Mix It Up

Launched in November 2002, the Study Circles Resource Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Mix It Up" campaign helps young people identify, question and cross social boundaries in their schools and communities. Hundreds of thousands of students in thousands of schools have taken the challenge to sit with someone new during Mix It Up At Lunch Day. Students and teachers are welcome to order the free Mix It Up handbook, Reaching Across Boundaries: Talk to Create Change.

Resource Link: http://www.mixitup.org

Mobilize.org

Mobilize.org, formerly Mobilizing America's Youth, is an all-partisan network dedicated to educating, empowering, and energizing young people to increase our civic engagement and political participation. We work to show young people how their lives are impacted by public policy and in turn, how we can impact public policy.

Resource Link: http://mobilize.org

Morris J. Wosk Centre - Dialogue Capacity-Building Workshop

The Wosk Centre offers a one-day, customized dialogue capacity-building workshop that introduces groups to the study and practice of dialogue within various contexts - organizational change, workplace conflict, difficult conversations, as a preamble to decision-making, and healing rifts between individuals. Custom workshops for off-site groups can be created for groups of 20 or more.

Resource Link: http://www.sfu.ca/dialogue

Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue

Simon Fraser University, which is located in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), is the home of the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, an international conference centre providing 16,000 square feet of specialized meeting and function space which is devoted to facilitating public and private dialogue in order to foster understanding and engender positive action.

Resource Link: http://www.sfu.ca/dialogue

Multicultural Teaching in the University

David Schoem and Linda Frankel, Ximena Zuniga, Edith Lewis. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995.

Rather than representing a homogeneous view of multicultural teaching, this volume reflects the debate and dialogue that surround the issue. This book integrates new scholarship that reflects a more expansive notion of knowledge, and suggests new ways to communicate with diverse populations of students.

NAME Listserv

National Association for Multicultural Education.

NAME-MCE provides a forum to discuss multicultural education, share resources, post job openings, announce conferences or other events, and ask questions of educators and activists around the world.

Resource Link: http://mail.nameorg.org/mailman/listinfo/name-mce_nameorg.org

Narrative Mediation

Narrative mediation is an innovative conflict resolution paradigm that is a revolutionary departure from the traditional problem-solving, interest-based model of resolving disputes. Based on a postmodern, social constructionist philosophy, narrative mediation views conflict as arising within cultural contexts that have a direct bearing on how parties construct their perceptions of a particular event. A narrative mediation approach encourages the conflicting parties to reach understanding and resolution through a deep understanding of the shared personal and cultural narratives underlying the conflict.

Resource Link: http://narrative-mediation.crinfo.org

National Association for Community Mediation

NAFCM is a membership organization comprised of community mediation centers, their staff and volunteer mediators, and other individuals and organizations interested in the community mediation movement.

Resource Link: http://www.nafcm.org

National Charrette Institute (NCI)

The National Charrette Institute (NCI) is a nonprofit educational institution. We help people build community capacity for collaboration to create healthy community plans. We teach professionals and community leaders the art and science of Dynamic Planning, a holistic, collaborative planning process that harnesses the talents and energies of all interested parties to create and support a feasible plan. And we advance the fields of community planning and public involvement through research and publications.

Resource Link: http://www.charretteinstitute.org

National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation

NCDD formed in 2002 after 60 leaders and 50 organizations collaborated to produce the first National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation. The conference brought together practitioners and scholars from across the spectrum of D&D practice for the first time, and NCDD's members are committed to continuing to foster collaboration and build understanding and cohesion in the D&D community.

Resource Link: http://www.thataway.org

National Dialogue on Social Security

In 1999, Information Renaissance collaborated with Americans Discuss Social Security to host a non-partisan electronic discussion and debate on Social Security reform. Thousands of Americans participated in a national discussion with policymakers, experts and each other via the internet. You can browse the archives of this event to learn more about large-scale online discussions.

Resource Link: http://www.network-democracy.org/social-security

National Issues Forums

The term "National Issues Forums" is used to refer to both a network of programs and a deliberative process. National Issues Forums (NIF) is an independent network of civic and educational groups which use "issue books" as a basis for deliberative choice work in forums based on the town meeting tradition. NIF issue books use research on the public's concerns to identify three or four options or approaches to an issue. Presenting issues in this way invites citizens to confront the conflicts among different options and avoids the usual debates in which people lash out with simplistic arguments.

National Issues Forums Institute

NIFI is a nationwide network of educational and community organizations that deliberate about nationwide issues. NIFI publishes deliberation guides on such topics as Racial and Ethnic Tensions: What Should We Do?; Money and Politics: Who Owns Democracy?; and Violent Kids: Can We Change The Trend? Members of the network also provide workshops on convening and moderating National Issues Forums or on framing issues for deliberation.

Resource Link: http://www.nifi.org

National Issues Forums News Page

National Issues Forums.

This news page is a place for people involved in the NIF Network to share what they are doing and learning in their communities.

Resource Link: http://www.nifi.org/news/

National MultiCultural Institute

NMCI is a national training and development organization which holds diversity conferences, conducts trainings, develops educational resource materials and initiates special projects of interest to the field. Organizations and communities which contact NMCI can request many types of diversity trainings, including interracial dialogue.

Resource Link: http://www.nmci.org

National Playback Theatre

Playback Theatre is practiced in hundreds of settings in many localities and cultures around the world, as both an art form and a means of generating community power and possibility. This improvisational form of communication was developed in 1975 by Jonathan Fox in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. The National Playback Theater ensemble, which performed at the 2004 NCDD conference, was founded by Leilani Rashida Henry to integrate the principles of art, spontaneity and authenticity to facilitate dialogue and enhance cohesion and transformation within organizations and communities.

Resource Link: http://beingandliving.com

National Roster of Environmental Dispute Resolution and Consensus Building Professionals

This roster was developed by the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution from a desire to improve access to qualified professionals for all who are sponsoring or engaging in ECR processes. Roster members are all impartial third-party practitioners (e.g., professional facilitators and mediators) experienced with environmental, natural resource and public lands issues, including matters related to energy, transportation and land use.

Resource Link: http://www.ecr.gov/roster/index.htm

NCDD Commentary: A Unique Certificate Program in Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement

Jan Elliott, Ph.D., Co-Director of the Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement Certificate Program at Fielding Graduate Institute. NCDD, 2004.

Jan Elliott submitted this commentary about Fielding's new certificate program for the NCDD website on May 13, 2004. Fielding Graduate Institute, in collaboration with The International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (IISD) and the Kettering Foundation, is launching a unique new 16-week graduate level Certificate Program on Dialogue, Deliberation and Public Engagement...

NCDD Commentary: Dynamic Facilitation and the Choice-Creating Process

Tom Atlee and Rosa Zubizarreta. NCDD, 2003.

This commentary was submitted for the NCDD website by Tom Atlee and Rosa Zubizarreta in March 2003. The piece is adapted from Tom's book "The Tao of Democracy" (2002). It begins "To 'facilitate' means to 'help make easier.' If our goal is to have meaningful and powerful dialogue, the role of a facilitator is to help make it easier for the group to do so. Dynamic Facilitation, created by consultant Jim Rough, is a leading-edge process designed to help groups have meaningful conversations, access their creativity, and discover practical breakthroughs to challenging situations, even in the midst of divergent opinions, strong emotions, and conflicting beliefs.

NCDD Commentary: Inviting or Excluding? Evaluating Our Way of Being

John Engle, The Experiment in Alternative Leadership. Engle, 2003.

John Engle submitted this commentary for NCDD's website on December 7, 2003. John is the co-founder of Beyond Borders and The Experiment in Alternative Leadership and board member of the Open Space Institute USA. In this commentary, John openly discusses his work with the Open Space method in Haiti.

Resource Link: http://www.theexperiment.info