More Conversation Instigations

July/August 2002 Issue

By Joseph Hart, Utne Reader

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Like grunge rock, Starbuck’s, and anti-globalization protests, the Conversation Café is spreading out from Seattle. One group directly inspired by Vicki Robin’s original has been launched in Tucson, Arizona, while conversation conveners in China, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada plan to follow suit. If you’d like to start a conversation café in your town, contact Robin’s organization, the New Road Map Foundation, which has trained dozens of "hosts" in the simple methods used in Seattle: Conversation Cafés, New Road Map Foundation, Box 15981, Seattle, WA 98115, 206/527-0437; e-mail project coordinator Claudia McNeill at claudiamcneill@mindspring.com; www.newroadmap.org. Below are some other conversation-based projects around the country.The Public Conversations
Project (PCP)
Laura Chasin, a practicing therapist, hit on the idea for PCP in 1989 while she watched an abortion debate on television devolve into a shouting match. It occurred to Chasin that she might apply the conflict resolution techniques she used with families every day in her office to public debates over abortion and other controversial subjects.During the next several years, Chasin and her colleagues honed techniques not unlike the simple methods of the Conversation Café. Even within the dramatically polarized abortion debate, the PCP dialogues bore fruit, Chasin told newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman. "They went out thinking these people are compassionate, principled, and share concerns that I have."Public Conversations Project
46 Kondazian Street
Watertown, MA 02472
617/923-1216
info@publicconversations.org
www.publicconversations.org
World Cafe
This project of the California-based Whole Systems Associates is basically an adaptable blueprint for fostering conversation in groups large and small. The model recreates a café setting—complete with food—and groups divide into small groups of four or five people to explore a given topic for a short time. There’s a good deal of emphasis on visual means like diagramming and drawing to inspire creativity and "map" evolving ideas.Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, principals in Whole Systems Associates, hit on the idea of the World Café by accident while they were hosting a seminar. Before the formal session began, participants gathered informally at several small tables with paper and crayons. They scribbled ideas, switched tables, and brainstormed together. By lunchtime, the paper table-cloths mapped the network of ideas that had been exchanged.

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