2018 Pre-conference

Pre-conference

We are thrilled to offer five exciting day long and one half-day pre-conference sessions on Thursday, November 1, 2018, prior to the start of NCDD 2018! These sessions are great for people of various levels of experience, and offer a variety of topics. Read through these descriptions and go to ncdd2018-precon.eventbrite.com to register!

Standing Up for Social Justice in Times of Fear & Hatred

When discussing and confronting “heated” racial and/or social justice issues within our communities, utilizing practical facilitation skills that are both culturally-responsive and sensitive to the needs and issues facing minority groups are imperative. In this workshop, we will make use of personal stories, diversity vignettes, and film clip scenarios to encourage participants to authentically address a variety of social justice issues. The group will be taught “Mindful Facilitation Techniques” to support one another to become stronger and more effective allies within our communities. (Governor’s Square 15 – Beginner)

Lee Mun Wah
Master Diversity Trainer, Founder/CEO, StirFry Seminars & Consulting, Inc.

Hours: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm with a break for lunch (not included)
Registration: $100 (if fee is cost prohibitive, please contact [email protected])

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Tackling Wicked Problems in Local Communities: A Workshop for Local Governments, School Districts, and Community Leaders

This workshop is focused on building local capacity to engage difficult issues more collaboratively and productively through the use of deliberative engagement processes. Deliberative engagement involves interactive, often facilitated, small group discussions utilizing materials and processes designed to spark collaborative learning rather than merely the collection of individual opinions. An opening session will examine the concept of “wicked problems” as a framework to better understand difficult issues and then review recent research on social psychology to help explain why traditional engagement processes are often counterproductive to supporting the high quality communication democracy requires. The workshop will then review the key components to deliberative engagement and explore and engage in hands on practice with a variety of tools and techniques drawn from several dialogue and deliberation traditions. The workshop will be particularly valuable to practitioners focused on their local community working to build capacity across the public, private, and non-profit sectors for higher quality engagement. The workshop will be led by Martin Carcasson, Ph.D., professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University, the founder and director of the CSU Center for Public Deliberation (CPD), and the current chair of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Board of Directors. All proceeds from the workshop fees are being provided to NCDD to support their ongoing efforts. (Governor’s Square 14 – Beginner)

Martin Carcasson
Director, Center for Public Deliberation, Colorado State University

Hours: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm with a break for lunch (not included)
Registration: $150

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A Taste of the Theory and Practice of Bohm Dialogue

This one-day pre-conference session will provide participants with a weave of the background, theory, guides, and basic building blocks of Bohm Dialogue together with an experience of being in Dialogue on emergent topics. Bohm Dialogue can play a powerful role within polarized communities. This process is based on the work of the late David Bohm, a quantum physicist who turned to philosophy to move ideas from his quantum world view into practical ways of resolving complex social problems often rooted in unacknowledged cultural assumptions. (Governor’s Square 17 – Beginner)

Linda Ellinor
Founder and Sr. Partner, Action Dialogue Group

Hours: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm with a break for lunch (not included)
Registration: $150

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Transforming Community Spaces: A Workshop for Community Facilitators

Many places around the globe are seeing insistent challenges to monuments, memorials, contaminated sites, and other locations identified with histories of harm. These challenges offer opportunities to foster more complete understandings of history and to take action to remedy deep, systemic inequities, which tend otherwise to be ignored or suppressed. “Transforming Community Spaces” (TCS) is a new, national project led by the Institute for Environmental Negotiation (IEN) at the University of Virginia to help institutions and communities take on these challenges through inclusive, transparent dialogues that uncover hidden histories, advance social justice, and promote collective healing. This training will introduce facilitators to the concepts of problematic community spaces, to cultural humility, to trauma-informed facilitation, and to the Transforming Community Spaces Toolkit that will be provided to community leaders and others working to better their communities. The training will be highly interactive with both exercises and simulations. We anticipate that participants will return to their own institutions and communities with a new appreciation for the issues at stake in these conflicts and new capacity to help those institutions and communities bring people together to address their own problematic spaces. (Governor’s Square 16 – Advanced)

Frank Dukes
Distinguished Institute Fellow, Institute for Environmental Negotiation

Tanya Denckla Cobb
Director, Institute for Environmental Negotiation

Selena Cozart, PhD
Community Facilitator, Institute for Environmental Negotiation

Mary Dumas
President, Dumas and Associates, Inc.

Donna Silverberg
Mediator and Trainer

Hours: 9:00 am – 4:30 pm with a break for lunch (included in cost)
Registration: $100 (if fee is cost prohibitive, please contact [email protected])

We the People Are More Powerful Than We Dare to Believe: First Steps in Dismantling Corporate Rule

The Community Rights movement has helped more than 200 communities in ten states to pass local laws that begin to dismantle corporate rule from the local up. Communities are banning harmful corporate activities that have become background normal – like fracking, clearcut logging, oil pipelines, water bottling, factory farms, etc. These new-paradigm local laws also strip corporations of their corporate personhood and other so-called constitutional “rights”, while enshrining the right of local community self-government. Profound culture shift takes place in this transformative process, where residents discover their power & authority as We the People. Conservatives and progressives work well together in this trans-partisan effort. This culture-shift process requires skilled facilitators, which is why we’re offering this day-long intensive course at NCDD’s conference. Learn how YOU and YOUR community can join this growing movement of people saying “No!” to corporate interference and “Yes!” to nurturing healthy communities. To learn more about the full-weekend version of this workshop: http://communityrights.us/we-the-people-are-more-powerful-than-we-dare-to-believe-first-steps-in-dismantling-corporate-rule-weekend-workshop-intensive/. (Governor’s Square 11 – Beginner)

Paul Cienfuegos
Paul Cienfuegos, nationally recognized workshop leader & organizer in the Community Rights movement, Founding Director Community Rights US, co-founder Oregon Community Rights Network. More info: www.CommunityRights.US.

Hours: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm with a break for lunch (not included)
Registration: $50-$150 sliding scale (contact [email protected] regarding lower rates)

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What is Participatory Budgeting and how can it work for me?

Join community members, organizers, agency staff and government staff for an interactive training to explore and plan out the possibilities of participatory budgeting (PB) in Denver and beyond. This session will review a model that promotes authentic democracy while centering equity and redistributing power to community members to make effective spending decisions with public funds. The Participatory Budgeting Project will lead a training that will simulate a PB experience while PB pioneers from Colorado will reflect on their local experience with PB. (Governor’s Square 12 – Beginner)

Shari Davis
Co-Executive Director, Participatory Budgeting Project

Roshan Bliss
Student Organizer, Project VOYCE/Auraria PB

Candi CdeBaca
Executive Director, Project VOYCE

Candace Johnson
Community Partner, The Colorado Trust, Project Belay Team Member

Evan Weissman
Executive Director, Warm Cookies of the Revolution

Hours: 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Registration: General admission $45, sliding scale for youth ($5) and local participants ($20) – contact [email protected] for sliding scale tickets

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