NCDD is excited to announce our continued partnership with the American Library Association to support library workers through the Libraries Transforming Communities project. This latest effort will provide small and rural libraries with grants to facilitate community conversations which will identify services or facility improvements the library can take on to better address accessibility needs in their communities. 

NCDD will support grantees by providing materials and guidance for facilitating accessible community conversations. Over the next three years of this initiative, NCDD will provide coaching to libraries and support to the project. NCDD will be reaching out to our network to help support this effort with co-creation of facilitation materials which identify best practices and models for accessible conversations. 

Starting this November, ALA will begin accepting applications for the grants, which will be distributed in several rounds over the next three years. Grants will range from $10,000 to $20,000. Libraries will identify the audience they are hoping to reach (e.g., homebound seniors, children with autism, Deaf community members) and facilitate a community conversation with the impacted populations.  Grantees will then use the funds to create services or improve their facilities based on the needs identified by their audience.

Please share this opportunity with your local library! Have you designed and/or facilitated accessible conversations? Let NCDD know about it! Email [email protected] to share your experience and explore whether you might be able to help support the libraries in this next endeavor.

This initiative is funded through a private grant to ALA. Review the recent ALA press release here. 

The NCDD Summer Learning Springboard is back! Save the date for our second annual virtual event, taking place July 25-29, 2022. Join us this summer for a variety of skill building and learning exchange events. 

Last year, more than 125 attendees from across the globe joined us for thirteen engaging sessions, including workshops on Bohm Dialogue, Ripple Effects Mapping, and sessions discussing equity, neutrality, and using technology for engagement. You can check out the 2021 offerings on our Springboard page.

Call for Session Proposals Now Open: Are you interested in leading a session at the 2022 Springboard? Now is the time to submit your session proposal! Go to https://forms.gle/BFvez3YCRtXBPRBaA to review the questions and criteria and submit your proposal. Deadline for submissions is Friday, April 8th. If you have any questions about proposing a session, email [email protected]. 

As a reminder, NCDD Members will receive discounted registration rates for most or all sessions, so now is a good time to join or renew your membership!
We look forward to seeing you in July!

We are committed to better conversations, collaboration, and decision-making. Join our vibrant community as we explore these practices, share stories and resources, and continue to demonstrate the valuable work of dialogue and deliberation. 

As NCDD enters its 20th year, we have much to reflect on and look forward to in 2022. Your support helps us:

• Elevate NCDD’s status as a starting point for those looking for new ways to build connection and collaboration
• Continue to nourish connections among members and provide opportunities to explore the next big steps forward in practice, initiate new collaborations, and further strengthen local and regional networks
• Strive to lift up the stories of dialogue and deliberation, and show the impacts of these practices and of this coalition

Our shiny new website is one big step in this direction!
 
We invite you to support the efforts of this vibrant community of practice with a donation today and to join us in this journey in 2022 by renewing or officially joining as a member. Come help us shape the future together!

First of all, thank you to everyone in this community for sticking with the work in a tough year.

NCDD’s staff and board have been talking a lot over the last nine months of the pandemic about what this year has shown us about this network’s necessity in the world, and where we can most support you all. It’s been encouraging to see that much of what we’ve always offered – news and resources, and opportunities to connect and collaborate – are still highly valued and needed, especially when times are tough.

There are also some areas we can work on – expanding our network, for one, in an inclusive way to welcome everyone who is committed to helping their communities have better conversations. It doesn’t matter whether you are a professional doing this work as your career, or a volunteer doing this to better your own community – all are welcome at NCDD.

By Lydia Hooper

How many conversations have you had this week about something you saw, on TV or happening in front if you? Vision is the primary way we sense and experience our world, and we are social beings who process information with others. We can easily leverage these tendencies if we want to inspire specific conversations in specific moments.

​The conventional way of doing so is using presentation slides or videos to introduce or explain important topics. These visual forms, however, emphasize what is important from the perspective of the presenter. They do not necessarily offer opportunities to capture what a larger group of people thinks or feels.

NCDD is excited to announce that we will be co-presenting a session at the Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia, PA on Friday, March 23rd at 2:00pm. Along with our partners at the American Library Association Public Program’s Office, NCDD will be talking with public librarians about the Libraries Transforming Communities: Models for Change initiative and will help them further explore how libraries can engage their communities through dialogue and deliberation. The session is open to all attendees.
​
The description for the session, titled Libraries Transforming Communities: Models for Change is below:

Looking back, 2016 was an important year for NCDD and the dialogue & deliberation community. NCDD and the field saw a lot of important things happen and transitions take place, and as we look forward to the work ahead, we also wanted to look back at what we’ve accomplished and what’s changed.

NCDD 2016
​
​Of course, the biggest effort on NCDD’s part was organizing the 2016 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation on “Bridging Our Divides,” a timely focus on the important work of bringing people together across differences of politics, race, socioeconomic status, and more. We had 350 public engagement practitioners, journalists, academics, public officials, funders, and students converge for this three-day gathering focused on sharing stories, exploring collaborations, and talking about what’s next for the dialogue and deliberation community following the divisive election season. You can view the schedule and speakers, watch panels, and more in the Events section of our site.

As we begin the new year, NCDD is excited to announce we are launching a two-year partnership with the American Library Association (ALA) that will train library staff across the country to use methods and processes from the dialogue and deliberation field to support their communities. Our Libraries Transforming Communities: Models for Change partnership will take the form of both online and in-person trainings that we hope will help strengthen the capacity for libraries to serve not only as places of learning and research, but also as hubs for dialogue, engagement, and healing our divides.
​
We see this partnership as a chance to broaden the reach and the impact of our field’s work, as well as an opportunity to create new audiences and collaborative potentials for D&D practitioners in the future. We’ll be sharing more info on the partnership soon, but for now, we encourage you to read more about the upcoming trainings in the ALA announcement below or to find the original here.

Earlier this week, NCDD hosted a special post-election Confab Call during which over fifty of our members and affiliates had a rich, inspiring, and for some, therapeutic conversation about what kind of work people in the dialogue and deliberation field are doing to address this post-election moment.
​
The call was part of our ongoing #BridgingOurDivides campaign, during which we’ve been encouraging our members to share about the work happening in our field that’s aimed at fostering bridge building, and to share resources that can build capacity to move forward together despite differences. The Confab Call was its own kind of resource, and if you missed the call, you can hear about all the great projects, insights, and resources that were discussed during it by reading over the discussion and links from the call’s chat transcription here. NCDD members who missed this event can watch the recording by clicking here. But there are many more resources we want to share with you all today.