NCDD2018 Sesh Proposals Due Weds and More Updates

Several reminders about our upcoming 2018 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation happening November 2-4 in downtown Denver!

The most immediate reminder is that session proposals are due tomorrow Wednesday, May 23rd. Are you looking to do a workshop at NCDD2018? Now is the time to get your proposals in! Check out our post on tips for finding collaborators and guidelines for presenting sessions at the conference. We invite session proposals that will highlight the work being done to tap D&D into the peoples’ daily lives, build democratic participation, and better expose D&D work. Our conference team is excited to see what sessions you want to bring!

We want to give you a friendly reminder that the “Super Early Bird” registration rate is available until Thursday, May 31st! On Friday, June 1st, the registration will go up to the”Early Bird” rate of $385, which will be active until July 15th (where it will then go up to the regular rate of $450). Take advantage of this ultra-low rate now to join over 400 leaders, practitioners, and enthusiasts, on Connecting and Strengthening Civic Innovators, our theme for NCDD2018Our goal of the conference is to explore how to bring dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement work’s many tools and processes into greater visibility and practice within our society. Learn more about the conference at www.ncdd.org/ncdd2018 and register to secure your tickets ASAP!

In case you missed our announcement, we are now accepting NCDD2018 sponsors! Looking to heighten the profile of your organization and work in the field? Being a sponsor is a great way to do it! NCDD conferences regularly bring together many of the most active, thoughtful, and influential people in public engagement and group process work across the U.S. and Canada (plus practitioners from around the world), and being a sponsor can help your organization can reach them all.

Being an All-Sponsor ($10,000+), Collaborator ($5,000+), Co-Sponsor ($3,000),  Partner ($2,000), or Supporter ($1,000) will earn you name recognition with potential clients, provide months of PR, and build respect and goodwill for your organization every time we proudly acknowledge your support as we promote the conference. Plus you’ll be providing the crucial support that NCDD relies on to make our national conferences so spectacular, including making it possible for us to offer more scholarships to the amazing young people and other deserving folks in our field. You can learn more about the details in our sponsorship document.

Finally, we have our FAQs page up on the NCDD2018 conference page, as well as, information on travel and lodging – where you can learn more about the room block price and fun things (besides the conference) to do while you’re in Denver! FYI we will also be posting on the blog later this summer to help folks coordinate if they want to share a room with someone.

Want to get an idea of what past NCDD conferences have been like? Check out these short videos of our 2016 and 2014 conferences!

PB Network to Host Study Session on Deliberation & Voting

The Participatory Budgeting Project team recently launched the exciting PB Network – a learning and collaboration infrastructure for cities and institutions using participatory budgeting – which is hosting periodic “study sessions” online, and the NCDD network is invited! Their next study session will be a webinar focused on citizens juries and deliberative methods of decision-making this Wednesday, March 22. We encourage you to learn more in the PBP announcement below or sign up here.


Upcoming PB Network Event

We’d like to invite you to the PB Network’s next PBP Study Session on Wednesday, March 22nd!

One of the ideas behind participatory budgeting is that we need to get beyond the simple yes/no votes we’re usually presented with at ballot boxes. Choosing between 2 options doesn’t capture the breadth and subtlety of the needs that many communities face. Deliberation and new voting techniques can help get better decisions that benefit broader groups of people.

The study session will feature Kyle Bozentko of the Jefferson Center, who will share some lessons from “citizen juries“, which take a randomly selected and balanced group of citizens to deliberate and make informed and thoughtful recommendations about a public issue. We’ll also learn from Ashish Goel of Stanford’s Crowdsourced Democracy Team, who works on collaborative decision-making, including developing innovative ballot platforms for participatory budgeting in many cities across the US.

Join us for a discussion on new innovations in participatory decision-making with broad sets of stakeholders.

The webinar will be:
Wednesday, March 22nd
1pm EST/10am PST
Click here to register and receive the webinar info

Register for the March NCDD Confab Call between Journalists and D&D Practitioners!

We invite our network to register to join us for an especially exciting NCDD Confab Call about strengthening partnerships and collaboration between journalists and dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement practitioners on Wednesday, March 15th from 1-2:30 pm Eastern / 10-11:30am Pacific! The Confab is part of NCDD’s ongoing #BridgingOurDivides campaign, and it’s going to be a very special call.

NCDD will be co-hosting this webinar with Journalism That Matters, one of our member organizations, and we are working in collaboration to bring both journalists and public engagement practitioners together on the call to continue the conversation we began at NCDD 2016 on ways that we can work together.

As you may remember, Peggy Holman, Executive Director of Journalism That Matters, moderated a panel of journalists at the NCDD conference this past fall who discussed innovative ways they are engaging communities, as well as their ideas for how journalists and public engagement practitioners can partner more substantively. What we also heard in this conversation was that journalism is more challenged than ever to share stories of people coming together across differences.

Based on our conversations at NCDD 2016, both journalists and public engagement practitioners are needed now more than ever to help us be in conversation on the issues that divide us. How can we bring our skill sets together to do this? How do community engagement practitioners and journalists work together to share stories? We’ll do a deep dive on these questions and more to see what’s possible now with these two worlds coming together to heal communities, and you won’t want to miss it!

This call will be highly interactive. Peggy Holman and Michelle Ferrier of Journalism That Matter will help us launch discussion among participants both in small, region-based breakouts and all together. And we’ll be joined by Kyle Bozentko of the Jefferson CenterBetty Knighton of the W. Virginia Center for Civic Life, and other NCDD members will share stories of their journalist-practitioner partnerships. We hope you’ll plan to join us for this exciting opportunity to initiate a conversation we hope will continue to bring these two fields closer together and spark some exciting collaborations!

This 90-minute call will use Zoom technology to allow for video and audio, screen sharing and breakouts. Register today for this exciting call!

About Journalism That Matters

Journalism That Matters is a nonprofit that convenes conversations to foster collaboration, innovation, and action so that a diverse news and information ecosystem supports communities to thrive. More information can be found on their website.

About NCDD’s Confab Calls

Confab bubble imageNCDD’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. Confabs are free and open to all. Register today if you’d like to join us!

About our Speakers

Kyle Bozentko is the Executive Director of the Jefferson Center. Kyle brings over a decade of civic engagement, public policy, and political organizing experience to oversee the strategic and organizational development of the Jefferson Center. He received his BA in Political Science and Religious Studies from Hamline University in Saint Paul and his Masters of Theological Studies from the Boston University School of Theology with an emphasis on sociology of religion and politics.

Dr. Michelle Ferrier is an associate professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, where she conducts research on online communities, digital identity and community engagement. She is the president of Journalism That Matters and has been a pioneer in developing online communities and community engagement work. Since 2009, she has been exploring the intersection of communities and journalism through articles on Poynter.org and through development of hyperlocal news platforms such as MyTopiaCafe.com, LocallyGrownNews.com and Troll-Busters.com.

Peggy Holman is Executive Director of Journalism That Matters, a nonprofit she co-founded with three journalists to re-conceive news and information civic communication to support communities and democracy to thrive. As an author and consultant, Holman has helped explore a nascent field of social technologies that enable diverse groups to face complex issues. In The Change Handbook, she & her co-authors profile 61 practices that involve people in creating their desired future. Her award-winning Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity provides a roadmap for tackling complex challenges through stories, principles, and practices.

Betty Knighton is the director of the West Virginia Center for Civic Life, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes public dialogue on issues that affect the quality of life in West Virginia. A primary focus of her work has been building a network for civic engagement in the state through collaborative partnerships with educational, civic, faith-based, and governmental organizations. Through the Center, she works with West Virginia communities to develop balanced frameworks for local issues, to convene and moderate community discussions, and to develop processes to move from dialogue to action.

Doug Oplinger is responsible for convening and leading the Ohio media collaborative, Your Voice Ohio. He has 45 years of exemplary journalistic work in Ohio as a reporter and Managing Editor at the Akron Beacon Journal that includes editing two Pulitzers and a Casey Medal for Service to Families and Children.

NCDD Podcast on Connecting Journalism & Public Engagement is Live!

The fourth episode of the NCDD Podcast is now live! You can find this on iTunes, SoundCloud and Google Play.

In this episode, Journalism that Matters Executive Director Peggy Holman and Board President Michelle Ferrier discuss their thoughts about connecting journalists and public engagement practitioners. They reflect on the opportunities they see for these fields to collaborate and complement one another.

This conversation is one that NCDD and Journalism That Matters will continue to have with our members in the coming months. In March, NCDD will hold a Confab Call with Journalism That Matters – look for an announcement of that event next week! And Journalism That Matters will look to also continue the conversation at their conference this May. More information on the conference in coming soon as well.

This first series of episodes in the NCDD Podcast were recorded at the NCDD 2016 Conference, where we asked leaders and practitioners from the D&D field to share their stories and ideas, as well as discuss opportunities and challenges in our audio room. These episodes are being released as we continue our conversation from the conference about #BridgingOurDivides.

We invite you to listen to this episode and share your thoughts here, particularly about the opportunities for journalists and public engagement practitioners to support one another and collaborate. Do you have experience working with journalists? Do you have ideas for how our fields can partner? Share them in the comments below!

Our thanks to Ryan Spenser for recording and editing these podcast episodes, to Barb Simonetti for her financial support of this initial series, and to everyone who participated at the conference.

Please continue to tune in and share the podcast with your networks!

2016 NCDD Year In Review

Looking back, 2016 was an important year for NCDD and the dialogue & deliberation community. NCDD and the field saw a lot of important things happen and transitions take place, and as we look forward to the work ahead, we also wanted to look back at what we’ve accomplished and what’s changed.

NCDD 2016

Of course, the biggest effort on NCDD’s part was organizing the 2016 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation on “Bridging Our Divides,” a timely focus on the important work of bringing people together across differences of politics, race, socioeconomic status, and more. We had 350 public engagement practitioners, journalists, academics, public officials, funders, and students converge for this three-day gathering focused on sharing stories, exploring collaborations, and talking about what’s next for the dialogue and deliberation community following the divisive election season. You can view the schedule and speakers, watch panels, and more in the Events section of our site.

Following the conference and the presidential election, NCDD continued this conversation with our #BridgingOurDivides campaign, which sought to continue to collect and share stories, resources, and tools for bridging divides in our communities. We also hosted a special open Confab Call about what our community can do and is doing post-election. We invite you to check out the amazing compilation of the tools and resources we gathered and to watch the recorded Confab on the blog here. Many thanks to our community for sharing your great tools, resources, and stories!

New Projects, Programs, and Partnerships

In 2016, NCDD truly embraced our stewardship of Conversation Café with the launch of the new Conversation Café website and a Confab Call sharing the story of how Conversation Café was created and how it has been utilized in communities across the country. Conversation Café is an elegantly simple process for dialogue, and with its materials all open source and available for free (including a recording of our recent host training session), it’s a important resource for our field and communities in a time where dialogue is so critically needed.

NCDD was also proud to finally unveil our new Emerging Leaders Initiative, a program we’ve been working towards since our 2014 Conference. The Emerging Leaders Initiative, or ELI, will provide resources and support to rising leaders in our field and create more “on ramps” into the dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement field, especially for young people 35 and under. The ELI also seeks to provide support to newcomers to the field, no matter their age, in addition to helping facilitate collaborations and connections among D&D efforts that involve or focus on young people. Learn more about this exciting initiative at www.ncdd.org/youth, or contact our Youth Engagement Coordinator Roshan Bliss at roshan@ncdd.org.

Another outcome from NCDD 2016 was the launch of our new NCDD Podcast. The podcast brings together members of the D&D community to discuss ideas, opportunities, and challenges in our work, as well as share tools and resources. Our first three episodes, all recorded at NCDD 2016, are up on iTunes, SoundCloud and Google Play!

Last year, NCDD also solidified an agreement to embark upon an exciting new partnership with the American Library Association. NCDD is proud to partner with the ALA on the Libraries Transforming Communities: Models for Change initiative that will train librarians across the country in dialogue and deliberation methods for community engagement and connect them with NCDD members. We look forward to launching these online and in-person trainings very soon! For more information, see our blog post here.

And as always, our work with the Kettering Foundation continued – including a huge inventory survey we conducted in collaboration with KF and work engaging the dialogue and deliberation community in Kettering’s annual DC event, A Public Voice.

Changes in Leadership

So who was responsible for this fabulous work? Our amazing staff, of course! In 2016, we saw our amazing team of five continue to work hard to deliver fabulous programming, projects, and a successful conference. We also saw a transition in our leadership, with myself, Courtney Breese, moving into a larger role as Managing Director working in partnership with Sandy Heierbacher, who transitioned from Executive Director to Founding Director. Sandy and I enjoy working together so much, and we think this transition is a great move for both of us and NCDD. I know I have a very tough job ahead in managing NCDD’s day-to-day operations as skillfully as Sandy has! And Sandy is excited to continue her essential work nurturing and building our network with us, as well as having the flexibility to explore new opportunities to use her skills at building and engaging networks.

The year 2016 also saw the end of an era for our Board of Directors. Board members John Backman, Marla Crockett, Diane Miller, and Barbara Simonetti completed six years of service to NCDD – two complete terms, which is our max for Board members. We could not be more thankful to these Board members for their guidance, support and (serious) heavy lifting they provided to NCDD as we succeeded in gaining 501(c)3 status, building our staffing from three to five, organizing three successful conferences and numerous programs and initiatives. They will be missed!

We were also grateful to continue to work with Board members Susan Stuart Clark and Martin Carcasson, who are continuing into 2017 and will be joined by new Board members Simone Talma Flowers, Jacob Hess, Betty Knighton, and Wendy Willis, all of whom we’re excited to work with.

Looking Forward

As 2017 gets underway, NCDD is committed to continuing to support the dialogue and deliberation community through sharing resources, convening conversations, supporting collaborations, reaching out to new networks, and lifting up the stories of the work of this network.

NCDD’s staff is a small outfit that does a great amount of work to keep this community connected and supported. Our work is significantly funded by members’ dues and small donations. If you want to support all of the great work we do, please consider making a tax-deductible donation by visiting www.ncdd.org/donate or renewing or upgrading your membership at www.ncdd.org/renew.

We look forward to continuing to work with this community at this important time for dialogue in our country, and we certainly continue to be inspired by the innovative and essential work you do!

NCDD’s Year in Numbers: 2016

2016 was an important year for the dialogue & deliberation community, and a very active one for NCDD!

The following end-of-year infographic highlights NCDD’s impact and activity during the past twelve months, including activity at our national conference, on our website, listservs, events, and new and exciting efforts. Our sincere thanks to NCDD co-founder Andy Fluke for his fabulous design work!

Thanks to our fabulous community for engaging with us in so many ways in 2016! We look forward to continuing this important work with you all in 2017.

Please share this post with others 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 addition to sharing this post and/or just the image above, feel free to download the print-quality PDF.

Moving Forward with NCDD’s Emerging Leaders Initiative

During our NCDD 2016 conference, we were proud to officially announce that NCDD would be launching our new Emerging Leaders Initiative – a new effort to support and engage the next generation of D&D leaders and practitioners that NCDD has been developing since our 2014 conference on Democracy for the Next Generation. Today, we’re happy to share more details el_badge_web_01on the next steps in developing the initiative’s offerings!

What is the Emerging Leaders Initiative?

The Emerging Leaders Initiative (ELI) emerged from the NCDD members’ recognition of our need to foster long-term resilience for the field of dialogue & deliberation and that we can do that best by intentionally cultivating D&D’s next generation of leadership – that is, the younger folks in our ranks as well as those who are newer to the field.

To that end, the ELI will seek to provide extra resources and support to rising leaders in our field and to create more “on ramps” into the dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement field, especially for young people 35 and under, but also for newcomers to the field of any age. We want to offer these emerging leaders a means to become more involved in the world of D&D, connecting them with opportunities to build their capacity as practitioners, scholars, and professionals while lifting up the contributions, innovation, and leadership of young and new people in our field.

To accomplish these goals, NCDD has already created several tools that will be cornerstones of the Emerging Leaders Initiative – including the Emerging Leaders Discussion Listserv, social media forums, and a compilation of introductory D&D resources – and we are currently working on building a robust mentorship program, youth-focused webinars, and other capacity-building efforts for emerging leaders. We encourage our NCDD members, especially our younger and newer ones, to learn more about what the ELI by visiting its the brand new web page at www.ncdd.org/youth – the hub for all things related to the initiative.

Have Your Say in How the ELI Develops!

In addition to the new page, we are also launching the Emerging Leaders Survey – a short questionnaire that we’re using to better understand how we can support and collaborate with our emerging leaders. We are asking anyone in NCDD’s network or the broader field who is 35 and under, relatively new to D&D, and/or a current student to fill out the survey by Friday, February 10th.

Our field is already full of promising young folks and newcomers, and we want to hear from you! This survey is your chance to directly inform what you want the Emerging Leaders Initiative to look like and how you want to be involved. And to sweeten the deal, two survey participants will be randomly selected after Feb. 10th to win a $25 gift card! Don’t miss your chance – please fill the survey out today or encourage any of the younger or newer D&D folks who you are connected with to do so!

We’re Just Getting Started

The ELI will continue to develop and evolve over time, and collaboration with our NCDD members will play a key role in how that happens. So if you want to connect with this important work and help support and cultivate the next generation of D&D leaders, please don’t hesitate to get in touch me, Roshan Bliss, NCDD’s Youth Engagement Coordinator, at roshan@ncdd.org.

On a personal note, I am incredibly honored and humbled to be spearheading the Emerging Leaders Initiative for NCDD, and I can’t wait to connect with others who understand the importance of cross-generational collaboration in dialogue, deliberation, and public engagement. The D&D field’s future is bright and full of potential, and we hope that you will support the Emerging Leaders Initiative in unlocking even more of that potential in the coming years!

Want to support the Emerging Leaders Initiative and all of the great young people in the field? Make a donation in support of the next generation of D&D!

NCDD Podcast Episode 3: Opportunities for D&D in Congress is Now Live

Yesterday a new Congress was sworn in, including many newly elected members, eager to get to work. In light of this new year and the new opportunities and challenges it presents, we are releasing our next podcast episode which focuses on the possibilities for connecting Congress men and women with dialogue and deliberation for better constituent engagement.

You can find this, our third episode, on iTunes, SoundCloud and Google Play!

In this episode, I, Courtney Breese, NCDD’s Managing Director, speak with Brad Fitch of the Congressional Management Foundation. The Foundation works with Members of Congress and staff to enhance their operations and interactions with constituents. Brad and I discussed the work of the Foundation, as well as his reflections from NCDD 2016 and the possibilities he sees for bringing dialogue and deliberation practices to Members of Congress. It’s an enlightening conversation and good food for thought for this field as we consider efforts to bridge divides in our nation.

This first series of episodes in the NCDD Podcast were recorded at the NCDD 2016 Conference, where we asked leaders and practitioners from the D&D field to share their stories and ideas, as well as discuss opportunities and challenges in our audio room. These episodes are being released as we continue our conversation from the conference about #BridgingOurDivides.

We invite you to listen to this episode and share your thoughts here, particularly about the opportunities and challenges for incorporating dialogue and deliberation into constituent engagement: What opportunities do you see for dialogue and deliberation practices to be used by Congress men and women in engaging those they represent? How might we overcome some of the challenges, particularly the systemic challenges outlined in the podcast? We look forward to your ideas!

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

Please continue to tune in and share the podcast with your networks!

Looking Back at NCDD 2016 and What Has Happened Since

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

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

Sharing the Stories of the Conference

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

Panel on Philanthropy and Fundraising

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

Panel on Journalism and Public Engagement

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

ncdd_podcast_200x200Sharing More Personal Stories

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing this Work

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

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

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

NCDD Podcast Episode 2 about Conversation Café Now Live

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

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

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

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

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