"The energy you brought to this project is so alive, fresh, excited, intuitive, ingenuous, and passionate, full of vision-- someone would have to be living under a rock not to notice." --young community-based activist

"In this dialogue I experienced a sense of timelessness. It's so important to hear these stories, to extend my narrow focus. Yet you really moved it along, too; the pace was always right." --older community-based activist

Intensive facilitation training, in our case through the Public Conversations Project. Although this three-day training did not meet our needs in that it seemed heavily geared toward white, upper middle class participants with considerable unexamined bias, it did hand us several valuable tools for dialogue facilitation.

For example, we learned the value of phone interviews with participants ahead of time to enable them to express some of their biases, fears, needs, and hopes without constraint (and to help facilitators identify surprise "hot spots" or burning conflicts).

We learned techniques for establishing participants' comfort and safety; how to ask "unloaded" questions; how to support appropriate levels of vulnerability; how to encourage participants to ask each other questions of curiosity; how to identify gray areas, areas where dialogue participants disagree strongly with each other but also have some internal discomfort about their own position.

Most of all, we gained intensive exposure to the whole concept of shifting relationships among participants, rather than shifting the participants' dearly held points of view. While we don't recommend Public Conversation Project trainings in particular, we do recommend facilitator training. Facilitator training sensitive to issues of privilege and diversity, from trainers intimately familiar with movements for progressive and radical social change, is available from the National Coalition Building Institute and Training for Change.

At least two of the Training for Change facilitators who worked all year on the Activist Dialogue Project are available to go on the road and not only train facilitators, but help you think through, customize, plan and shape your own Dialogue Project. If interested, please email us or call 612-827-7323.

Our second task as facilitators was to "self-train," which we each did in unique and creative ways. One of us, by immersing himself for months in a particular subculture and listening intently, identified many of the particular fears and sharp angers carried toward older activists by younger activists, and toward university students by community-based activists. He then created a set of questions designed exquisitely to bring out the stereotypes somewhat indirectly, such as, "How do you feel you would be received by the other participant's community? How does hearing that make you feel?" enabling activists to express feelings about how they feel they've been stereotyped by others, without (at first) directly asking them to reveal their own stereotypes of the other.

Another facilitator seemed to learn best by making close observations of his own impact, as facilitator, on each participant, and coming to staff meetings with a combination of shared observations and sharp questions about facilitators' dilemmas, such as, "what do you do when one participant is so seemingly disrespectful that she appears not even to be listening to the other participant?" or "what do I do as a male facilitator, when facilitating dialogue between two women, if I feel that to interrupt or re-direct the conversation feels sexist?"

A third facilitator, as a preliminary practice before facilitating her first "real dialogue," went to the local coffeeshop hangout spot and "practiced" not dialogues, but spontaneous one-person interviews to begin collecting life stories, political awakenings, and impressions of the 20year-old been-to-Seattle-and-Chiapas crowd. This proved not only a confidence boost, but provided provocation necessary to get her to rethink her own generational assumptions based on over twenty years among predominantly pacifist direct actionists.

"Practice Dialogues"

Before we started facilitating dialogues between the communities in dispute, we each facilitated at least one "practice dialogue" between close members of the Training for Change community, i.e., staff, other facilitators, and board members. This proved extremely useful. We found this was a particularly exciting time to make mistakes. One facilitator made her most confounding mistake of the year in her practice session, when she experimented with stepping "temporarily" out of the facilitator role to put out a political perspective which she felt wasn't being represented in the dialogue. We must admit she felt emotionally provoked and involved at the time. It didn't work. She received extensive and pointed negative feedback about this experiment; it essentially ruined the safe and confidential atmosphere she had just skillfully created. (Interestingly, after months of carefully neutral facilitation, this facilitator did find it is possible to be open about one's own political involvements to a certain degree just enough to make participants feel grounded in knowing their facilitator has done some real work and help the "flow" of dialogue, without compromising the sense of safety and confidentiality for participants. But this came only after months of practice at containing her political responses; in general, we found the discipline of containing our own opinions to be essential to the success of the project).

We highly recommend "practice dialogues" for new dialogue facilitators to experiment with their method and to make mistakes in a situation in which the stakes are relatively low. We also recommend taking care, if facilitator mistakes are made, to acknowledge and check in about them thoroughly so that all parties are confident the same mistake won't be made repeatedly.

Evolving Facilitator Skills:

Facilitators were encouraged to keep a journal of their experiences as facilitators, as well as to share their experiences at staff meetings. We found the sharing of facilitation dilemmas often to be the most fruitful and fascinating portion of staff meetings, and even when we couldn't resolve a particular facilitation problem, it felt productive because we knew each staff member left chewing over a dilemma, and a solution might well occur right in the middle of the next dialogue.

In sum, the most useful of all training tools was our own reflection before, during and after each dialoge; our own observations of not only the words but body language, energy level, and freedom of expression of dialogue participants; our note-taking and journaling about the effectiveness of our opening and closing processes, questions and interventions; and sharing all this with each other with enough time left for brainstorming solutions.

Mistakes we made and how you can avoid them: I've mentioned some of our mistakes along the way, but the main "mistake" is to do with the trickster known as Time. We started the year with an excellent timeline, a map of where we needed to be by October, by December, by April. However, we started work the first week of September, 2001, and then there was September 11th.

We started the work with one political map in mind, and suddenly the political landscape was not only changing dynamically every day, but the very intergenerational conflicts we planned to tackle were re-creating themselves in front of our eyes and in our midst, AND we felt pulled at times to participate much more directly in the fragmented political scene so in need of bridge-building.

Because of this, because of the staggered arrivals of staff members, multiple demands on our lives, and events in personal lives (illnesses, deaths of loved ones) we absolutely did not keep to the timeline in front of us. We found ourselves far from immune from the multiple stresses placed on typical activists juggling organizational, family, community, and personal commitments. And you expect me to tell you how to avoid this mistake? HAH! Au contraire, please write back and tell US how to avoid this mistake.

What we do suggest are two remedies, one concrete, one attitudinal. The concrete remedy is to make a "political map" of the entire set of communities and activists you are interested in reaching, at the beginning of your project. Don't draw it to scale, just draw it, on a huge piece of paper up on a wall. Draw arrows between communities indicating who is connected, who gets along, and where lines of communication are eroded or nonexistent. Name names, so that you know who's who among influential activists you want to involve in the project. No matter what else happens with your timeline, do these two steps within the first six weeks.

Even if the political map changes, or you re-define your project and you have to re-make the map and re-name the names later, doing this activity together will help you enormously. You'll be grounded in the impossibility of "doing it all," which will help you focus on what, realistically, you can do in the time available; who you can reach, and what your priorities are.

The attitudinal remedy is compassion. As activists we tend to ask a lot of ourselves, be hard on ourselves, and sometimes don't leave enough room for family matters, personal responses to disturbing political events, or even our own health. If we are not compassionate with ourselves and with each other, how is it we're going to build the world we all want so much to live in?