Join TODAY! Doing Democracy: Why Dialogue Matters When Democracy Is Under Pressure

Everyday Democracy is hosting "Doing Democracy: Why Deliberate in a Time of Democratic Crisis?" today, a virtual panel examining whether dialogue and collaborative decision-making still hold value amid democratic backsliding and rising polarization. The event brings together practitioners who have translated community dialogue into concrete policy shifts, including a city's move toward non-police crisis response, and a national coordinator of participatory democracy efforts, grounding the discussion in lived organizing experience rather than theory. Attendees will hear how deliberation functions in high-stakes, cross-difference settings, including interracial and interfaith conflict, offering practical insight into where collaborative decision-making succeeds and where its limits lie. The event's inquiry into deliberation's role during democratic crisis speaks directly to NCDD's mission of strengthening democratic participation and equipping the dialogue and deliberation field for this political moment.

---

---

As civil rights face rollback and democratic norms come under sustained strain, communities across the country are asking a pointed question: does dialogue still have a place when the stakes are this high? Everyday Democracy is taking up that question today, in "Doing Democracy: Why Deliberate in a Time of Democratic Crisis?", a virtual conversation running this afternoon from 4 to 5:30 PM ET. Rather than treating dialogue as a retreat from conflict, the event frames it as a tool communities use precisely because power built with others tends to outlast power built only against them.

The conversation brings together practitioners with direct experience translating dialogue into structural change. One panelist has guided coalition-building work behind a city's shift toward sending mental health professionals, rather than police, to behavioral health emergencies, growing that effort from grassroots conversation into a multi-year collaborative planning process with residents, city leaders, and law enforcement at the table. Another panelist has spent years coordinating a national coalition focused on participatory democracy beyond the ballot box, building relationships across advocacy groups, elected officials, and community organizations to widen civic participation. Their combined experience speaks to the honest tension at the center of the event: deliberation is neither a cure-all nor a distraction from urgent stakes, but a discipline for navigating interracial, interfaith, and cross-sector conflict toward workable collective decisions.

The panel draws on three people with distinct entry points into the same broader work. Roshan Bliss runs his own consulting practice helping nonprofits, schools, and government bodies redesign how they make decisions democratically, and his credibility here comes from concrete outcomes rather than theory: he helped move Denver toward sending paramedics and mental health workers instead of police to behavioral health calls, and separately guided a school district through a genuinely contested deliberation over resource officers. Petula Jarvis-Hanley's contribution is more coalition-infrastructure than direct-service. She coordinated the Democracy Beyond Elections coalition, which is national-scale relationship building across advocacy groups and local partners, and her Brooklyn organizing work on housing and education gives her a ground-level counterweight to that national role. Merle McGee moderates, and her background, 25 years in equity and racial justice work, a stint as Chief Equity and Engagement Officer at Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, co-founding The BIPOC Project, positions her to press the other two on where dialogue actually delivers versus where it's being asked to do too much.
​
For NCDD's network of dialogue and deliberation practitioners, this event offers a candid look at what collaborative decision-making demands when polarization and democratic erosion are not abstractions but daily realities. It models how anti-oppression frameworks and community organizing traditions can inform deliberative practice without diluting its urgency. Those who want to join before it starts can register at https://everyday-democracy.org/doing-democracy-deliberation/.