B. Concept: choosing dialogue, defining communities to work with

We chose dialogue among individuals, rather than debate or goal-oriented meetings between organizations or communities, as our tool, for several reasons:

Having chosen dialogue (this is something we did right!), we needed to define the communities we would be working with. Here is where we made MISTAKE #1:

MISTAKE #1: Using vague, or even euphemistic, terms where clear definitions are needed! This caused us a bit of trouble. In fact, the three communities which we realistically undertook to focus on in the intergenerational dialogue process were fairly well-defined:

This would have been a bite-sized, doable project for one year, and, to the extent that we stuck to those definitions, we succeeded in impacting these three communities significantly.

However, because we chose to call the young activists "community-based youth activists," (when we really meant specifically the young anarchist and anti-globalist activists whose energy was so visible on the street during R2K), the euphemism created some confusion internal to the project.

One facilitator, taking the phrase "community-based" literally, felt disturbed that the project did not include young people of color community-based activists working on issues such as health (HIV/AIDS, sexual health education, and recovery), education (there was a huge fight about classism, racism and control of the Philly schools, throughout the duration of the Dialogue Project), and housing.

The response, of course, was that these activists tend not to have a problem with the older generation; they are working strongly side by side with seasoned activists already. Because the Dialogue Project was designed to address a problem through intergenerational dialogue, it didn't make sense to create intergenerational dialogue where no problem existed.

Logical although all this was, the continued use of the term "community-based youth activists" when the project was not, in fact, concerned with the majority of community-based youth activists in the city, left the project open to the charge of bias.

Even having identified this as Mistake #1, it's still not clear in hindsight what term would have been best. "Anarchist youth" is too narrow, for although many of the young activists did define themselves as anarchist, some were moving away from the label, some did not like the label because of all the myths attached to it, and no two anarchists define "anarchism" the same way anyway. "Anti-globalist youth" also didn't fit, for many of the young activists involved with the project identified other issues, including racism, sexism, animal rights; queer activism, indigenous peoples, the death penalty, and the death sentence against Mumia Abu-Jamal, as key issues for them and would not define themselves primarily as "anti-globalists".

Having chosen "community-based youth activists" as our term, perhaps the best thing we could have done would have been to acknowledge and discuss explicitly the built-in contradiction from the beginning, i.e., that although a high proportion of community-based youth activists in this city are young people of color, almost all the young activists this project includes, in this pilot phase, will be white, due to the particular character of the generation gap we have designed the project to address. Then, even if some participants might still feel uncomfortable and prefer to include more young people of color intentionally in the project, at least the discussion is out in the open and not hidden by an "as-if" euphemism.

"DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO" -- To avoid this mistake, carefully define not only the communities you intend to include in your dialogue project, but the terms you use to define those communities. Suppose you want to address anti-Semitism-keep in mind that Palestinians are also "Semites." Suppose you want to address transphobia within the queer community in a particular city and you think everybody these days knows what "trans" means or even what "queer" means- think again! Suppose you want to address xenophobia in Georgia, where waves of Mexican immigrants are being met with hostility in the very communities now benefiting from their labor- if you use the term "Latino" when the folks you are addressing are used to hearing "Hispanic," your intended audience may tune out before you've invited them to a single dialogue. Define your communities. Ask a zillion questions about your own definitions, and re-define them, and check in with your definitions as you go along. Define the terms you use, ask a zillion questions about their appropriateness, and check in as you go along. That should help.