbara Simonetti
Director, Meetings That Matter
Board Chair, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)

NCDD’s 2013 Year-in-Numbers

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2013 was a banner year for NCDD, and we’ve already summarized our activities, collaborative projects, and new developments in our Year-in-Review post. Please help us increase NCDD’s reach (and celebrate 2013!) by sharing this infographic with all those you think need to know there’s an amazing community of innovators in public engagement and group process work they can tap into or join in with.

2013_NCDD_Infographic

Andy has created 3 versions of this infographic for NCDD members to use or share:

  • A .png image, which is great for including in blog posts
  • A web-friendly PDF, which is great for emailing to colleagues and displays larger than the .png online
  • A print-quality PDF, which fits nicely on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper

You can also just use the share buttons below to share this post with your networks.

Please email me at sandy@ncdd.org or Andy (NCDD’s Creative Director) at andy@ncdd.org if you have questions or need help sharing the infographic.

NCDD’s Year In Review

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2013 was an incredible year for NCDD and for our community.

We started off the year by intensely engaging our members around how the D&D community can respond to crises like the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting (explore the Hackpad series here). Soon after that, we announced the two projects that won our member-selected Catalyst Awards (in hindsight, we realized we had actually run our first Participatory Budgeting process, having had members develop the contending projects in teams and then vote for the winners!).

NCDD Meetup at TuftsWe ran two mini regional events — one at Tufts in July and one at the Univ of Virginia in November thanks to Lucas Cioffi and Nancy Gansneder, and we secured a great space for next year’s national conference and are seeing buzz building around that event already!

We bumped up our “virtual” events this year as well, getting in the habit of offering a high-quality and well-attended Confab Call or Tech Tuesday almost every month (archived recordings here).  We also experimented with informal “coffee hour” calls, which our Board plans to continue in 2014 in a different format, having Board member run monthly Coffee Hours on a topic of interest to them and our community.

We spent a good deal of time this year on collaborative projects with other leaders in the field — projects we felt were well worth our investment of time due to their potential to move our field forward.  NCDD continues to serve on the core team of Creating Community Solutions, the “dialogue part” of HHS’s national dialogue on mental health.  We have continued our work with the Orton-led Community Matters partnership, building resources on civic infrastructure with key leaders in our and related fields. And we have become part of the amazing community that is convened regularly by the Kettering Foundation, and you’ll be hearing more and more about our exciting work with them during 2014.

We also played a leading role in the Text Talk & Act experiment that melded the fun and convenience of texting with the irreplaceable value of face-to-face dialogue.  And we supported projects to develop a comprehensive open database of case studies (Participedia.net), to develop and promote new local laws that “make participation legal again,” to run the first online unconference on online facilitation, and to offer the top-notch Dialogue, Deliberation & Public Engagement certificate program.

US-GoogleMap-outlinedWe’ve grown to 1,900 members this year, and to 33,000 subscribers on our e-updates.  And we scrapped our not-nearly-good-enough members network and replaced it with a gorgeous Google map and super-useful online directory of our members.

We also launched the Dialogue Storytelling Tool this year in partnership with the Kettering Foundation and Participedia, to help our members report on their dialogue and deliberation projects and events, and let NCDD do the work of spreading the word.

We doubled or tripled the usefulness and quality of our community blog by hiring Roshan Bliss as our lead blogger, and saw more and more NCDD members post their own news and resources on the site as well.  And of course we maintained the tools you rely on that keep our community vibrant and connected, like our listservs and social media spaces.

Our small staff and our amazing Board and volunteers do our best to support this vital community’s work, and I think 2013 may have been our best year yet in this regard.

Does all 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 extremely easy to donate to NCDD using the short form that’s up at www.ncdd.org/donate.  NCDD is a tax exempt 501(c)(3) organization, so your donations are fully tax deductible.

Results of NCDD’s member drive – and a huge THANK YOU!

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Last month, we shared NCDD’s news from 2013 with all our members—including our strengthened relationship with the Kettering Foundation—and asked you to support our efforts to serve you by “stepping up” your membership.  Our goal was to see many non-dues members upgrading to supporting member levels, and to see those whose dues were due for renewal or lapsed to get their supporting membership in good standing.

ThankYouImageMany people did exactly that. In all, nearly 150 stepped up during the drive (all but 14 as supporting members), representing more than $6,000 in support for 2014. That includes 64 brand-new members (welcome!). We think it says a lot when people choose to contribute dues when they don’t have to.

To everyone who joined, renewed, or upgraded, thank you. In the final analysis, you are NCDD, and your commitment fuels our ability to strengthen your practice, expand your network, and advance the field of dialogue and deliberation. Without you, it doesn’t happen—so your dedication to NCDD is deeply appreciated. (And in case you missed out, there’s still time to upgrade or renew your membership.)

Again, thank you for your support. NCDD’s staff and Board wish you all the best for the holidays.

Text, Talk, Act: Results and How to Continue

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Last week, on Dec. 5, thousands of people across the country joined Creating Community Solutions in a “Text, Talk, and Act,” a nationwide discussion on mental health via text. Participants met in groups of 4-5 to talk about the importance of mental health, their personal experiences, and what they could do to make a difference.

The initiative was designed to engage high school and college students in particular, using technology that is ubiquitous in their lives. Over 600 phones (and approx. 2,400 people) joined in to “Text, Talk, and Act” last Thursday.

NCDD is one of the organizing groups for Creating Community Solutions, and we contributed to this innovative project in several ways — including designing the infographic used to publicize the event!

Here’s a photo collage that one of our participant groups (the team @JCFNmemphis) submitted to us…

JCFN-MemphisThe discussion questions were designed to provide a safe space for candid dialogue on mental health, one of the most critical and misunderstood public issues we face. During the conversation, groups were asked to respond to polling questions related to mental health. Results from the live polling questions were tabulated almost instantly, so people could see how participants across the country responded.

Many of the participants reported that mental health is very important in their lives: 59% of respondents said that they thought about mental health every day and 69% said that it was extremely important to them.

During the conversation, participants discussed what schools and communities are doing well to support mental health. “Having understanding psychologists and social workers in the school systems really helps the students feel comfortable talking about their problems,” one participant answered. Other responses included support groups, open discussions, and early intervention. Some participants noted that we need more attention and programs to address mental health challenges: “In our community, no one is really trying anything. We think more legislators who are personally involved in actively caring for those with mental health issues need to be open advocates.”

The process also provided an opportunity for participants to discuss actions they can take to strengthen mental health on their campuses and in their communities. Some of the action ideas included starting nonprofits, raising awareness, and continuing the conversation on mental health in their school or community. Participants also noted that individual, everyday actions can make a difference as well: “Allow my actions to show I am someone who you can talk to when people need to.”

View more results from the polling questions and additional actions you can take at: www.creatingcommunitysolutions.org/texttalkact

We are also on Storify! Review the event here: http://bit.ly/TextTalkActStory

If you weren’t able to participate last week, you can now – we’ve left the texting platform open. Taking part is easy: just gather a few friends, colleagues, or fellow students, and text START to 89800 any time you like.

Help make this bigger and better by referring a friend, posting or tweeting about #texttalkact, and using the texting platform to suggest ways for us to improve the experience.

Thanks to everyone who participated last week, and keep texting, talking, and acting!