Introducing The Transpartisan Review

Posted on January 31, 2017 by Andy Fluke

In case you missed it in all the commotion of the past month, I want to encourage you to check out an important project launched on Inauguration Day 2017 by a handful of members and friends of NCDD – The Transpartisan Review. I had the pleasure to join the team behind this new publication a few months ago, lending my skills as designer and editor, and I’d like to share a bit more about it.

Originally introduced to the NCDD community last fall at our NCDD 2016 conference, The Transpartisan Review is a new digital journal dedicated to sharing thoughts and insights from the growing transpartisan community.

In its inaugural issue, The Transpartisan Review explores the “transpartisan moment” we find ourselves in after the latest presidential election. Executive editors Lawrence Chickering and James Turner posit that we have reached a turning point in the history of our democracy – a transitional phase – which is offering us an opportunity to replace the “partisanship” splitting our country with a new form of political engagement incorporating the best features of left and right.

Alongside this assessment of the current political climate, this first issue of The Transpartisan Review shares several articles on a variety of topics, including contributions from distinguished NCDD members Joan Blades, Mark Gerzon, and Michael Briand (who also served as managing editor). It examines perspectives from the political side of NCDD’s #BridgingOurDivides campaign with articles contemplating how to be a better neighbor, an alternative approach to foreign policy, and even a different way to look at terrorism – all from a perspective that seeks to go beyond the traditional left-right divide.

Not only are they effective conversation starters, but these features represent the beginning of a dialogue the editors of the journal hope to encourage with and between its readership as we all gather to discuss the impact the new administration will have on the United States and the rest of the world.

You can read the entire issue online or download it for free at the journal’s website, www.transpartisanreview.com, and while you’re there, you can also check out Chickering and Turner’s Transpartisan Notes, a series of short-form articles on current issues viewed through a transpartisan lens.

You can look forward to more critical contributions to the work of bridging our nation’s divides in future issues of The Transpartisan Review and from this great team of NCDDers and transpartisan leaders.

Free NIFI Community-Police Relations Discussion Guides

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Roshan Bliss

We want to encourage our network to learn more about the new Safety & Justice discussion guide from the National Issues Forums Institute. As NIFI and the Kettering Foundation – both core NCDD member orgs – prepare for their yearly A Public Voice event in DC, they are collecting reports from deliberative forums on community-police relations and criminal justice reform to show policymakers that deliberation is more than “bumper sticker talk” and media representations.
NIFI is inviting all those hosting discussions on this critical issue to share their data and learnings with them so that they can be included in the conversation in DC, even if those conversations don’t use NIFI materials. You can learn more about how to participate and get free discussion guides in the NIFI blog post below or find the original here.

Special Spring ’17 Offer: Free Safety & Justice Materials to First 100 Moderators

Recently, the relationship between police and the communities they serve has become the focus of intense scrutiny, conversation, and even protest. The issue is difficult to talk about – and yet, we must, or this
issue could tear our communities apart.

A problem like this requires talk, but not just any talk. We need deliberative forums where community members of all ages, races, ethnicities, religions, and professions can get beyond the talking points and bumper stickers. Forums where they can share not just what they think, but why. Places where we can consider tensions and tradeoffs and see where we may have common ground.

But in order for there to be forums, there have to be conveners and moderators.

And that’s why your community needs YOU. To get people started, NIFI is offering 20 FREE hard copies of the Safety and Justice issue guide + copy of the starter video to the first 100 moderators who can convene a forum between January 1, 2017 and March 15, 2017.

Sign up for your free materials HERE.

NIFI is offering these materials in partnership with the Kettering Foundation. Kettering will analyze participant questionnaires and other forum information for a report to policymakers at the A Public Voice event on May 9, and in a full report on the entire forums series at the end of the year.

To qualify for this special offer, you must:

Host a forum on Safety and Justice between January 1, 2017 and March 15, 2017.
Ensure that each participant and moderator complete a post-forum questionnaire.
Send all questionnaires back within a week of hosting the forum (all questionnaires must be sent by March 15, 2017).
Collect participant contact information for additional A Public Voice and NIFI opportunities.

I am asking each of you to consider offering a forum to a group with whom you have contact and who you feel is interested in this issue – your church, a book club, a class you are teaching, a civic organization to which you belong, etc. You can make a significant contribution to spreading awareness of public deliberation and to helping to find a solution to this significant public issue.
– NIFI President Emeritus Bill Muse

You can find the original version of this NIFI blog post at www.nifi.org/en/2017-safety-justice-offer.

Can Public Life Be Regenerated?

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Keiva Hummel

The 32-page report, Can Public Life Be Regenerated? (2016), was written by David Mathews and supported by the Cousins Research Group of the Kettering Foundation. This report is based on a presentations Mathews gave the the Independent Sector conference on issues of community, civil society, and governance. In this report, Mathews explores the possibilities to “reweave the social fabric” within society, to improve its social capital and revitalize its sense of community, and create a healthier civil society.

Below is an excerpt of the report and it can be found in full at the bottom of this page or on Kettering Foundation’s site here.

From the guide…

Foreword
This paper was written in 1996 for an Independent Sector conference. At that time, the term public life was used to distinguish political life from other kinds of collective living. This was intended to counter a tendency to conflate largely social phenomena (attending a picnic) with more political activities (building a playground to give children a safer place to play). If I were writing this paper today, I likely would title it Can Democracy Be Regenerated? The Kettering Foundation’s research has led to a distinctive understanding of democratic politics that puts citizens at the center. By citizens, we mean people who join with others to produce things that serve our common well-being. As our research evolved, we came to use “making democracy work as it should” as a central, organizing theme. We define democracy, at its most fundamental, as a system of governance in which power comes from citizens who generate their power by working together to combat common problems—beginning in their communities—and by working to shape their common future, both through what they do with one another and through their institutions. – David Mathews April 4, 2016

These days we seem willing to consider the possibility that democracies need something more than written constitutions, multiple parties, free elections, and representative governments. They also depend on a strong public life, a rich depository of social capital, a sense of community, and a healthy civil society. Now comes the obvious follow-up: Is it possible to “reweave the social fabric,” to generate social capital where it is lacking, to build a sense of community in a fragmented, polarized city, to invigorate public life at a time when many Americans are seeking security in private sanctuaries? No one knows. Maybe a democratic civil society takes centuries to develop, building layer upon layer like a coral reef. Maybe the places we admire most result more from happenstance than we would like to admit. These reservations notwithstanding, we do have cases where a civil order changed its character in a relatively short period of time. Modern Spanish democracy emerged from Franco’s fascism in only a few decades, according to Víctor Pérez Díaz. And Vaughn Grisham Jr. reports that Tupelo, Mississippi, changed its civic character in roughly the same amount of time, the result being that the poorest city in the poorest county in the poorest state of the union became a progressive community with a per capita income close to that of Atlanta.

So maybe—just maybe—it is possible for towns and cities, perhaps even counties and states, to change their politics. Maybe public life can be regenerated. I say “regenerated” because I am assuming that some vestige or memory of public life exists almost everywhere. I think modern public life is rooted in the earliest institutions and norms created for collective survival. So my instincts tell me that strengthening public life is best accomplished by following the advice of J. Herman Blake, a very effective community organizer, whose practice is to “build on what grows.” With that as a predicate, I want to go on to the question of how people might change the character of their civil order. There is some urgency surrounding this question; I sense a danger in trying to strengthen public life with only a thin concept of the public, civil, or communal to guide the way. That would create a problem akin to trying to paint a barn red without clearly distinguishing red from pink or orange. There is a tendency to take descriptions of cities with a rich reservoir of social capital and try to replicate their features. If they have a lot of festivals, why not generate public life with a pig roast? (Actually, a foundation in Europe was asked to do just that.) But are community barbecues and festivals the product of something that happens prior to the events, of some precondition that we haven’t been able to identify? Are we in danger of mistaking the symptom for the cause? If we do, our strategies for building civil society will be the equivalent of dress-for-success strategies that tell us we can get ahead in the world by wearing the right tie or dress.

Developing a Concept of Public Life
Here is what I will try to do in this paper: Drawing on what the Kettering Foundation is learning from its research and observations, and from studies others have done, I will propose a way of thinking about public life, or a paradigm.5 Kettering has been developing a hypothesis about what public life is in order to have a better idea about how to strengthen it. The way we understand the structure and function of a public suggests ways to regenerate public life. Since no one knows the answer to the question of whether such life can be renewed, surely the thing to do is to spell out our assumptions, which can be tested by experience.

The Influence of Studies of Social Capital and Community Development
We aren’t making empirical claims when we develop a hypothesis. Yet our experiences influence our imagination of what might be. For 15 years, Kettering has been observing public life in communities from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to El Paso, Texas, and from Newark, New Jersey, to Orange County, California. We have also commissioned independent research on public life. And we have been influenced by studies like Pérez-Díaz’s on Spain, Grisham’s on Tupelo, Robert Putnam’s on north central Italy, and that of the Heartland Center for Leadership Development on the difference between dying and prospering rural communities, among others. Putnam and Grisham reinforced our own impressions that the “soft side” of the social order or an intangible such as social capital is critical to public life. Social capital is said to consist of networks of civic associations, along with norms of reciprocity and social trust, that result in high levels of voluntary cooperation. This capital is generated where public life is strong, that is, where people are involved in public matters and in relationships that run horizontally (among equals) instead of vertically (between haves and have-nots). As you know, while Putnam found these characteristics in some areas in Italy, they were noticeably absent in others. People in the “uncivil” areas did not participate in either local politics or social organizations, and their relationships tended to be hierarchical, with the have-nots dependent on the haves.

This is an excerpt of the report, download the full guide at the bottom of this page to learn more.

About Kettering Foundation
The Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operating foundation rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Kettering’s primary research question is, what does it take to make democracy work as it should? Kettering’s research is distinctive because it is conducted from the perspective of citizens and focuses on what people can do collectively to address problems affecting their lives, their communities, and their nation.

Follow on Twitter: @KetteringFdn

Resource Link: www.kettering.org/catalog/product/can-public-life-be-regenerated

The Challenge of Populism to Deliberative Democracy

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Roshan Bliss

As populism sees a global resurgence, it is critical for our field to examine what this phenomenon means for our work. That’s why we encourage our network to give some thought to the insights offered in this piece from Lucy Parry of Participedia – an NCDD member organization. In it, Lucy examines the way citizens juries in Australia might violate core tenets of populism, and encourage us to consider how deliberative democracy – especially approaches using mini-publics – may need to evolve to avoid being delegitimized by populist challenges. You can read the piece below or find it on Participedia’s blog here.

When is a democratic innovation not a democratic innovation? The populist challenge in Australia

The following article by Participedia Research Assistant Lucy Parry was originally published by The Policy Space on October 11, 2016.

Democratic innovation is burgeoning worldwide. Over 50 examples from Australia alone are now detailed on Participedia, an online global project documenting democratic innovations. In some states, ‘mini-publics’ proliferate at local and state level. South Australia in particular has wholeheartedly embraced the notion of deliberative democracy and has embarked on an ambitious raft of citizen engagement processes including several Citizens’ Juries.

According to Graham Smith (2009) a democratic innovation must (a) engage citizens over organised interests and (b) be part of the wider political process. Mini-publics operationalise these aims through convening a group of citizens who are at least broadly representative of the wider population to deliberate on a given topic.

Despite fulfilling Smith’s criteria, democratic innovations in Australia run the risk of becoming neither democratic nor innovative. Scholarly debate over mini-publics peaked over a decade ago – isn’t it time to move on? Moving on necessitates moving with the times and dealing with contemporary challenges. One such challenge is the rise of populism. Australian democratic innovations typically rely on premises that are fundamentally opposed by populism: random selection and expert knowledge. This populist challenge cannot be ignored, and theorists and practitioners must meet it together.

Inside the room

A Citizens’ Jury is a well-known mini-public format: a small(ish) group of randomly selected citizens who meet several times to deliberate on a given topic. Random selection underpins the process in two ways. It aims to produce a descriptively representative sample, making the jurors literally a ‘mini public’ (Fung 2003; Ryan and Smith 2014): a microcosm of the wider population. Random selection also relates to deliberative quality: bringing together a group of random citizens reduces the likelihood of the loudest voices dominating. As Australian research organisation newDemocracy Foundation points out, ‘governments inevitably hear from the noisiest voices who insist on being heard’; lobbyists, Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), Not-in-my-back-yards (NIMBYs) – call them what you will. Mini-publics are designed to foster a less adversarial, more nuanced debate with a group of random citizens.

I have observed Citizens’ Juries in the flesh and it is quite an extraordinary experience. Watching a room of disparate and diverse people evolve into a committed team negotiating technical topics like wind farm development leaves me feeling almost jubilant (I don’t get out much). When you are inside the room, watching the deliberative process at play, it really is wonderful. Australia is home to a number of practitioners including newDemocracy Foundation, DemocracyCo and Mosaic Lab, and it is undeniable that some great work is going on in Australia in this area.

But alas, the path of democracy never did run smoothly. Suffice to say that cracks begin to emerge when you are outside the room. If decisions are legitimate to the extent that they have been deliberated upon, then the decisions made by a mini-public suffer a legitimacy deficit, given the typically small group involved (Parkinson 2003). And although some recent Citizens’ Juries have sought to expand the number of participants, this diminishes the quality of dialogue (Chambers 2009). Furthermore, in the past 15 years a growing number of scholars have sought to move beyond the mini-public paradigm in deliberative democracy to tackle deliberation at the large scale – through deliberative systems (Dryzek 2009; Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012), deliberative cultures (Sass and Dryzek 2013) and deliberative societies.

Yet, the practice of deliberative democracy (in Australia at least) clings to the mini-public approach. South Australia is notable for its extensive citizen engagement yes, but is it really innovative? The Western Australian Department of Planning and Infrastructure undertook a similarly ambitious program of mini-public style engagements over a decade ago. This critique is not a reflection on the quality of democratic practice in Australia, nor is it a criticism of what goes on inside the room. It is instead a concern that further underpins the need for deliberative theorists and practitioners to work together.

Outside the room: the populist challenge

Remember those NIMBYs and SIFs that mini-publics aim to exclude through random selection? Their exclusion rests on the assumption that the quality and outcome of deliberation is better without those insistent voices. The aim is that through a process of deliberation, people will become ‘more public-spirited, more tolerant, more knowledgeable, more attentive to the interests of others, and more probing of their own interests’ (Warren 1992, p8). Producing deliberated public opinion involves weeding out weak and poorly informed arguments. Again, this is all very well if you are inside the room. If you’re outside the room, you may very well object.

And let’s face it, those objectionable voices are not going away. As Ben Moffit points out, ‘Populism, once seen as a fringe phenomenon relegated to another era or only certain parts of the world, is now a mainstay of contemporary politics across the globe’. The voices that a Citizens’ Jury wants to keep out of the room now have the room surrounded. If we continue down the mini-publics road, the very thing that allegedly legitimises mini-publics will also be its downfall. The assumptions underpinning random selection are that it is representative of the wider community; and that it facilitates better quality deliberation by bringing together everyday citizens rather than insistent voices. Whether these things are accurate or not is a moot point – what actually matters is how they are perceived by broader publics. It is sad but possibly true that for those outside the room, what goes on inside the room doesn’t matter. And I suspect that the argument that a Jury is representative and very well informed is simply not going to cut it.

Trust in the Australian political system is at a staggering low with very little trust in any level of government; mini-publics in Australia are almost invariably associated with a government body or statutory authority. Mini-publics rely on information presented by experts; populism rejects the knowledge of experts. With all the will and most independently-recruited-and-facilitated process in the world – people may just not trust it. And yet, even if there were greater trust in politics, the justification of random selection explicitly rejects populist public opinion – and vice versa. Bridie Jabour’s Guardian interviews with One Nation voters exemplifies this disconnect. One Hanson supporter is quoted as saying:

“I’m not a politician, I’m not an accountant, I’m not anybody who knows anything but I see stuff and think ‘that doesn’t look right to me’, the average Joe Blow feels things more than they actually understand or know, they feel things, they know stuff.”

The logic of randomly selected mini-publics goes against this. The question is how to respond; the populist challenge cannot simply be ignored or sneered at. Yet in a way, this is exactly what mini-publics can be perceived as doing.

The time is right

We are at a critical juncture in Australia. One option is to continue plying the mini-public trade and make extra efforts to engage more people in the process, and to better explain mini-publics to a wider audience. The question is whether we simply need to work on explaining ourselves better, or whether the populist challenge requires deeper reflection on the practice of democratic innovation and deliberative democracy. I am inclined toward the latter.

The challenge that populism poses should be seized as a catalyst to re-think the practice of deliberative democracy in Australia. Mini-publics are one of many worthy options; deliberative democracy is a far broader church – and democratic innovation even more so. Randomly selected mini-publics are not a cure-all. At best, they are an important piece embedded in a broader democratic process. At worst, they are a viable threat to the practice of deliberative democracy itself.

You can find the posting of this article on the Participedia blog at www.participedia.net/en/news/2016/11/13/when-democratic-innovation-not-democratic-innovation-populist-challenge-australia.

ILG Releases Results of CA Public Engagement Survey

Posted on January 23, 2017 by Roshan Bliss

We encourage our members on the West Coast to take note of the results of a survey of local public engagement in California recently conducted by NCDD member organization the Institute for Local Government. The survey results show that local governments need more support in key areas that many of our members work in, which hopefully means more opportunities are on the horizon! We encourage you to read ILG’s post about the survey results below, or click here for more on their effort.

ILG Public Engagement Program Releases Findings from Self Evaluation Effort

“When citizens are actively involved in their civic and democratic institutions, their community and nation are stronger, more just, and more prosperous.” — Alan Solomont, Dean, Tufts University

As public engagement is a foundation of our democracy, the Public Engagement Program has been a foundation of the Institute for Local Government (ILG). A key component of our organization’s vision is to work toward a future where “all segments of the community are appropriately engaged in key public decisions.”

We’ve been working on this vision for more for a decade. But last year we decided to pause, assess our effectiveness and look at how we can best assist local governments. We retained outside consultants to help us undertake an ambitious, objective assessment of where we stand, what our local government partners need and how we can help them achieve their goals. The result was an in-depth evaluation resulting in informative infographics and accompanying narrative reports: “What We Did and What We Learned” and “Electronic Survey Results.”

These reports provide insight into the process used and input considered to assess the effectiveness of our program, while a complementary document, “The Future of Public Engagement Work,” outlines 10 recommended steps for the Public Engagement Program to take in order to better engage communities and local governments.

What We Did & What We Learned

ILG engaged with stakeholders across California to discuss what our public engagement program is doing well, how it can better serve local governments, and the challenges that local governments often face in making policy decisions. The result was a number of key observations, for example:

The public engagement field is still developing;
While local governments in California have made strides towards more inclusive public engagement in decision-making, they continue to report significant challenges; and
ILG is uniquely positioned to expand training and technical assistance to local governments in California.

The Program also completed a resources inventory that includes the publishing of more than 500 resources and 200 conference sessions since 2005. In addition, we interviewed 11 similar organizations, providing a nationwide scan of the field. During these interviews, many key themes were expressed, including the importance of a practitioner support network and the need to share lessons learned at a national level.

Statewide Electronic Survey Results

In conjunction with our consultants, we also conducted an extensive survey that was completed by more than 250 stakeholders representing counties, cities, special districts, and public engagement champions in 42 of California’s 58 counties. The survey provided ILG with insight on the impact of the Public Engagement Program; for example, 83 percent of those who had participated in an ILG learning opportunity reported that it increased knowledge and/or capacity to engage people.

The survey also provided many insights into the challenges that local government officials face in making local policy decisions. Among the most cited problems were “it’s the same people who always participate” and a “lack of staff and/or financial resources.” Participants stated that they believed a public engagement model for policy decision making is best applied to the following areas: parks and recreation, land use and planning, transportation, and infrastructure.

The Future of Our Public Engagement Work

Additionally, the consultants recommended 10 possible “next steps” for the Program to consider pursuing. Highlights included:

Increasing in-person outreach to discover local government needs and how ILG can assist;
Establishing new cross-sector partnerships to expand effective public engagement practices; and
Expanding the Public Engagement Program’s training opportunities and developing new tools.

The evaluation was conducted by our project consultants: Deb Marois, Converge CRT, and Adele James, Adele James Consulting. We thank The James Irvine Foundation for their generous support in making this assessment a reality, as well as in sharing our vision regarding the value of effective public engagement.

At ILG, we are excited about the future of our Public Engagement Program, and we are ready to put our consultants’ recommendations into practice.

You can find the infographics and their accompanying narrative reports on the Institute for Local Government’s website at: www.ca-ilg.org/PE2015Evaluation.

NCDD Members to Lead Deliberative Democracy Consortium

Posted on December 30, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We are so pleased to share that three of our great NCDD members – Wendy Willis (who is also an incoming NCDD Board member), Bruce Mallory, and Kyle Bozentko – have been named as the new leadership of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium starting in 2017. The DDC has been a key organization in the D&D field for years, and we are excited for these three heavyweights to revitalize it. You can read more about the change in DDC’s announcement below or on their Facebook page here (while their website revamp is in the works).

The Deliberative Democracy Consortium’s New Leadership

Dear Friends of the DDC:

We are pleased and proud to announce that DDC has new leadership! Starting January 1, Wendy Willis will become DDC’s Executive Director, while Bruce Mallory and Kyle Bozenkto will begin their terms as co-chairs of the Executive Committee.

Wendy succeeds long-time director Matt Leighninger, who will continue to serve on the Executive Committee and assist Wendy with the transition. Wendy will attend to immediate tasks such as restoring the DDC web presence, communicating with Committee members and institutional partners, and reaching out to potential sponsors interested in advancing our mission. Her appointment comes at a critical moment for deliberative, participatory democracy in the US and around the world. DDC is honored to have Wendy help us set our course in these rough seas.

Wendy Willis joins DDC from Kitchen Table Democracy, where she has served as Executive Director for the past five years. Wendy will also continue as Director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table in the National Policy Consensus Center at Portland State University. Prior to joining Kitchen Table Democracy and the National Policy Consensus Center, Wendy served as Executive Director of City Club of Portland, as a Federal Public Defender in the District of Oregon, and as a law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr., of the Oregon Supreme Court. She is also a widely published poet and essayist. Her first book of poems, Blood Sisters of the Republic, was published in 2012, and she has had poems and essays published in Utne Reader, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Oregon Humanities, ZYZZYVA, and numerous other places. Wendy holds a J.D. from Georgetown Law Center, an M.F.A. in poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, and a B.A. from Willamette University. Wendy is an incoming board member for the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation and is the incoming chair of the board for Tavern Books.

Bruce Mallory is a professor of education at the University of New Hampshire. He was appointed Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of New Hampshire in July 2003 and served until July 2009. Previously, he served on the faculty and as Dean of the Graduate School at UNH. From 2011 to 2014, he was director of the Carsey Institute. He teaches in the areas of higher education, education and poverty, and social change. He is co-founder of New Hampshire Listens and The Democracy Imperative, and serves on the Paul J. Aicher Foundation (Everyday Democracy) Board of Directors. Dr. Mallory received the Ph.D. in Special Education and Community Psychology from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

Kyle Bozentko is the Executive Director of the Jefferson Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work on citizen participation, democratic reform, and civic engagement has been published in GOVERNING Magazine, MinnPost, and InDaily (Adelaide, South Australia) and on the Independent Sector blog. 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. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of International Association of Public Participation USA (IAP2 USA) and on the Advisory Board of Forum dos Cidadaos (Portugal).

Please join us in welcoming Wendy and Bruce and Kyle!

Top Resources for Post-Election Dialogue Across Divides

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

Earlier this week, NCDD hosted a special post-election Confab Call during which over fifty of our members and affiliates had a rich, inspiring, and for some, therapeutic conversation about what kind of work people in the dialogue and deliberation field are doing to address this post-election moment.

The call was part of our ongoing #BridgingOurDivides campaign, during which we’ve been encouraging our members to share about the work happening in our field that’s aimed at fostering bridge building, and to share resources that can build capacity to move forward together despite differences. The Confab Call was its own kind of resource, and if you missed the call, you can hear about all the great projects, insights, and resources that were discussed during it by listening to the recording here or reading over the discussion and links from the call’s chat transcription here. But there are many more resources we want to share with you all today.

As we’ve mentioned before, there are important needs being felt in the wake of the election year’s end that dialogue and deliberation can address: D&D can help us process our feelings and what’s next, it can help promote and maintain civility, it can assist in bridging long-standing divides, and it can facilitate interactions that humanize people or groups who’ve been made into caricatured “others” and out groups. NCDD wanted to know how our field is responding to these needs, so we recently asked our D&D community to share their resources, tools, and projects that could help address post-election issues with us.

We received a wide variety of wonderful resources in response to that call, and in our continued efforts to help the field rise to the needs and opportunities presented in this challenging moment for our country, we’ve created a list of some of the best resources the NCDDers shared. We’ve linked to over two dozen resources below that we hope D&D practitioners will find useful as you engage with your communities over the coming weeks and months.

Please continue to add to this list in the comments section, as we’ll be continuing to archive the best of these and other tools in our Resource Center for future use. For now, take a look through the list below of valuable D&D resources.

Processing Emotions and What Happens Next

Much of what is needed across the country after the election is simply spaces and methods to process our thoughts and feelings about the election season, the outcome, and what they want to see happen next – together. There are tons of great resources in our field for doing that, and here are some of the good ones:

The Conversation Café process (CC) provides a simple structure for people looking to have thoughtful dialogue to reflect on the election as well as what they’d like to see happen now. We recommend the Quick How-To Guide, or you can delve into more comprehensive list of CC resources. You can also read a great overview and history of the CC method here
We also recommended the “What’s Next After the Election?” conversation guide from NCDD member organization Living Room Conversations to help you have conversations with people who think differently from you
Another NCDD member org, Essential Partners, is running a social media campaign that invites commentary – especially video and audio responses – about what people want to see happen after the election, and you’re invited to join the conversation using the #AfterNov8 hashtag
The National Association of Community & Restorative Justice has released a talking circle guide for teachers trying to help younger students process their thoughts and feelings about the election
The racial healing-focused organization Coming to the Table has a circle guide focused on race dialogues if you’re hosting conversations around race

Promoting and Maintaining Civility

With the divisiveness and rancor of the election season’s rhetoric on all sides, a huge part of the need D&D can fill right now is to help build the capacity for civil conversations when we’re disagreeing – whether within families, in the media, or in the legislature. Below are some of the best resources for supporting civility after the election:

The National Institute for Civil Discourse is leading the charge to promoting civility through their Revive Civility campaign. As other sources of inspiration, we also recommend the guide to surviving Thanksgiving (or any holiday) dinner penned by NCDD member and head of NICD Carolyn Lukensmeyer and the joint statement that more than 20 prominent politicians signed calling for civility and respect in politics
The Tufts University Institute for Democracy & Higher Education created this facilitator training guide specifically for those wanting to facilitate civil discussions about politically charged conversations on campuses
The national organization Facing History and Ourselves also recently released a guide for civil conversations in classrooms geared toward teachers
The conversation guide that was created by the makers of Hi From the Other Side is simple but powerful for helping folks connect on a more personal level before wading into the election
The Frenemies Project at Virginia Tech is exploring whether facilitated dialogue can promote understanding and empathy between individuals who have vastly different perspectives. More information on their initiative, Frenemies Day, can be found here
The Inquiry Institute put together a free e-book, Thoughtful Citizenship, which includes a variety of essays that share guidance on how to listen and dialogue with people of differing views

Bridging Our Divides

The election both opened new divides and deepened old ones in our society, and helping individuals and communities bridge those divides need to be a special focus of D&D work today. We encourage you to learn more about how you can facilitate that bridging using the resources below:

As a follow-up to our recent national conference on this topic, NCDD is still running our #BridgingOurDivides campaign to talk about how the D&D community is working to help our country close its most persistent and painful gaps. We encourage you to check out the conversation via the #BridgingOurDivides hashtag on social media
Essential Partners offers a great Guide for Reaching Across the Red-Blue Divides for people looking to engage with those whose political perspectives differ from theirs, as well as a list of wise questions to start such conversations off.
For public officials and community leaders, there are some good ideas in the Key Considerations for Community Leaders Facing Civil Unrest toolkit as well as the Planning in Advance of Civil Unrest toolkit, both of which are from NCDD member Grande Lum of the Divided Communities Project
The NCDD affiliated Days of Dialogue initiative in LA offers a dialogue guide and facilitators’ handbook for hosting conversations on addressing the strained community-police divide
The Bring it to the Table project from NCDD member Talking Eyes Media has a great set of short videos that can help start balanced conversations between people who disagree on issues like economy, welfare , abortion, immigration,health care, and gay marriage
Years ago when Essential Partners was still the Public Conversations Project, they released their 188-page Guide to Fostering Dialogue Across Differences, and it’s still as relevant as ever

Humanizing Groups Seen as “the Other”

One of the most troubling needs after the election, especially in light of the spike in hate crimes over the last month, is the need to develop and implement D&D methods that can help people see the humanity in those who they’ve written off as “other” or “less than” themselves. This need is one that our field urgently needs to develop more robust resources for addressing, but there are some good ones out there, which we’ve listed below:

NCDD member organization Not In Our Town has a treasure trove of resources for hosting conversations and taking action to oppose bullying and hate groups. Check out their huge catalogue of videos (most of which come with discussion guides) you can use to start conversations about addressing intolerance. You can also check out their guide on bringing stakeholders together, their Not In Our Schools guides for educators, and their quick start guide
NCDD recently launched our new Race, Police, & Reconciliation listserv to support collaboration and exchange among those working in racial dialogue, community-police relations, and truth-telling & reconciliation work – all of which help break down barriers between “us” and “them.” We encourage all involved in such work to join
We recommend reading and sharing about AllSides.com, a project that helps reduce the disconnection from other perspectives that the echo-chamber effect of social media fosters by providing comparisons of the same news stories from left-leaning, right-leaning, and center-based sources
If you want to get sense of how thick your “bubble” is or help your friends think about theirs, check out this quiz that purports to give a rating of how insulated you are or are not from the experiences of working class people
On the creative side, the US Department of Arts & Culture is inviting communities to participate in their annual People’s State of the Union between Jan. 27 – Feb. 5 by hosting story circles that encourage telling real stories of connection, disconnection, and breaking through barriers. Check out the downloadable toolkit for hosts
This illustrated video of a webinar on the power of storytelling to humanize “others” has important lessons on listening to people we’ve been taught to hate
For some reflection on how we make those we don’t know into “the other,” check out the classic TED talk from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about “the danger of a single story”

What Other Resources Are Out There?

This list features some incredible resources, but we know it’s just a taste of what’s out there in our field, so we encourage everyone to continue sharing your resources for addressing post-election needs in the comments section below! For now, we encourage you all to keep thinking about how our field can make its broadest impact possible in moving our communities and our nation beyond its deep divides and toward a positive future.

If you want to find even more amazing D&D tools, be sure to visit NCDD’s Resource Center.

NCDD Launches Listserv on Race, Police, & Reconciliation

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

There were many connections made, collaborations started, and projects launched during our NCDD 2016 conference last month in Boston. But there’s one initiative that we want to specifically highlight today and encourage our NCDD members to support.

As NCDD 2016 participants dug into the conference theme of Bridging Our Divides, two important and related divides were clearly feeling urgent for participants – our nation’s racial divides, and the parallel divide between police and the communities they work in. During several conference workshops, conversations in the hallways, and during the plenaries, our NCDD members were also exploring and sharing ideas about the power of truth & reconciliation processes to possibly help our nation address such issues, asking themselves not only what D&D practitioners can do to play a more active role in growing work aimed bridging these fraught divides, but also, what are we already doing?

That’s why NCDD is launching a new email discussion listserv that we hope will serve as a space where we can continue to share and discuss ideas, tools, projects, and resources about race dialogue, community-police dialogue, and truth-telling & reconciliation work. We encourage anyone in our network who works on, studies, or has an interest in race relations, community-police relations in the face of violence, or broader truth-telling and reconciliation processes to join this email list to network and share with others who work in these areas.

Join the Discussion Today

You can subscribe to the Race, Police, & Reconciliation Discussion List by sending a blank email to race-dialogue-subscribe-request@lists.ncdd.org. Then once you’re subscribed, you can send messages to everyone on the list by emailing race-dialogue@lists.ncdd.org.

We know that there many NCDD members – and even more outside of our network – already engaged in ongoing dialogue efforts across historical racial divides and doing the difficult work of trying to help everyday people angry with police to hear and be heard by law enforcement officials. And we at NCDD want to try to harness that collective energy and catalyze even more collaboration among those who are seeking to strengthen that work or move it towards real healing and reconciliation.

We believe that our D&D field has a special role to play in making substantive progress about how we move forward together as a country on these difficult divides, and we invite you to join us on this new discussion listserv to begin figuring out just how we do that.

Learn more about NCDD’s many other discussion and updates listservs at www.ncdd.org/listservs.

Two NCDD Members Share IAP2 USA Research Award

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We are proud to share that two of our great NCDD members – Kyle Bozentko of the Jefferson Center and Tina Nabatchi of the Maxwell School at Syracuse – have been jointly awarded the Research Project of the Year Award by NCDD member organization IAP2 USA.

The award came as part of the US branch of the International Association for Public Participation‘s annual Core Values Awards, which it gives to outstanding organizations or projects that represent the best of the best in public participation.

Kyle and Tina’s project was called “Clearing the Error: Public Deliberation about Diagnostic Error,” and it used the Citizen Jury process to involve everyday medical patients in improving their common problems with health diagnoses. It was an innovative use of deliberation to really empower people to make an impact on a key issue in health care systems, and we congratulate them on a job well done!

You can learn more about the award-winning “Clearing the Error” project in the video below:

There is more info on Kyle and Tina’s project as well as all the other award winners at www.iap2usa.org/2016cva. But for now, please join us in congratulating Kyle, Tina, and their teams on winning this important award!

Celebrating What We Accomplished at NCDD 2016

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Roshan Bliss

We with the NCDD team want to say one more giant THANK YOU to all of those involved in making the 2016 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation an enormous success last weekend! It was without a doubt one of our best conferences yet, but it couldn’t have been as incredible as it was without you!

NCDD 2016 featured 5 pre-conference events, 54 workshops, 3 engaging plenaries, 3 mentoring sessions, over a dozen breakout discussions during our Networking & Collaboration space, a great field trip, and countless connections made. We also recorded several in-person interviews with NCDD members about the projects their working on which we’ll be turning into videos and podcasts soon. It felt like a whirlwind of wonderful people, good conversation, deep learning, and unlocked potential – you really missed out if you weren’t there!

NCDD is so grateful to the over 350 diverse innovators, practitioners, scholars, elected officials, and young leaders who attended this year’s conference, our tireless volunteers, our generous conference sponsors, our featured speakers, the mentors and mentees, and everyone else who worked to make NCDD 2016 so very special! panorama-smaller

Following up, Moving forward

While we certainly didn’t figure out how to bridge all of the divides that need healing over the weekend, we did share stories of how our field has already started that work, we gained insights on how we can grow and strengthen that work, and many collaborations, partnerships, and new projects were sparked during the gathering. We encourage all of our attendees to do the follow up and deeper connecting needed to make those collaborations and projects materialize.

To support our members in following up and to help those who couldn’t be there to stay connected, we created a conference Google drive folder, which we highly recommend that everyone check out – please add your notes, slides from your presentations, and other info to the folder for everyone to share! We also hope you’ll upload the best pictures you took to this folder so we can see all of the smiling faces of NCDD!

We also encourage you to keep the conversation going on social media with the hashtags #NCDD2016, #NCDD, #BridgingOurDivides, and #NCDDEmergingLeaders or by participating in our NCDD Facebook Discussion Group. Don’t forget to follow NCDD on Facebook and Twitter!

group-talking NCDD conferences are always an in-person reminder of just how broad and powerful this field is. We are truly honored to be working to support our network and the important work you do. We will continue to share more in-depth updates on specific outcomes and next steps that emerged from the conference over the next weeks, so continue to check back here on the news blog for more.

For now, let’s bask in the great memories we made during this incredible gathering of our field while we make plans for advancing our work until the next time we all meet together in 2018!

Civic Studies

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