We need community to get things done.
Community rests on relationships.
Relationships grow from conversations.
Conversations cultivate community.
I’ve been a gardener for years; for most of them, with hit-or- miss results. Sometimes a pretty good yield, sometimes mostly weeds. That all changed a couple of years ago when a woman at work taught me about soil. The key to good growth, she said, is good soil: attention paid to creating the best soil and tending to it was the most important and powerful thing I could do to have a predictably fruitful garden. I was dubious but I followed her advice, sifting in mulch and manure in the spring, adding fertilizer and breaking the tough ground as needed throughout the season. I was astonished at how my efforts paid off: healthy plants, huge vegetables, massive yield.
I think of the work of dialogue much as I think of the cycle of my garden; how the time I spend in preparation and tending deeply affects the quality and the yield. Now (spring) is the time when I decide what I will grow. I sit with the seed catalogues or browse the racks at my local nursery. In past years, I skipped a step: I went ahead and decided what to plant without checking in with family and neighbors about what they’d like to eat at harvest time. The result was a lot of wasted effort and food. Zucchini for the masses! So a first question to ask when planning a public engagement meeting is: What does this community want and need? What do we want to grow here? It’s astonishing how often this question is neglected.
Once I’m clear about what to plant, I concentrate on the soil: which mix of soil and fertilizer will be the best for this particular garden? Then I design my garden space for the coming year, figuring out which plants go well together and which I should keep separate. The rest is tending: watering, fertilizing, and weeding, much as I do as facilitator of a meeting or a series of meetings. The effort I invest at every step affects what’s possible to realize.
Though each garden and community is different, much is the same. After many years of working with troubled communities, there are several things across contexts and times that I hear people longing for:
- Visibility: to be seen as they see themselves; to be known for who they are apart from labels.
- Connection with others.
- Agency: to know that they can affect other people and their community.
- Possibility: restored hope for a preferred future.
Unfortunately, many attempts to engage the public—whether in small or large meetings—fail to address these longings. In fact, the design of many sessions invites division, disconnection, disempowerment, impersonal communication, and ultimately despair.
At the Public Conversations Project, we are interested in helping communities develop the connections and resources that will enable people to have honest, heartfelt, courageous conversations that build connection and resilience in the midst of even the deepest of differences. Dialogue is a powerful means of bringing people together across chasms of division in many contexts and on many subjects. Some examples from our work include:
- In Massachusetts, leaders of organizations involved in the abortion controversy agreed to meet for four sessions in the aftermath of a shooting at a local women’s reproductive health clinic. Their secret meetings stretched into five and a half years and resulted in a jointly written, three page op-ed in the Boston Sunday Globe to inspire other opponents to engage in dialogue. Fifteen years later, they continue to speak in pro-life/pro-choice pairs about the power of their dialogue.
- In Montana, during dialogues about the currently volatile issue of guns, 100% of pro- and anti-gun control partisans who participated agreed or strongly agreed that “I was able to listen to points different than my own.” And 91% either agreed or strongly agreed that “I feel my views were heard.” The Montana facilitation team is now being called on to lead conversations on other controversial issues such as land use, a Confederate memorial in the state capitol, and Syrian refugees.
- In Minnesota, The Respectful Conversations Project, adapting Reflective Structured Dialogue, sponsored successful, state-wide conversations about a pending marriage amendment to the state constitution in an effort to avoid the kinds of division that these amendment drives had caused in other states.
This paper will examine the challenges to constructive public engagement and vibrant community and will present one useful alternative: the Reflective Structured Dialogue approach of the Public Conversations Project.