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 2008, LaDonna Coy 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!

To learn more about the World Café, contact the Institute's Training and Technical Assistance Department at 1-800-54-CADCA. ext. 240, or training@cadca.org.