World Cafe Community

World Café Signature Learning Programs

We have now scheduled our next set of Level One World Café Signature Learning Programs!

We will be offering these learning programs in three two-hour sessions online - one in January 2011, and one in February 2012.

Each one is timed to be convenient and accessible to people in different parts of our international community, so you can choose the one that works best for you. 

January 2012
Level One Online - The Americas & Asia/Australia
Offered online in three two-hour sessions
January 6th, 9th, and 11th
(in Asia/Australia that is Jan 7th, 10th, & 12th)
5pm - 7pm Pacific Time
REGISTER HERE

 

February 2012
Level One Online - The Americas & Europe
Offered online in three two-hour sessions
February 15th, 17th, and 19th
8am - 10am Pacific Time
REGISTER HERE

 

We call them Learning Programs rather than trainings, because while you will come out of the series (Levels One to Three) well grounded in the art and craft of hosting World Café, the process is one of collaborative learning rather than pedagogical instruction. Interactive and experiential, these programs are held in an atmosphere of shared inquiry and mutual support.

 

Start your own "learning journey" into the magic of the World Café by registering for one of these introductory Level One events now!

 

Level One is a pre-requisite for the Level Two Signature Learning Programs, so you'll want to take one of these currently-scheduled programs to prepare for our Level Two course being offered online in May 2012 in collaboration with Fielding Graduate University.

Read more about World Café Signature Learning Programs here.

 

If you would like to contribute a scholarship to one or more of the many people who would love to participate in this program but are prevented by financial limitations, please make your contribution using the "Give" button in the left column - be sure to indicate your wishes in the PayPal text field provided.

What the World Café Makes Possible

From Ben Roberts of weDialogue, on what his engagement with the World Café has made possible for him:

On the occasion of this “Harvest Fund Drive,” I find myself reflecting back on what has been an incredible personal journey in which the Foundation has played a key role. A year and a half ago, I began an inquiry into the power and joy of engaging in “conversations that matter,” in the context of my involvement in the political initiatives of “the Coffee Party.” This led me immediately to The World Café as a process and to the work of the Foundation. There I found an inspiring array of resources and an incredibly responsive, sincere, generous and dedicated community of practice that was eager to support me. Talk about “creating hospitable space!” You can read a series of posts in the StoryNet section of our wonderful Online Community describing my efforts; here are links to part 1, part 2 and part 3).

As I learned more about the magic of large group dialogic processes, my interest quickly morphed from excitement about finding a set of tools to apply to this specific political initiative to a sense that I had discovered new and fertile ground for my life’s work in a much broader context. I became especially taken with the possibility for weaving these processes together with the incredible convening power of the internet. Here, the Foundation’s director of global communications Amy Lenzo proved to be particularly supportive. One of the world’s most experienced hosts of emergent dialogue online, Amy generously volunteered to teach me, connect me with resources and even to co-host many of my earliest efforts in convening virtual conversation.

Community for the 21st Century

We finally have the story of weDialogue's first session of the "Conversations for the 21st Century" series up in StoryNet! Here's an added enhancement you will only see here: an audio recording of the round table of conversation starters with Peter Block, Sarah Whiteley and Maria Scordialos, and Nancy White:

Just to get you to want to see more, here's a sneak peak of Susan Kelly's graphic recording of the conversation starters (click to see it full size):

Conversations for the 21st Century

World Cafe Online Services partner WeDialogue is launching a series of free, interactive public conversations called Conversations for the 21st Century. These events will be telephone-based and use a World Cafe format. Each will focus on a different topic of significance for life in the 21st Century - economics, health, the environment, etc. - and feature a triad of "conversation starters" (thanks to the Heartland community for this term).

The three conversation starters are chosen for their diversity of perspective and together they will seed the conversation with insights based on their work in the subject area.

The first of the series, Community for the 21st Century, is happening on April 1st and will feature Peter Block, Nancy White, and Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whiteley as conversation starters.

Come, be part of the conversation!

More about the Community for the 21st Century session.
or REGISTER NOW (you must register to participate)

More about the Conversations for the 21st Century series.

 

March Community Cafe

Benjamin Degenhart and I are hosting our second online Community Cafe together on March 10th.

Come join us!

All the details (including a link to register - you must register to participate - are on the community calendar. We look forward to welcoming you...

 

Announcing the New World Cafe Logo!

The World Cafe New Logo Contest was a phenomenal success! We received 29 entries from 12 designers in 10 countries around the world. Designs came in from Turkey, Indonesia, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., Serbia, Brazil, India, Mexico and Pakistan. They were all extraordinary, and they all interpreted the complex necessities of our criteria in creative and sometimes surprising ways.

We were very pleased with the quality of entries, and it took us quite a while to make the decision and follow standard procedures to resolve any potential trademark or brand issues. We are deeply grateful to all our contest entrants - not only for responding to our call and giving us their best work, but also for their incredible generosity and patience in waiting for us to be absolutely sure we had the right logo.

We are especially grateful to our winner, who showed great professionalism and worked tirelessly to help us achieve our ambitious goal of a logo that can do everything we need it to do.

It is our great pleasure to announce the winner of the World Cafe New Logo Contest - Gabriel Kurauchi from Brazil, and to introduce our new World Cafe logo!

Gabriel is the talented young designer who created this friendly yet professional logo - a mark that is inviting and immediately accessible to our wide range of users; that reaches across generations and is at home in cultures all over the world. It is a design that is classic and clean and reproduces well in a variety of media; a logo that will stand out in a crowded brandscape and tell our story of global connection and communication.

Can you tell we are in love with it?  We can't wait to show it off in our website re-design, which will launch in the new year. Look out for our interview with Gabriel in upcoming communications - we feel he's so talented that we'll all be hearing more about him in the future.

It was no easier to choose the runners up than it was to choose the winning design, and it is our honor, with great appreciation, to present the top five outstanding logos that captured our admiration and consideration.

In no specific order, the runners up in the World Cafe New Logo Contest are:

Designer: Christian Grambow, from Germany

 

Designer: Ana Vujosevic, from Serbia

Designer: Sunil Gajjar, from India

 

Designer: Lara Elijah, from the United States

 

Designer: Kim Philips, from the United States

 

Thanks again to all our contest entrants, and Congratulations to Gabrieil Kurauchi and our five runners up - Christian Granbow, Ana Vujosevic, Sunil Gajar, Laura Elija and Kim Philips!

Join us for a World Cafe at the Enlightened Business Summit Oct 29

World Cafe co-founder Juanita Brown and Online Cafe pioneer Amy Lenzo are teaming up to host an online World Cafe as the culminating session of a week-long online "Enlightened Business Summit" starting October 25. This is a great opportunity to experience an online Cafe geared specifically to a business audience - if you've been curious to experience for yourself just how powerful an online World Cafe can be, please join us. All the Summit sessions, including the World Café, are free, and we'd love to see you there, as we are exploring the use of this medium for hosting World Cafes not only in business, but in NGOs and other organizational and community settings.

Moving from Insight to Action: A World Café Strategic Dialogue will be held Friday, October 29th, from 1-2:30pm PST / 4-5:30pm EST and we'll be staying an extra 1/2 hour to extend the conversation for those who want to explore further.

Click here to register and find out more about the other sessions. The Summit is co-hosted by Chip Conley, an inspiring business leader and one of the most popular speakers at this year's TED conference.

You can participate in as many calls as you like and interact with both the featured leaders and other participants via the fabulous MaestroConference platform, which is phone based and easily connects you to others around the world for exciting exploration and engagement. We've begun to use this platform very successfully for a whole range of World Cafe style dialogues.

By registering you'll also get free access to the full library of recordings from the Summit.

Please share this invitation with your friends and allies - all are welcome to participate.

Warm Wishes,

Juanita Brown and Amy Lenzo

P.S. If you're interested in learning more about World Cafe Online Services or for help in hosting your own conversations, please contact Amy Lenzo.

World Cafe and MaestroMonth

What's easier than picking up the phone to connect and get people talking to each other?

Nothing, right?! Well, what if we could meet for a World Cafe on the phone - break out into small groups with touch of a button and then come back to the large group to share the highlights and harvest our conversations? What if we could experience the intimacy and collective excitement of a face-to-face World Cafe, on the phone?

Well, now we can!

Amy Lenzo, Christine Whitney Sanchez and Gabriel Shirley are hosting a special series featuring interactive events from Juanita Brown & Nicole Boyer, David Isaacs, Christina Whitney Sanchez, David Copperrider, Diana Whitney and Harrison Owen. This series, called Beyond Facilitation: Accessing Collective Wisdom, is one week of October's MaestroMonth, which launches MaestroConference, the company behind this revolutionary new phone-based interactive technology.

These 5 events, like all the events in MaestroMonth are FREE. Most of them start at 9am and go through to 11am. For more information about each event and/or to register, go to MaestroMonth.com, scroll down to the event you're interested in and then click the "Details" or "Register" button beneath each one. It's that simple.

* * *

The full MaestroMonth schedule features an array of luminaries across several fields, including many of our close friends and colleagues. :

Business: T. Harv Eker, Michael Port, Robin Sharma, Lance Secretan, Chip Conley, Ray Blanchard, Jeff Hoffman, David Finkel, Lynne Twist, Mari Smith, DC Cordova, Cynthia Kersey, Charlotte & Laura Shelton, James Malinchak, Bettie Spruill, Rinaldo Brutoco
 
Health: Deepak Chopra, John Gray, Candace Pert, Olivia Newton John & John Easterling, Judith Orloff, Joan Borysenko, Norman Shealy, Eric Pearl, Len Saputo, Mary Shomon, Jennifer MacLean, Lee Gerdes, Mona Lisa Schulz
 
Personal Growth: Debbie & Arielle Ford, Dan Millman, John Assaraf, Hale Dwoskin, Vishen Lakhaini, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dave Ellis, Brian Johnson, Mike Robbins, Tripp Lanier & Jayson Gaddis, Zen DeBrucke, Amy Ahlers
 
Societal Change: Gregg Braden, Seane Corn, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jean Houston, Starhawk, Aqeela Sherrils, Azim Khamisa, Steve Bhaerman, Fred Johnson, David Cooperider, Anodea Judith, Lynne McMullen, Richard Rudd, Miki Kashtan, Stacey Lawson
 
Spirituality: Marianne Williamson, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Andrew Cohen, James Twyman, Genpo Roshi, Andrew Harvey, Carter Phipps, Lisa Schrader, Ron Alexander, Lauren Mackler, Paul Hoffman, Paul & Patty Richards, Ellen Debenport, Nicole Daedone, Stephen Dinan & Devaa Haley Mitchell
 
Special Track for Entrepreneurs: Sharon Drew Morgen, Morgana Rae, Ken Foster, Leesa Barnes, Garrett Sutton, Larry Ousley, James Burgin & John Ward, Steve Maxwell, Leslie Grossman, Brian Burt
 
Special Series for Change Leaders: Harrison Owen, Juanita Brown & Nicole Boyer, David Isaacs, Diana Whitney, Christine Whitney Sanchez

New World Cafe Online Community Launched!

As new people join the new World Cafe online community every day from countries around the world - Brazil, Israel, Italy, Finland, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, the United States, Russia, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, the Phillipines, France, Ghana, Indonesia, Columbia, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Belgium, Spain, Croatia, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Yukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Peru, Dubai, Slovenia, Tahiti, Venezula, Jamaica, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, Bolivia and Austria - there is a palpable sense of a new kind of community - a truly global World Café - taking form.

If you have not yet joined us in the new online community, we invite you to go to www.theworldcafecommunity.org and sign up today. Find friends and allies, deepen your learning, band together and take action, start the conversations and launch the projects that are closest to your heart - now's the time!

Read on for some of the new features and benefits that are available to us now ...

Be the Change ... But How?

This story is about the Santa Cruz World Café held on March 24th, 2009
By Nicole Boyer and Brooking Gatewood, of Adaptive Edge

On a beautiful spring evening in Santa Cruz about two-dozen people gathered at The Empty Boat, an atmospheric little teahouse on Squid Row for a World Café dialogue on the timeless and timely questions: how do we “be the change”? What’s the relationship between our “inner work” and “outer work”— between personal transformation and transforming the world?

Why we did this
The first impetus to host this session was simple.  Brooking and Nicole wanted an opportunity to do a dialogue session together.  Since Santa Cruz was Brooking’s home turf, we thought that was a good place to start. 

Then, the more we talked about it, the more reasons we found to do this.

The obvious hit us right away. For decades, Santa Cruz has been a hotbed of innovation for personal transformation work and world-changing activism, making this a fitting and fecund nexus for this conversation.   “Location, location, location!” we chimed. 

Nicole was also looking for inspiration for a book project called “Personal Futures”, which had been gestating, for too long, on the sidelines of her work.  Then something clicked into place, an “ah-hah” that the café format could be a form of participatory research, a way to frame and understand the questions people were holding.  All of sudden, this café became a pilot conversation for something much bigger, with a full day workshop being the intention for the summer.

Our civic instincts were powerful drivers as well— perhaps the most deeply held of all. At this moment of deep transition and uncertainty, we felt in our bones the importance of getting people to talk about these questions, to be more actively engaged in how to “be the change.”  For it's moments of systemic change, when everything is in flux that individuals can make the most difference in influencing events and the future.   So for a little investment in time and tea, we figured it was well worth doing… and it was.

Why people came—and who showed 
As people gathered around 5:30pm, it was clear that many came out of sheer curiosity, drawn in by these powerful questions and the promise of something a bit different.   Not many people in the room knew each other, a surprise given that many folks were long-time residents, and most had no clue what a World Café was or would be.  As one person said later on, “I had no idea what this would be about, but instead of watching TV, I thought this would be a different kind of entertainment.  And it was! It was best way to spend the evening!”

 Serendipity also played a helpful role.  Many in the room showed up because of Brooking’s excellent networking (often in person at her local café, Asana), and through the help of Daniel Blumberg, an amazing “connector” in the community with deep experience and passion for these questions.  This café wouldn’t have been possible without them.

Our group was diverse for Santa Cruz, and delightfully so.  We had therapists, energy healers and body workers to professionals in sustainability, real estate, financial planning, logistics, and marketing— plus a few people from San Francisco.  Many people came with years of personal and professional experience with this subject matter, and others were in early phases of their own inner explorations.   Beginner minds helped seasoned practitioners and vice versa.

What we did
The introductions, alone, would have met our expectations.  Already a palpable energy was building in the room as everyone realized what an amazing group had been gathered— a buzz that continued well into the evening thanks to abundant quantities of pu-erh tea expertly brewed and served by Noah, a linguistics student at UCSC.  

Once we explained the World Café principles, we spent the next two-and-half hours, at four lively tea tables, intimate and low to the ground, exploring our questions in 30-minute rounds, in the following sequence: 

1. Why is this important? How does “inner work” translate into world-changing action?

2.  What enables this to happen— i.e. the nexus between inner work and changing the world? What key factors need to align for real transformation to happen?

3. What are the barriers?   What gets in the way of inner work translating into world-changing work? And what is the shadow side of all of work?

When the rounds were complete, people shared what was emerging for them.  The key themes included: the importance of having good tools for these transformation processes; creating “containers” or safe spaces for the often painful and frightening explorations that can lead to inner change; creating community and support networks for birthing more whole leaders and supporting their work in healing each other and our planet.  “What if our political leaders had to go through personal rites of passage before taking office,” said one person, “how world-changing would that be!”  Many participants also expressed appreciation (and pleasant surprise) for the organization and structure of the World Café process itself, which was a living example of the kind of “containers” we need in the world.

(click the image to see it full size, or download the pdf)

Lastly, the group also recognized a great power in itself— perhaps the most important insight of all. Many participants were already engaged in great work that the rest of the group was eager to explore and help support, and a “yahoo group” will likely be created to help the participants continue to connect and support each other’s personal and professional journeys. The sense of excitement, shared-interest and connection was so strong afterwards that many of the participants went out for a late dinner, and dancing ensued well into the evening! We were thrilled to see this happen as a result of a three hour World Café process and are planning to host similar events on this subject in other locations later this year.   Once again, we’re reminded that it’s the simplest of things that change the world.

 - - - - - - - - - - - -
The co-hosts: The co-hosts were Brooking Gatewood and Nicole Boyer of Adaptive Edge, a "better futures" organization based in San Francisco.  Brooking lives in Santa Cruz and is a long time environmental activist and is involved locally in dance church, women’s work, and co-operative living. Nicole lives in San Francisco and has spent her career engaged in futures thinking, strategic foresight, and scenario planning work.  As her book project alludes to, she is deeply committed to helping people discover their best “personal future”.  Nicole is also a steward of The World Café, and is working with its founders and foundation on its long-term sustainability.