Café Conversations/Community Engagement

“Café to Go: A Quick Reference Guide for Putting Conversations to Work,” The World Café Community, 2002. This document is a quick reference guide for anyone planning to facilitate a Café Conversation. It outlines café guidelines, what Café Conversations are, café etiquette, creating powerful questions, making collective knowledge visible, how to create a café ambiance, a list of supplies needed, and how to be café host and a table host.

“Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community: Changing the Nature of the Conversation,” Peter Block, Civic Engagement Series, A Small Group, 2005. This booklet is a set of ideas and tools designed to restore and reconcile our community by shifting the nature of the public conversation. The intent of this booklet is to create the possibility of an alternative future by creating a public conversation based on communal accountability and commitment. www.peterblock.com

“Creating New Futures Through Community Conversation,” Vicky Schubert and Rachel Baker, Leverage Points, Issue 99, June 2008 by Pegasus Communication. In this article, the authors interview Peter Block about his new book, Community: The Structure of Belonging and how creating community conversation can promise something different. Block talks about the importance of diversity and an open, questioning mind. He emphasizes that connection, not problem solving, are the key to creating the communities we desire.

Grantmakers in Health, “Making the Most Out of Community Advisory Committees,” Kyna Rubin, GIH Inside Stories, Winter 2007. Although this article is written from a healthcare funder’s perspective, it offers useful information about how to draw meaningful input from the populations an organization serves and use it to guide funding strategies and programming.

“Strategic Questioning: Engaging People’s Best Thinking,” Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Eric Vogt, and Nancy Margulies, Systems Thinker Newsletter, November 2002. This article discusses how asking the right questions enable us to engage in collaborative conversation, exploration, inquiry, and learning. The approach described is grounded in the assumption that stakeholders in any system already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges. The article gives many tips on how to craft and use strategic questions.

“The World Café: Catalyzing Large-Scale Collective Learning,” Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Nancy Margulies, and Gary Warhaftig, Leverage: News and Ideas For the Organizational Learner, September 1999. This article briefly describes the birth of the Café Conversation model and how to use it.