Suzanne Kryder talks with Carolyne Abdullah, Senior Director of the Strengthening
Democratic Capacity Team at Everyday Democracy

SK: Carolyne, let’s talk about the three “D” words. “Debate,” many people know what that means. It’s when a few people have disagreements about what they believe in and they’re trying to convince each other, maybe an audience of their beliefs.
           
The other two “D” words, people get confused about them, “dialogue” and “deliberation.” Give us a synonym for each one or a simple explanation of how they are different.

CA: The word “dialogue” implies listening. It implies engagement. It implies an openness. It implies collaboration.
           
When I think about “deliberation,” I think about reflection. I think about careful thought. I think about weighing options. I think about some intentionality around listening to different views, the purpose of action.

SK: You work for an organization called Everyday Democracy. They have a model called “Dialogue to Change.” Tell us just briefly about each of those three steps, organize, dialogue, action.

CA: Everyday Democracy of course is a national non-profit organization that has been around for over 30 years supporting community-level change in partnership with coalitions, other non-profits, foundations, towns and local governments.
           
The organizing component that we talk about is for inclusivity. That organizing is meant for both what you may call traditional stakeholders and non-traditional stakeholders, the grass tops and the grassroots so to speak. It is for those whose voices often get left at the margins of society.
           
That organizing component should never be skipped because it takes effort, time and resources to ensure that we have all of those voices in the engagement process of the dialogue. That’s why our first pillar is called organizing.
           
Our second pillar is around dialogue. This is where the actual learning and cross connections take place. The dialogue itself is rooted in social contact theory which means that over time if you engage with someone, you begin to understand, learn, reduce stereotypes about the other and open a space for collective understanding.
           
That’s guided by the tools we publish and create. Our discussion materials will guide that process over anywhere between a four-to-six-week process.

Then we move into the action component. Again, based on our experience, we recognize that often times individuals will love to engage in active listening and the dialogue component. Some however realize that that is beautiful and that’s fine and I have grown, I have learned, and I want my life condition to look different, to be better.

It’s very important for some voices to understand and to accept and to know that there will be some action coming out of these conversations, which is why we created the action component that will follow the dialogue.

SK: Tell us a couple quick examples that you’ve seen, or you’ve heard ofwhere you’ve seen the whole group change, or you’ve seen institutional change.

CA: Over the years we’ve been doing this work, there are probably thousands of people who have engaged in this particular approach to dialogue and learning and change. Over the years, we’ve seen a variety of ways groups began to work together to address their concerns.
           
One example would be a local community in Florida where they were engaging around the issue of race. One of the outcomes they talked about was how the local paper talked about their neighborhood or their community, often times in negative ways.
           
Without pointing out specific names at this particular point, I will say an example in which the local community decided to do as a group coming out of these conversations was to meet with the local paper, the editor and talk about the way they covered their neighborhood.

In those conversations, it led to creating an ad hoc group that worked with the local paper to really begin to publish positive stories about what the community members were doing in their communities to address everything from crime to clean up to youth mentoring programs and projects. There is an example of a dialogue around race.
           
It just happened to be that a bank president was part of these conversations in the local community. They were discussing how difficult it was for some communities of color to obtain small business loans, particularly young business entrepreneurs and a part of the city’s community.
           
Upon hearing this, because there was a perception that anyone who has the right credentials, credit worthiness can obtain a small business loan, until the president was part of a dialogue on race in his community hearing these stories of people saying, “I’ve gone to banks and been turned down. I have a good credit score. I have other collateral items, but I’ve been turned down.”
           
Listening over time to some of these stories that people told him and that he engaged in, he went back to his bank and began to examine some of their lending practices and policies.
           
Not only that, but he also actually brought in his peers to have these conversations with his peer groups, other bank presidents. They were able to put together some small loans, repackaged loans for small business lenders of color in that community to help support them as they were starting their enterprise.

SK: With the facilitators, what are some peace-promoting questions that they can begin with or that they can ask folks?

CA: Let’s say we’re talking about law enforcement or community police relations and that’s the topic, the public issue we’re having our dialogue on, a question might be “What did your parents tell you about policing when you grew up?” Or for officers, “What did you learn about policing when you grew up?” “What did it mean to you to be in a community where you saw law enforcement in a positive light?” “What did it look like for you in a community where you saw things about law enforcement that you wanted to change?”

You want to always start with people from a place of ownership. If the issue is education, it may be a question like, “What was schooling like for you?” Before you can talk about what needs to happen and change in education, let’s go back to your own experience because some people in that circle will have had a very bad experience in education. Other folks, not so much the case.

SK:  Carolyne, let’s talk about experts because I’ve seen national commissions, even local commissions are often made up of all the experts and that’s good however I love what Thomas Jefferson said about public policy. He said, “The best public policy comes from integrating the knowledge of experts with the wisdom of common people.” How do you support this peace process of balancing experts and citizens?

CA: In the organizing model, we deliberately seek to bring in the voices both at the traditional expert level and local community level. Again, experts and technocrats bring a certain expertise and knowledge around a particular issue, whether it’s transportation or housing or whatever the issue may be because they are learned in that field of practice.

Community people bring a particular lived experience in this issue because they are the recipients of the outputs of the experts’ policies.

If you’re talking about criminal justice reform for example, we have a lot of stakeholders, experts in that field. We also have people who have gone through that system or are in that system who are the recipients of that criminal justice, or some might say “injustice” system.

Having their voices at the table integrated, having their voices in the design of reform and transformation is crucial to not reproducing the same inequities and harm.

Suzanne Kryder Talks with Marion Sanchez, Community Engagement Manager with the City of Austin

SK: Your website in Austin is called “Speak Up Austin” and one of the software programs that powers it is called Engagement HQ from Bang the Table. I’ve noticed that lots of U.S. cities are starting to use this online public engagement. Could you say what are the positives and negatives of using online?

MS: What I’m noticing is that many communities are engaging not only with the city but also with friends and family online, over the phone, mobile technology, face to face, so what we try to do is to create an environment that is similar and natural.
           
The online engagement such as what you mentioned, Speak Up Austin is one option of many for people to engage. The goal for our team is to open lines of communication.

If online is something that works for some families, we want to make sure that we have those options for those families. For the families that prefer to have a cup of tea and a conservation with leadership, then that is the option that we offer. If people prefer to answer a survey at recreation center, we want to make sure that we have that.

We always look at the community from the perspective of equity. What communities have less opportunities to engage and what are the barriers around that engagement? As we analyze those barriers, we’re trying to create avenues to break those in a way that if they decide to engage, they do have an avenue to do so.

SK: Since you work for the City of Austin, you have to decide which topics you will put online, which topics will be in person and which topics are a combination. How do you decide that when people are allowed to come in person?

MS: Well, we don’t really choose what topics are going online or in a face-to-face engagement. Typically, topics and initiatives come from the departments,and they need to hear from the community how it might work best.
           
When we look at our tools, whether they’re online or face to face, what I try to think about is who is last. Who is the person who has the hardest time to engage and what are the most affected communities? Once I understand what communities are having the hardest time, then I can create tools that will help them engage if they decide to engage.
           
Typically, we try to have things both online and in person, but in this particular case, because we’re living in a different period with COVID, the face to face is limited. Right now, most of our toolbox is online.

SK: Equality is also a peace issue. I’m wondering how public engagement balances all this stuff. Let me give you some examples. You might have a person who has no internet access or you have a person who is very domineering and talks a lot or writes a lot or you may have some who are very silent. You might also have a person who says, “This is so stupid. I would never be involved in this.” How do you balance all of these different approaches?

MS: What a variety of opinions does is that it provides us with a window of opportunity to understand what people are thinking behind what they are sharing. What I have learned is that no one shares their full self. They’ll share what is convenient at that given moment according to the situation that we have.
           
When someone says something like, “I don’t want to be involved in this process,” then I have to read between the lines because they are here, and they want to be involved. I’m just not involving them in a way that we can connect.
           
That is a challenge for me to figure out; what it is I can do to bring them into this dialogue. Perhaps it’s location. Perhaps it’s a language barrier. Perhaps it’s people talking at the same time and some are not able to express their opinion. It could be a number of things, but it’s my job to listen and understand how to open lines of communication because that feedback is equally important.

SK: What is an example of some healing or peacemaking that you have seen happen in Austin because of public dialogues?

MS: That’s a big question. Austin has a long history of lack of dialogue with communities. It started in the 1920s when we created a master plan where we moved people of color to one side of a highway, and it continues by basically not providing services.
           
The healing process of a large community that has suffered for so many years is a difficult one. I think what we have done as an organization is learn through the process to understand, to hear better and to be able to provide services to the communities.
           
I don’t think that Austin communities have “healed” per say. I think that we are at the beginning process where we can hear each other, but the healing process is going to take a long time because we’re looking at years and years and it’s difficult to move forward.
           
Right now, where we are as a city, I will say we are in a listening mode, humbly hoping that we can move forward and continue to do better.

SK: Maybe some of our audience members want to get involved in public dialogue. How could they get involved?

MS: Facilitating you can learn through going to a school but being caring is something that you need to practice every day and you practice by helping your neighbors, brothers and sisters, someone that you don’t know, someone that is in need.
           
You will learn to read people’s needs without having to hear the need and that really helps a lot when you facilitate to understand where people are coming from and understand that they are presenting their best selves that they can at that given moment, but there is more behind.

I will say that if someone enjoys dialogue, enjoys having conversations and dinner parties, maybe they have a career in community engagement.

Former and First Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse,
headquartered at the University of Arizona.

SK: Carolyn, you founded a non-partisan, non-profit in 1995 called America Speaks. It closed later in 2014. You used what you call “large-scale engagement.” Tell us what that is and why it’s important for healing.

CL: Well, I was privileged to be the first woman to be selected as Chief of Staff to the Governor of the State of Ohio. I then worked in the Clinton/Gore White House. In those two experiences, I really profoundly understood how the voice of the collective American people was closed out of the process except for voting and polling.
           
The point in creating large scale engagement for we the people to once again affect the public policies that so profoundly impact our lives was to create the spaces and design the processes that could bring thousands of people together, so they together could look deeply at an issue and make a collective decision.
           
For example, we worked in New York City after 9/11. Five thousand people were gathered at the Jacob Javits Center, all of them reviewing the initial conceptual plans for rebuilding the towers in Lower Manhattan. That was a very dramatic experience because when the public saw what the plans were, they rejected them unanimously.
           
Credit to the mayor’s representatives and the governor’s representatives. They stood on that platform at the end of the day, and they said, “We have heard you. We will have to start this process over.”

SK: Carolyn, I love that there were 5,000 people, but I can even have conflict with just one person. How is large-scale engagement peace-promoting?

CL:  Imagine this, think of a large convention center, a big open floor. For 5,000 people, there were 500 tables and at each table, there were ten citizens and residents seated. Each table had a professionally trained process facilitator and each person had fact-based material to be using throughout the day.
           
You were talking with ten other people who you first had a chance to share values with, a chance to share your view of what the tragedy was on 9/11 and what was important in rebuilding New York City. Trust was built table by table by table.
           
Then each table had a computer on the table and each person had a voting keypad device. After we asked a specific question, for example, “What values do you believe should drive the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan?” Each table picked the values that they wanted.

The facilitator taped it into a computer. They went to a live computing station in the hall where people could see, and they read all the data from the 500 tables. It came out in themes. Then we projected those themes up on a large screen in front of 5,000 people.

SK: America Speaks, the non-profit that you founded, used technological engagement quite a bit. Talk about what that is, what it entails and why it was important for these large-scale engagements.

CL: Well, our goal was to have a large enough number of people making a collective decision that elected officials and other decision makers would take it seriously. In order to do that in a meaningful timeframe, I invented a method to computerize the New England Town Meeting.
           
Town meetings still occur today where townspeople get together and determine the towns’ budget and the towns’ school budget. They do it all voice to voice with a moderator. That can get you to 200 people or if it’s a really sophisticated moderator, maybe 300, but we wanted to do 1,000 or 3,000 or even 10,000 sometimes.

We combined the small table discussions with each table having its own computer and every person having a keypad for voting purposes. By using the computers, we could quickly take the outcome of each table discussion and experts reading those themes as they came in could find where the commonalities across all of the tables were.
           
We then used good old-fashioned technology and projected that on the screen in front of the room and that allowed people to see not only what their table said, but what what all 500 tables said, or 100 tables or whatever the number was.
           
It was a combination of excellent face to face discussions, facilitated in a professional and safe way creating a safe space to explore differences combined with the support of computer technology and voting keypads is how we did it at America Speaks.

SK: Carolyn, what is the future of large-scale engagement?

CL: We not only need the capacity to do large-scale national conversations, we need the capacity to do large-scale global conversations, particularly for example on how we deal with the rapidly increasing threat of climate change.
           
Where we need to go in the future is a combination of expanding technology. Germany has done a platform that we are now adapting in the U.S. called “My Country Talks.” The first two experiments have been done in this country called “America Talks” where listeners could go to AmericaTalks.US and look at what happened in June as the first round of an American Talks conversation, which will be repeated in six months. That is a totally online experience.
           
We need to get to a place where we can combine some face-to-face work with the online capacities that didn’t exist in 2010 or 2014 that now do so that we can get to very large numbers.