|
by Vicki Robin
Conversation Cafés arose to allow strangers in public places to shift from small
talk to big talk. Conversation is democracy in action and an antidote to loneliness
and social isolation.
In July 2001, Susan Partnow, Habib Rose and Vicki Robins each began hosting weekly
conversations in Seattle cafés to experiment with variations on this theme. Over
the summer they developed the basic process and agreements and some of the outreach
strategies that form the backbone of the Conversation Cafés. Flushed with their
small success, Susan and Vicki and two other inveterate conversationalists met
on Sept. 10 to expand their experiment city wide, even nation wide. They came
up with an imaginative plan that they thought they would carry out some day.
Then Sept. 11 hit and within a week Vicki was grabbed with a passion to spread
the cafés throughout Seattle as a way to process this event and respond thoughtfully
as citizens. Susan, Vicki and several others became the core team.
Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" to mean a cultural gene a bit
of information that self-replicates through a culture. A whole field of viral
marketing has arisen from this idea an effort to create ideas that spread through
word of mouth with little input from the originator. The group sought to make
Conversation Cafés memetic so they were designed to be fun, simple, clear and
inviting.
Talking to strangers is certainly risky Conversation Cafés make it safe. The taboos
against talking with folks you don’t know are major they might hurt you,
reject you, ridicule you or follow you home. At Conversation Cafés you are safe
because there’s a host who will be friendly, manage the weirdos and keep
things going. No committees will be formed and you will not end up with further
commitments. Many interesting people can’t afford one more thing to do,
but they would love a weekly conversational oasis.
How do you have Conversation Cafés arrive with a splash so they will attract lots
of people? In dreary Seattle the group created a mid-winter festival of conversation
called Conversation Week with a gala celebrity launch event and at least two cafés
per day. Building toward this event required putting together all the elements
with an intensity that made people take notice.
If people are going to sit down at a table with strangers, there has to be a host,
someone who is warm, welcoming and gets the ball rolling. Hosts don’t have
to have facilitation skills they just have to run the process, watch for drift
outside the agreements and end on time. A Conversation Café is like a dinner party
where the host just wants the guests to all enjoy themselves.
At host trainings, friends and professionals learned simple techniques. Other
dialogue, communication, facilitation and mediation groups were asked to co-sponsor
the event. They were offered free publicity through the café website if they would
do outreach to their members and provide two hosts.
Once trained, the hosts were invited to become part of a host learning circle,
a rich community of practice that meets once a month to deepen their capacity
to host, to build the initiative, to eat good food and have fun conversations.
There is also a listserve where hosts can raise their questions and concerns about
happenings at their cafés, as well as celebrate their successes and track the
conversational themes that are alive in the whole community.
In addition to the prime movers and the early group of hosts, a part time person
was hired to do outreach to sign up cafés, assign hosts to cafés, do logistics
for the launch event and keep it all running smoothly. The paid staff member put
in about 200 hours over three months and through her networks found a skilled
volunteer to do publicity.
Holding Conversation Cafés in coffee houses, libraries and bookstores solves several
problems most groups have. If you meet in a home, you don’t tend to welcome
drop-ins and the group can get stale and predictable. If you meet in a public
room, you often have a cost which means that someone needs to pay and you never
know if the room will be too big or too small. If you serve food, you fuss over
set up and clean up.
Cafés are designed to be public places. A large group can just spread out to more
tables. The café serves food and cleans up as part of its design indeed, participants
in the conversation, from the café owner’s perspective, are customers. Café
owners also get free publicity through every flyer distributed and through the
website. Some café owners have taken this advantage to heart and identify their
establishment as a Conversation Café site. One has even created a special dinner
for the group that meets there, attracting up to 30 people at a whack.
With a cartoonist on board to create a logo and a web designer who took on the
challenge of designing the site both as volunteers - a really fun, informative
and empowering web presence was created within two months of committing to spreading
the Conversation Cafés.
The group also partnered with several similar initiatives nationwide - The World
Café, The Commons Café and The Public Conversations Project - that all had January
2002 events around the theme of 911. The underlying principles of all these initiatives
were listed under The Café Collaborative.
An inexpensive voice messaging system serves people without web access. A voice
recording about the current cafés is updated weekly. These are inexpensive ways
to get the word out widely.
All the major and neighborhood papers ran events calendar listings. Vicki’s
prior media connections and minor fame from her book Your Money or Your Life got
the group radio and newspaper interviews. Eventually stories were run in several
neighborhood papers, in The Seattle Times, The New York Times and Utne Reader
as well as a radio interview on Talk of the Nation and a television story on the
local NBC affiliate.
Face it -- fame counts. Local celebrities agreed to participate in at least one
Conversation Café during Conversation Week and they were listed prominently on
all flyers. It was clear that they were participating as citizens, not as experts
-- a nice holiday for a famous person. Attendees had the intriguing promise that
they would sit down with a mystery celebrity in peer conversation.
Using prior connections, the group was able to get almost the whole city council,
several beloved religious leaders, some media personalities and civic leaders
to agree to participate. Again, it was a low commitment way for them to serve
the community.
All hosts, celebrities and co-sponsors were asked to send out emails to their
local lists about Conversation Week. Every community has a few "nodes"
-- people who maintain extensive email lists and like to send on significant news.
And just about everyone has a brief list of friends they can pass things on to.
If the email has a link to a website the recipient can evaluate for him or herself,
then it’s more likely to spread. If the message is short, it’s more
likely to spread. Vicki wrote an engaging, brief invitation to the event that
people could forward with little effort. In addition to putting posters as Word
documents on the web, someone was hired to slather Seattle with posters. As with
most marketing, it is repeated exposure that allows people to recognize something
as real.
Obviously, 911 was a natural subject. People needed to talk about the event and
the aftermath. Posing three questions works well -- one for the head, one for
the heart and one for the need to act. While Conversation Cafés are distinctly
not places for groups to organize for action, they are places where anyone can
consider, among other intelligent and heartful people, what actions might be worth
taking. The questions should be carefully designed to elicit inquiry rather than
opinion.
Since Conversation Week, the cafés are serving primarily as places where people
of diverse views can reflect philosophically, politically and personally with
others on the times we are living through. They are places to make meaning with
other thoughtful citizens. From 24 cafés during Conversation Week, the concept
has expanded in North America to 70 individual and unique cafés.
If you want more information, please feel free to contact Leslie Schneider,
the international Conversation Café coordinator: leslie@conversationcafe.org,
check the website at www.conversationcafe.org
or leave a message on the hotline, (206) 781-5700.
Common Ground hosts Conversation Café
 Top
|
|
