Holding Productive Conversation Requires Perspective
The Committee of Seventy’s PA Project for Civic Engagement (PPCE) helps communities and organizations hold productive conversations about challenging issues. Its motto is: If you want to hear a different conversation, you have to hold a different conversation.
Resources
Platforms and organizations for reference to learn about how to have diverse conversations.
The Flipside
This news aggregator quickly shows readers multiple sides of issues in the news.
The National Issues Forum Institute
The NIFI works to support group deliberations and substantive, meaningful discussions on issues from Social Security to healthcare to immigration.
The Red and Blue Exchange
The Red and Blue Exchange is headquartered in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania.
OpenMind
This platform uses a psychology-based approach to promote constructive and depolarizing discourse in schools, communities, and the workplace.
The National Institute for Civil Discourse
A Tucson-based organization, the NICD works to promote healthy and civil political debate.
The Hardwood Institute
The Hardwood Institute emphasizes community, rather than background and partisanship. They provide training and coaching that promote the kinds of problem-solving that benefit everyone.
Diverse Perspectives In Reading
Enjoy a few of our picks for books that help us keep an open but critical mind.
- The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias, Dolly Chugh
- The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
- Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation, Tania Israel
- Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer
- I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, Mónica Guzmán
- Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation, by Dannagal Young
- Coming to Public Judgement, Daniel Yankelovich
- Stepping Forward, Rich Hartwood
- Democracy in Retrograde, Emily Amick and Sami Sage
- Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Amy Chua
How to Have Better Political Conversations
Take a look at some of the videos below for some discussion of how to change the conversation and what is at stake if we don’t.
Continue Learning the Five Habits
Your life is the sum of your habits. What you repeatedly do ultimately forms the person you are and the things you believe. For citizens who want to engage with our democracy year-round, we have narrowed down a checklist of five research-based habits that anyone can follow in order to be a more active participant in the electoral process.
