Community Dialogues
January 2023 marked the launch of Community Dialogues, President Holmes-Sullivan’s signature initiative. This ongoing program is intended to make healthy, constructive dialogue a part of our identity as an institution, and the foundation of how we relate to each other in community in both informal and formal settings.
Seeking Students to Lead Important Campus Conversations
Seeking students to become trained Dialogue Practitioners and hold important conversations on campus!
This program is designed to equip student leaders with the skills to facilitate meaningful dialogue on campus. In this role, you’ll be trained in dialogue facilitation and learn techniques for fostering constructive conversations across a variety of perspectives. Following the initial two-day training, students will work with other trained practitioners to develop and facilitate a dialogue project on a topic that matters in our campus community.
Interested in participating? See upcoming Dialogue in Action events
Since January of 2023, 71 members of our community—faculty, staff, and students from all three of our campuses— have been prepared by Essential Partners to facilitate meaningful dialogue across differences. Dialogues have been held in both formal and informal settings, inside and outside of the classroom, on a range of topics that matter to our community. The purpose of learning and practicing dialogue at LC is for all community members to build our capacity to listen, speak, and learn with each other about topics central to our collective well-being.
The ultimate goal of this initiative is for our community to learn and practice dialogue in both formal and informal settings to build our capacity to listen, speak, and learn with each other about topics central to our collective wellbeing, even when those topics are contentious.
Small group Reflective Structured Dialogues have been held in the Lewis & Clark Community on a range of topics, including: race and identity, public forests, belonging, the L&C values and mascot, making change in the world, the College’s environmental work, the impacts of current events in Israel/Palestine, gender, and social media. Learn more here. Our trained practitioners are also involved in integrating dialogic practices into their varied contexts and work across campus.
We are always happy to organize dialogue sessions on these or other topics in a way that will best fit your group’s needs. We can also provide workshops and trainings to your team. To inquire, please contact communitydialogues@lclark.edu.
Essential Partners
Essential Partners has over 30 years of experience helping campus communities large and small become more inclusive and resilient by learning to respectfully engage on sensitive topics such as:
- Race and ethnicity
- Gender and sexuality
- Religious differences
- Economic inequality
- Climate change
- Intellectual diversity
- Political partisanship
Learn more about their higher ed–specific approach and how they create what they call the Dialogic Campus.