World Cafe Community

World Café Services: An Update from Deborah Goldblatt

With the launch of our new website on June 1^st, World Café Services moved into high gear with a flurry of inquiries from all directions!

During the month of June and July, I enjoyed many conversations with people from a variety of public and private sectors:  education, energy, forestry, sustainability, entrepreneurship, immigration, climate change and health.  

What is so encouraging for me about World Café Services is being on the frontlines of the World Café world hearing about the diverse communities and businesses who are curious about The World Café – not just as a method or process but as a practice and way of being in all our communications - and are wanting or are already implementing an approach of “learning together through inquiry” in life and work today.

World Café Services, through our professional network, is serving community and business clients everywhere– whether that’s by having a half hour conversation with myself and others looking at the possibilities of convening very small or very large groups in a new way or exploring ways to renew or deepen the conversations they’ve been hosting internally within their organizations.

One of my favorite stories from this month’s World Café Services work is helping an organizing team for a conference in Arusha, Tanzania to find some guidance and support to co-create their World Café design.

We Are Not Ants

We're pleased to note that the World Café has been mentioned in the 2011 Spanish language edition of We Are Not Ants (No Somos Hormigas), a collaboration by four young people from Spain who took Mahatma Ghandi's challenge to "be the change you want to see" seriously.

We Are Not Ants champions positive change in a number of ways - first and perhaps most powerfully it is written from the standpoint of Appreciative Inquiry, and focuses primarily on what is working. They wanted to write a book "against the current zeitgeist of pessimism and world-weariness", calling it a "guide-book for the well-informed optimist on the state of humanity".

The book has three chapters - "Things That Work", "Things That Go Wrong and Need To Be Fixed", and "Initiatives Decicated to Positive Change". Their piece on World Café is in the third chapter, listed under new ways of Communication. 

The authors of We Are Not Ants are converting the ideas in the book into a crowd-sourced directory of social innovation projects or organizations like the World Café Community Foundation that either

• generate new opportunities for people
• promote a more efficient use of material and intellectual resources
• enable a more sustainable use of natural resources

They've invited readers to submit new social innovation projects and groups for publication in future printings, including the English language edition they are currently seeking a publisher for.

We thank them for the shout out and wish them all the best!