UConn's Democracy and Dialogues Initiative, co-directed by History Professor Brendan Kane and Nana Amos of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, hosted a four-hour student retreat in March 2026 that equipped campus leaders with practical tools for facilitating constructive dialogue across difference. Drawing on frameworks developed in partnership with Essential Partners and Everyday Democracy, the program grounds participants in the neuroscience of conflict response and trains them to move from defensive reaction toward reflective, curiosity-driven communication. The retreat's peer facilitation model — combining structured listening exercises, role plays, and real-time practice — offers a replicable approach for higher education institutions seeking to build dialogue capacity among student leaders. This work directly advances NCDD's mission by embedding dialogue and deliberation skills into campus culture at a moment when civic communication competencies are urgently needed.

Essential Partners is hosting an online Dialogue Experience on June 16, 2026, offering a complete three-hour introduction to its Reflective Structured Dialogue methodology through a live, facilitated dialogue on the topic of America@250, led by EP-trained facilitator Meg Griffiths. RSD is Essential Partners' signature framework for building relationships and healthier communication dynamics across big differences in identity, values, and perspective — and this event is designed to be experienced rather than observed, giving participants a direct encounter with the structures and facilitation approach that make it effective. Participants will leave with a grounded understanding of RSD's theory and practice and a clearer sense of how it might apply to their own communities and work. For NCDD members seeking to deepen their facilitation toolkit or explore a proven methodology for dialogue across difference, this event offers an accessible and high-value opportunity to engage firsthand with one of the field's most respected approaches.

​The Minnesota Council on Foundations has launched the Minnesota Civic Resilience Fund, a one-time pooled grantmaking initiative distributing $300,000 in $25,000 grants to approximately twelve Minnesota-based 501(c)(3) nonprofits conducting nonpartisan voter engagement, civic education, and community organizing work ahead of the 2026 election. The fund prioritizes strategies that build civic capacity, expand voter participation, counter disinformation, and actively defend voting rights — with particular emphasis on historically underrepresented communities and broad geographic reach across the state. Applications are open through June 22, 2026, with funding decisions expected in early July. For NCDD members and partners working in Minnesota's civic ecosystem, this fund offers both immediate resources and a model of coordinated philanthropic investment in the relational and structural foundations that make democratic participation possible.

The Center for Inclusive Democracy (CID), founded and directed by Mindy Romero, Ph.D., will launch as an independent national organization on July 1, 2026, transitioning away from its previous university affiliations to operate with greater focus and decisiveness at a moment when the integrity of nonpartisan democracy research requires institutional independence. With Sierra Health Foundation serving as its new fiscal sponsor, CID will continue producing rigorous, data-driven research on voter participation, electoral access, and civic engagement while expanding into new educational outreach programs, customized community data tools, and deeper direct engagement with community partners across the country. The organization's sixteen-year track record — informing the work of election officials, policymakers, and civic organizations at the state and national level — has earned it broad recognition as a trusted, nonpartisan resource in the democracy field. CID's commitment to closing the gap between democratic ideals and lived civic experience aligns directly with NCDD's mission to strengthen inclusive participation and ensure that dialogue and deliberation are accessible to all communities.

​Voting should be easy, and cheating should be hard. The Trustworthy Elections initiative is a community-based effort to strengthen public trust in elections by helping people learn how elections work, engage across differences, and build relationships within and across communities. We are inviting local leaders—including civic leaders, librarians, faith leaders, facilitators, educators, election officials, and engaged community members—to help shape and support this work in ways that fit their communities. Join us for an informational call on Thursday, June 4, at 9:00 am Pacific / 12:00 pm Eastern to learn more about the initiative and opportunities to get involved - register here! The initiative is being convened by Living Room Conversations, Interfaith America, NCDD, AllSides, and Civity, alongside a growing network of civic leaders. Read more in the blog post below.

Essential Partners will host a free online Community Summit on June 10, 2026, focused on using Reflective Structured Dialogue to build consensus and support collective decision-making, featuring two case studies that demonstrate the methodology's reach across high-stakes policy and community health contexts. Dr. Michael Siegel of Tufts University will present the Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy project, in which 23 gun owners and non-gun owners used RSD over the course of a year to produce a consensus, legislative-ready gun policy framework — demonstrating that structured facilitation can bridge even the most entrenched civic divides. YMCA community partners will also share how RSD is being deployed to meet the needs of the diverse communities they serve. The Summit offers NCDD members a practical, accessible opportunity to deepen their understanding of RSD and its applications, directly supporting the dialogue and deliberation field's commitment to consensus-building, conflict transformation, and inclusive civic engagement.

Saskia Brechenmacher of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Laura Livingston of Over Zero, and Miriam Juan-Torres González of UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute argue in a new Democracy Notes Perspectives piece that attacks on LGBTQ and women's rights are not peripheral culture war flashpoints but core components of a broader authoritarian strategy to push targeted groups out of public life and erode democratic institutions. Drawing on examples including Kansas legislation that may effectively disenfranchise transgender voters, the authors document how gender-based narratives function as socially acceptable entry points for dismantling pluralism and legal equality — and offer concrete recommendations for democracy funders and practitioners, including expanding policy analysis, investing in cultural counter-narratives, and building cross-movement dialogue spaces. Their call for structured dialogue across communities that rarely work together — democracy advocates, LGBTQ rights organizations, masculinities researchers, and others — connects directly to NCDD's mission and the practical capacity of the dialogue and deliberation field. This piece is essential reading for NCDD members working at the intersection of democratic participation, equity, and community bridge-building.

Dialogue Vanderbilt hosted The Dialogue CoLab on May 21–22, 2026, bringing together nearly thirty colleges and universities — ranging from Ivy League institutions to community colleges — for a national working summit focused on practical strategies for advancing campus dialogue, deliberation, and civil discourse. Directed by faculty director Sarah Igo and supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the CoLab is structured as a peer learning exchange rather than a traditional conference, enabling institutions with widely different student populations and campus cultures to honestly compare what they are trying, what students are responding to, and where challenges persist. Participating campuses have implemented a range of approaches — from dialogue-integrated student employment programs to faculty fellowships and structured deliberation models — and the summit creates space for those experiments to inform one another across institutional contexts. For NCDD members in higher education, the Dialogue CoLab offers both a model of field-building peer exchange and evidence of the growing momentum behind campus-based dialogue and deliberation work nationwide.

The Trust for Civic Life has launched Digital Civic Experiments, a pilot grantmaking portfolio supporting eight organizations that use digital tools to strengthen community connection, increase civic participation, and drive meaningful offline engagement among underserved and place-based communities nationwide. Grantees range from Entidad, which builds documentation tools for farmworkers, to Front Porch Forum, a Vermont-wide neighborhood network that consistently moves online interactions into real-world civic life, to the Relational Tech Project, which builds hyper-local tools collaboratively with and for approximately one hundred neighbors at a time. Informed by the Trust's own community research, the portfolio reflects a community-first philosophy that treats trust, local design, and offline impact as core criteria for what makes digital civic technology worth funding. For NCDD members navigating the intersection of technology and civic engagement, this portfolio offers both inspiration and a useful framework for distinguishing digital tools that genuinely serve dialogue and deliberation from those that merely replicate its surface features.

​The International Listening Association will host its 47th Annual Convention virtually September 16–19, 2026, under the theme Questioning Listening and Listening Questions, bringing together a global community of practitioners, educators, and researchers committed to deepening the theory and practice of listening. The convention introduces a new program format designed around pre-selected listening questions rather than an open call for proposals, with session times deliberately varied across four days to support participation from members in different time zones worldwide. For NCDD members, the ILA convention offers a valuable opportunity to strengthen one of the most essential and often overlooked capacities in dialogue and deliberation work — the ability to listen with genuine attention and care. The ILA's commitment to advancing listening practice aligns directly with NCDD's mission to foster meaningful civic conversation and strengthen the relational foundations of democratic life.