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Conversation Cafe
Program Details
Conversation
Café discussions are lively, respectful, facilitated
small-group discussions
between diverse people about personal, local and global issues.
Conversation Café’s
work best with about 6-8 people per circle, and when the topic
of conversation is something
that people potentially disagree on. Conversation Café was
developed in the west coast,
but to the best of our knowledge,
has not been brought to the Fox Valley before now.
Our Conversation Café is run as follows:
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Facilitator(s) set the environment – a circle of chairs, a
center piece, name tags, etc. –
and then welcome guests as they arrive.
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Facilitator introduces
the topic, explains the process of Conversation Café, teaches
the principles of the Check it at the Door Declaration, and
reviews the Conversation Café
Agreements (see below
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Facilitator offers a moment of
silence for centering, or for gathering your thoughts about the
topic.
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Using a talking stick, each
person is given a minute or two to introduce themselves and
share some initial thoughts about the topic (passing is OK).
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Conversation is opened up to a
natural flow, while still using the talking stick and the
Conversation Café Agreements.
After
about 90 minutes, the facilitator offers everyone one last round
for final thoughts,
and then closes the discussion, and determines a topic for next
month.
The six Conversation Café Agreements we utilize are:
§Open-mindedness:
listen to and respect all points of view. Make Conversation,
not peace.
§Acceptance:
suspend judgment as best you can. Disagree without being
disagreeable.
§Curiosity:
seek to understand rather than persuade. Challenge yourself
to see from a new perspective.
§Discovery:
question old assumptions, look for new insights. Assume
good intentions.
§Sincerity:
speak for yourself about what has personal heart and meaning.
Use “I statements”.
§Brevity:
go for honesty and depth but don’t go on and on.
We have brought a new twist to Conversation Café – inviting two
spiritual communities to come
together and share in this process. We are calling this
Conversation Café – Interfaith Interaction.
We piloted this new idea for the first time on June 26, 2007
with two local congregations who differ
greatly theologically: the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist
Fellowship (FVUUF) and the
Appleton Evangelical Free Church (AEFC).
Our topic for that night was “Where do you get your
authority?”. Fourteen members of each
congregation participated, as well as two Reverends from the
FVUUF, one Reverend from the
AEFC, three Harmony Café teammates and a few random Harmony Café
customers. The 36
people split into 4 circles, with even numbers of people from
each congregation in each circle.
Each circle had wonderful dialogue! People learned not just
about different perspectives of authority,
groups also found out more about each other’s faiths, and were
able to ask questions that would have
been uncomfortable in any other setting.
At the end of the conversations, we all gathered and talked
about how it went, and how to improve
the process. When asked, every person raised their hand
enthusiastically and said they wanted
to do this again next month. People also felt this was a
program that we should try to open up
to other faith communities.
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