CADCA National Coalition Institute

World Café: Community Conversations that Matter

Have you been to a town hall meeting like this: Participants dutifully arrive; the 'experts' sit at the front of the room and share their knowledge and opinions and answer a few questions from the audience, the meeting ends and everyone goes home? Citizens attend, but have little opportunity to participate. We often depend on the 'experts' telling the community. But, what if we turned it around?

For CADCA’s National Leadership Forum in February, LaDonna Coy and I developed a session, Community Conversations that Matter, using the World Café method that intentionally creates a way for each of us to participate in conversations that shape our lives in the community. We were surprised at the response: the room was set up for 90 and we allowed 25 more in before putting out a 'session full ' notice.

The room arrangement set the stage for a very different experience. The bright fluorescent lights were off and the softer spots on. The tables each seated four and were covered with red and white checkered cloths. Our reference materials looked more like menus than standard workshop handouts.

The World Café  recommends setting this kind of atmosphere and instructing participants to listen deep and share from the heart. Except table hosts, participants move to different tables every 20 minutes for three rounds, so people get to meet and listen to a variety of people and perspectives. The conversations were stimulating and it was hard to believe that an hour had passed when the session ended.

The session was so successful that we’re going to do it again at CADCA’s Mid-Year Training Institute in July. We hope you’ll join us and see what a World Café is like. In the meantime, you can get more information at the Town Hall Meeting Meets World Cafe Wiki pages.

If you’ve participated in a World Café, use the comments section below to tell us about the experience. Help us share our experiences and yours with the world!

 

This post was written by Diane Gallagher, Ph.D., Deputy Director for Evaluation and Research for CADCA's National Coalition Institute. Her e-mail address is dgallagher@cadca.org.

Environmental Strategies Publication Strikes a Chord

CADCA's National Coalition Institute released the first in a new series of publications, Beyond the Basics, last week and the response has been overwhelming. The Coalition Impact: Environmental Prevention Strategies resonates with community anti-drug coalitions because it addresses the day-to-day work of trying to create safer and healthier communities.

Since the publication launched on the Institute's Web site on April 8, hundreds of coalitions have visited the Institute's environmental strategies page and dozens have ordered multiple print copies. We're feeling a bit like Sally Field when she picked up her Academy Award a number of years ago and declared "You like me..."

Of course, with the Institute, we know that you like our work--and that's a tremendous compliment because we work continuously to develop innovative training curricula and resources that help community anti-drug coalitions build safer and healthier communities. Whether training on the basics of core competencies or disseminating topic-specific publications, we strive to provide comprehensive information that coalitions can apply in their individual communities.

Please let us know what you think of the new publication and what your coalition is doing to create population-level change in your community. By sharing your stories, you help us help other coalitions.

This post was written by Sue Stine, Senior Manager of Dissemination and Coalition Relations for CADCA's National Coalition Institute. Her e-mail address is sstine@cadca.org.