Conversation Groups

Many varieties of conversation groups are meeting across the USA. This is an opportunity to create a similar forum in Anchorage to bring together strangers in ways that allow for sharing of important thoughts and feelings. To begin with, we will learn about the strategies of existing groups, such as Conversation Café, World Café, Socrates Café, and many others. Here is some basic information about these groups:

Conversation Café, www.conversationcafe.org
“Conversation cafes are drop-in small group dialogues, held in public places like café, where citizens of every point of view can engage in lively, respectful inquiry into the things that matter most.” People split up into small groups to share ideas on a subject, and then move to other tables, where a member from the original table remains to explain what was already discussed. This happens several times, and then the insights are shared in the whole group.

Socrates Café, www.philosopher.org
“Its members strive to form communities of philosophical inquiry across the globe. The group is dedicated to helping people articulate and explore and further discover their singular philosophy of life, and in the process cultivate a more acute social and intellectual conscience, and become more autonomous thinkers.”

World Café, www.theworldcafe.com
“The principles of the World Café: create hospitable space; explore questions that matter; connect diverse people and ideas; encourage each person’s contribution; listen together for patterns, insights and deeper questions; make collective knowledge visible....It provides a means for moving people into heartfelt conversations without...becoming too touchy-feely.” “The World Café is a space of possibility for: fostering conscious conversation, discovering powerful questions, strengthening community, accessing collective intelligence, catalyzing collaborative learning, building shared knowledge, creating business and social value, co-evolving positive futures.”

Center for nonviolent communications, www.cnvc.org
To deepen conversation skills, look at this site. “NVC is a process that strengthens our ability to inspire compassion from others and respond compassionately to others and ourselves. NVC guides us to reframe how we express ourselves and how we hear others by focusing our consciousness on what we are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting.”

others
Utne salons, Conversation Collaborative, Open Sewer (www.opensewer.com), Commons Café (www.commonway.org/cafe/CAFE1-1.html), From the Four Directions (www.fromthefourdirections.org), PeerSpirit (www.peerspirit.com), Institute of Noetic Sciences (www.noetic.org/ions/community/comgrpl.asp), New Stories (www.newstories.org).

Circles
Background reading on ‘Circles’: Circles of Strength, especially pages 16-17, ‘The circle—an invitation.’ “We may feel tentative, but we have succeeded in grounding the circle. Or, to put it another way, we have claimed our common ground.”

For a few ideas about topics we may want to discuss, click here.