A Message from Juanita Brown and David Isaacs
The World Cafe Community Foundation will be receiving a very welcome contribution of $25,000 dollars in the new year, which can be leveraged most fully if it can be matched by contributions from the global World Cafe community.
These funds will be used to support:
- A younger leader to serve as a “World Cafe Fellow,” helping develop an emerging initiative on multi-generational collaboration and other pioneering projects.
- Development and implementation of a longer term resourcing model for the World Cafe to help ensure the continued existence and vibrancy of the platforms through which the World Cafe principles, process, and stories have been made freely available over the last 15 years.
- Continued evolution and enrichment of our virtual and on-line presence and the many opportunities for learning and connection they provide.
Your financial contribution, large or small, makes a huge difference.
If you have benefited from the gift of the World Cafe in your own life and work, we encourage you now to support its future by joining today with others around the world in making a generous contribution. You will be acting in the spirit which has shaped the life of the World Cafe since it's inception - as we briefly explain below - and will help ensure that the next generation of leaders and innovators can carry it powerfully into the future.
You can contribute easily on-line via PayPal, or mail your tax deductible donation to:
PO Box 67, Tomales, CA 94971
The Larger Resourcing Context
Here is a bit of the larger resourcing context within which we are making this request:
As many of you know, the World Café came into being in 1995 as a “gift.” It arrived in our living room unexpectedly during a strategic dialogue we were hosting among intellectual capital pioneers. David and I knew intuitively that, as our Danish colleague, the late Finn Voldtofte said, it was meant to be of “world service” during this time of critical challenge to our common future.
We and our colleagues decided to enable this gift to travel freely. We did not create a traditional business platform with expensive materials, licensing fees, professional certification requirements, or formal representatives with control over its distribution. Instead, we created the World Café Community Foundation, a US non-profit 501c3 organization to nurture this work as an experiment in the "gift economy".
Over time, the World Cafe has become an increasingly important practice field in social innovation, enabling us to learn more about the creation of a culture of reciprocity, giving, receiving, conviviality, friendship and new forms of exchange that enable the gift of the World Café to remain a gift—freely accessible to all.
Our experiment is succeeding beyond our wildest imaginations. The World Café has now traveled to the far reaches of our planet, reaching hundreds of thousands of people on six continents and engaging multi-sector, multi-generational, and multi-cultural “conversations that matter” on critical issues around the globe. In addition, the World Café book has now been translated into 10 languages and it’s coming out soon in mainland China!!The Resourcing Approach
To help nurture and sustain the minimum infrastructure and coordination needed to support this burgeoning global dialogue movement, we developed a creative "tithing" approach to resourcing the World Café.
On key consulting projects that we managed, we contributed 10% of our team's overall professional fees to the World Cafe Community Foundation. This tithing approach was coupled with periodic financial contributions from individuals and foundations along with many other friends and colleagues' generous contributions of volunteer time and talent. This approach has enabled the World Cafe Community Foundation to keep the work going and our community growing in amazing and unexpected ways.
Now a broader circle of new leaders are stepping forward to co-create the World Café in a true embodiment of multi-generational collaboration as David and I step into our elder years.
The World Café Needs Your Help!As we enter the next stage in our lives, David and I are no longer managing the large projects that formed the basis for the success of our earlier resourcing model. As we approach the 15th anniversary of the World Cafe, the future of the World Cafe rests with the support and engagement of a much larger global World Cafe community. In order to assure the ongoing integrity, vitality, and evolution of the World Cafe, our resourcing model will need to become more diverse and depend on a larger circle of contributions of time, talent, and treasure.
Your donation in these next weeks, large or small, will help keep the gift traveling and support the co-evolution of this work. You can contribute online via paypal - and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or would like additional information on how you can help.
We are deeply grateful for the incredible love, caring, commitment, and competence that so many of you are offering—both to the World Café and to the communities and organizations you are part of. We wish you all the very best in this holiday season. May Peace on Earth become the blessing of our time.Juanita Brown and David Isaacs
Co-Founders, The World Café
Board Members, the World Cafe Community Foundation
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