The Interactivity Foundation, a national civic organization dedicated to strengthening everyday democracy through structured community discussion, has launched a nationwide Discussion Club initiative and is accepting host applications through July 12, 2026. The program connects six to twelve consistent community members in monthly in-person conversations on topics ranging from mental health and loneliness to immigration and civic life, with hosts receiving facilitation training, community resources, and a $1,000 stipend to support participation. By combining accessible structure, practical facilitation tools, and a national host network, the initiative offers a replicable model for building social trust and dialogue capacity at the grassroots level. This work aligns directly with NCDD's mission to deepen civic engagement and expand the reach of dialogue and deliberation practice across American communities.

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 Interactivity Foundation marks five years of Collaborative Discussion Coach Trainings with summer 2026 sessions (June 1–5, July 13–17), having certified 200+ coaches who’ve awarded 1,000+ certificates and reached 5,000+ toolkit users. New grants (apply by May 15, 2026) fund fully covered in-person or online cohort trainings (10–20 participants) running July 31, 2026–August 31, 2027, including facilitation, materials, and certification. Participants build facilitation skills, earn credentials, and join a growing community of practice—expanding inclusive dialogue across classrooms, communities, and workplaces.

The Interactivity Foundation is launching summer 2026 opportunities to build collaborative discussion and facilitation skills through its Collaborative Discussion Project, including coach trainings, certifications, and five fully funded cohort grants that bring training directly to campuses or communities. The program focuses on developing “collaborative intelligence”—the ability to think constructively across differences—through hands-on, practice-based training that results in certification, facilitation tools, and entry into a broader community of practice. It also supports a train-the-trainer model, enabling participants to run their own programs and expand local capacity for dialogue. Participants gain access to a 40+ activity toolkit and ongoing resources, with applications open through April 2026 and trainings running through 2027.

​The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation partnered with the American Library Association’s Public Programs Office to produce “Leading Polarizing Conversations: Facilitation Guide,” a 45-page resource by NCDD Executive Director Keiva Hummel and Director Emeritus Courtney Breese. It provides libraries with practical tools for convening community conversations on divisive issues through planning, conversation design, facilitation best practices, and follow-up strategies. The guide integrates NCDD frameworks, including the Engagement Streams Framework, to help facilitators clarify conversation purpose and address challenges like distinguishing productive discomfort from harm, navigating misinformation, maintaining impartiality, and establishing group agreements for psychological safety. NCDD’s collaboration with ALA extends dialogue and deliberation practice to a trusted civic institution, encouraging libraries to access NCDD’s public member map for co-facilitation support and recognizing the emotional labor of facilitation through grounding techniques and self-care practices, especially for libraries with limited capacity. This project advances NCDD’s mission by positioning libraries as civic institutions that strengthen community resilience through structured dialogue, demonstrating how NCDD’s practices help model respectful engagement across divides, inspire listening and empathy, counteract echo chambers, strengthen civic trust, and provide templates for other institutions navigating polarization.

Ben Levi, a Bohmian Dialogue practitioner since the 1980s and founder of Zoom-based dialogue circles before COVID-19, developed a method to use Zoom’s Immersive View for virtual circles of up to 25 people. The method includes a Sentence Completion exercise where participants add words one at a time, continuing the flow of meaning in circle order. The emerging sentence is recorded in Meeting Chat until natural completion, followed by silence and 90-180 minutes of dialogue. This resource demonstrates how practitioners can adapt digital platforms to honor specific spatial and relational requirements of dialogue traditions, offering concrete examples of creatively utilizing platform features to create environments supporting depth of conversation and collective meaning-making, rather than accepting default video conference layouts that may undermine relational dynamics essential for transformative dialogue.

​Joel Castro, CEO of OneMind.Life LLC developed OneMind, a free, open-source consensus-building platform for groups of 5 to 5,000. It enables participants to move from individual perspectives to collective wisdom through anonymous structured rounds of proposing and rating. The win-twice convergence mechanism ensures genuine agreement, and built-in translation supports cross-language collaboration. The tool addresses facilitator dependency, time constraints, scalability issues, language barriers, and binary thinking through self-facilitating processes that work synchronously or asynchronously. It captures nuanced preferences on 0-100 scales and builds chains of thought where each convergence becomes the foundation for the next. This resource advances NCDD’s mission by providing practitioners with digital infrastructure for participatory decision-making that preserves deliberative values of equal voice, genuine listening, and collective wisdom. It enables practical applications, including real-time workshop facilitation, conflict resolution, group discovery, DEI discussions with anonymous input, and asynchronous deliberation.

​Reflective Structured Dialogue is a method developed by Essential Partners to help people navigate contentious conversations by focusing less on persuasive speaking and more on intentional listening. It describes two core practices—personal reflection before speaking and simple conversation structures like timed turns—that replace reactive debate and interruptions with predictable, safer rhythms for sharing. The approach is designed to work along a spectrum, from formal, facilitated dialogue sessions for highly divisive topics to everyday applications in classrooms, workplaces, and meetings. Rather than aiming for agreement or consensus, Reflective Structured Dialogue defines success through trust-building, participants feeling genuinely heard, and a sense of belonging. By emphasizing preparation to listen and adaptable structures, the method offers practical tools for sustaining understanding and collaboration across big political, social, and cultural differences.

​Scenario Six Collective’s Reimagining Engagement Workshop is a three-and-a-half-hour, facilitator-led experience designed for experienced civic engagement practitioners who feel stuck with plateauing participation and stale strategies. Rather than offering generic best practices, the workshop helps participants step back from day-to-day pressures to unpack a real engagement challenge they’re facing and develop context-specific, actionable strategies grounded in their community’s lived experience. Using structured, collaborative processes familiar to dialogue and deliberation work, the workshop moves participants from stagnation to strategic clarity, equipping them with practical tools they can continue using independently. Especially valuable for practitioners navigating the “messy middle” of sustaining and deepening engagement, the offering fills a gap in professional development while modeling the responsive, community-informed principles it seeks to strengthen.

Essential Conversations: Re-envisioning the Art of Convening for the Next 30 Years will take place on Wednesday, January 28, 2026, from 9:00–10:30 AM CT (US), offering an Essential Conversation on *Re-envisioning the Art of Convening: Purposeful Leadership Re-imagined*. This session introduces innovative leadership tools developed by the Art of Convening (AoC) Re-Envisioning Team to help leaders create spaces of welcome, safety, and belonging amid the complexity of our time, with conversation starters including CPL co-founder Craig Neal and AoC Re-Envisioning Team members Kim Kristenson-Lee, Brent Schmidt, Cecily Victor, Pamela Meade, Hart Edmonds, Amber Yang, Patricia Neal, Ric Hinkie, Jerry Chang, and Terry Chapman.