World Cafe Community

Anne's Blessing

Everyone may not share her spiritual perspective but those who know Anne Dosher know why we at the World Café Community Foundation feel so blessed to have her hold the role of "Elder" and "Guardian of the Soul of the World Café", along with her more prosaic roles as a Community Foundation board member. Her wise council over many years now and her 80+ years have earned her the title of Elder, and it is her deep understanding of life's mystery and our true relationship with all things that make her a Guardian.

We asked Anne to share some personal words of blessing for this last day of Harvest Fund Drive, and here they are:

"For me, I have been privileged for fifteen years to be asked to be Elder and Guardian of Soul of The World Café and I have called for silence and spoken the blessing at the
beginning of meetings. Every day I call on the Great Spirit who moves in and around all things to be with us. All those who have found this work are blessed. Thank you for
joining us and supporting the work.
Blessings aye, Anne
Elder and Guardian of Soul"

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On this last day of our first ever Fund Drive, I hope you too are inspired to contribute to our goal of raising $25,000.00 by the end of today, November 4, 2011.

Thank you to all of you who have already joined us in making this Harvest Fund Drive a great success. Please make your valuable contribution to the World Café Community Foundation now, and help us bring home this Fund Drive successfully at this critical time for the World Café.

You'll be helping to catalyze the most critical conversations of our time.

 

It Takes a Village to Raise a Village

Please contribute! We need your help now to keep the gift moving

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. 

"Groups" in TWC Online Community

One of the most wonderful opportunities in the new World Cafe online community space is the capacity we have to gather together in Groups and explore the precise elements of the World Cafe that we're passionate about and/or connect with others in your geographic location. It's not surprising that an international network like ours with so much to talk about have really maximized this opportunity.

After two months of being "live", there are already 23 groups, in 6 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Indonesian. I will tell you a little about just two or three of them here, but I can't possibly do justice to the many dynamic groups that have formed and I invite you to explore them for yourself. If you don't find the group you are looking for, talk to me about how to host it yourself.

One of the very first groups to form in this community was Cafe Latino, hosted by Maria de los Angeles as a place to welcome the very special people who host World Cafes in Latin America. All in Spanish, it's extremely active, seeming almost to overflow with the exuberance and warmth of those who have often been described as the "heart" of the World Cafe.

Another group started more recently by Christine Whitney Sanchez is on Methods for Strategic Collaboration. The conversation here is focused and stimulating, going to the heart of what's core to the work we do, no matter what form we use.

For those of us fascinated by graphic recording, there is the vibrant Art of Harvesting group, where a "knowing" beyond words is nevertheless conveyed through conversations about deep listening and reflection.

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If you have not yet joined us in the new online community, we invite you to do it now! Go to www.theworldcafecommunity.org and sign up today.

An Invitation to Stewardship

In the process of our ongoing exploration of the unique contribution of the World Café and the World Café Community Foundation during these times of challenge and transformation, several things are becoming clearer to us. Perhaps most importantly, we've reaffirmed our deep and enduring commitment to ensuring that the core ideas, principles, and process of the World Café remain freely available to all.

In recommitting to the "open source" approach and grass-roots perspective that has led the World Café into the vibrant, dynamic global force that it is today, we are also reaffirming our faith in the global community of World Café friends and practitioners to serve as stewards for its ongoing development and evolution in increasingly diverse, creative, and powerful ways.

One expression of this is our recent decision to stop singling out specific individuals as "regional stewards" on the website. Instead, we encourage all friends and practitioners to think of themselves as active stewards of the World Café.

We invite each of you who cares about the World Café to step forward to help nurture the areas and activities you feel passionately about -- to serve as an "attractor" and resource for others who may want to join in hosting conversations that matter.

For some, this may be holding World Café events in your town or city, hosting conversations about the questions that matter most locally. It may mean mentoring new World Café hosts, telling people you meet about the transformative power of conversation, or actively sharing innovative practices in the online community forum.

For many, it will mean supporting the the World Café Community Foundation by "tithing" 10% or more when you are earning money from the World Café (as a growing number of practitioners are starting to do), as well as sharing your stories so others can learn from them, and perhaps most importantly, it means listening to the spirit of the World Café and working in ways true to her (we're pretty sure it's a "her") principles.

Stepping up to World Café stewardship will look different to different people. What might stewardship mean to you?

We're very excited about this change, and in the next month or two will be moving to a new online community platform that will give us a better way to steward this network together. We'll share more about the new platform in the next month or two, but rest assured it will be much simpler to use and have the features we need to stay in touch and grow together.

Interview with Nancy Margulies

World Cafe host (and so much more) Nancy Margulies, interviewed by Nicole Anne Boyer:

NAB: When and how did you first become involved in TWC?

NM:  About the time Juanita and David were figuring this out, they came out to Sundance where Margaret Wheatly was doing a workshop.  I was up there working with her, doing workshops on chaos, complexity, and self-organization. She had just written her foundational book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. 

When I heard Juanita describe the World Café as a process and a way of understanding the power of conversation, I immediately said “I want to work with you and support you in any way I can” because we had been talking about this “other way of being together”, of being part of a healthy living system, but didn’t have a a specific way to practice it— it was all theoretical. To me Open Space and the World Café were good examples of what Margaret’s theory suggests.

Juanita and I put a poster together, and I started to illustrate and host cafés myself and developed my own variations, like the “Passion Cafes” – think of Open Space meeting TWC where people define their topics and the café tables are organized around those topics. And then the Climate Change café started.  I also used TWC in New Orleans to help the recovery process, and then to help people around the country consider what we can learn from what occurred in New Orleans. 

New Horizons for World Café Resourcing

As the seasons shift we’re all experiencing the cycles of change and transition, and the winds of change are stirring within the World Café as well. While change can surface questions and unknowns, it can also open up opportunities for potential and possibility.

Given our exponential growth and other changes over the last year or two, the World Café Community Foundation has been focused on creating a healthy “resourcing eco-system” to financially sustain its work of supporting the global World Café as we continue to grow and evolve.

In the World Café tradition of evolving through friendship, our need for support in this area was met by two wonderful friends of the World Café who have stepped forward to help: Erica Peng and Nicole-Anne (“Nicole”) Boyer.

These two young women bring the joy and energy of inter-generational collaboration to the WCCF resourcing team, along with inspired new ideas and the wisdom of their extensive experience in a variety of key areas.

Erica met Tom and Juanita at the Shambhala Leadership Institute this past June, and right away they knew she would bring a great contribution to this work. Erica’s gifts to us are already apparent though her passion for deepening human connection and conversation, her talents in using the power of film to tell compelling stories, her can-do attitude and willingness to pitch in and lend a hand to what is most needed.

Nicole came to us through long-time World Café friend Napier Collyns, co-founder of GBN Global Business Network. As a GBN alumnae, Nicole is a foresight specialist and facilitator with a mission to catalyze “better futures” through dialogue. Nine years ago she fell in love with the World Café and has been using it ever since. After relocating to San Francisco from Paris, France, she felt it was time to give back to this community what she has gained in her practice. Nicole has a deep understanding of this kind of systemic and strategic undertaking and her experience is particularly appreciated as we approach foundations and individual donors with invitations to become resourcing partners.

Over the next few months the World Café Community Foundation resourcing team will be inviting you too to participate, and we’ll be sharing what’s happening in the resourcing process as it evolves. Current plans include an enhanced website, a series of short videos and other web 2.0 invitations for the general public, as well as addressing Foundations, key individuals and the World Café network as a whole.

We will be exploring ways to engage your thinking and participation in this important project and your ideas are very welcome. If you have initial thoughts to share, please contact Tom Hurley or Amy Lenzo.

Stay tuned for more!

      

Interview with Carlos Mota

In the first of a monthly series highlighting stewardship of the World Café network, steward Nicole Anne Boyer from the resourcing team interviewed Latin American regional and global steward of the World Café, Carlos Mota, who lives in Mexico City. Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

NAB: What does being a steward mean to you personally?
CM: First of all, being a Steward is a tremendous privilege and responsibility, because it’s of course a voluntary position where you are trying to look for the best of all worlds for this practice of dialogue. It’s like being an ambassador, to create the conditions for it to grow and expand and be embraced by many people in different parts of the world. It’s a thrill, actually. But this brings with it a strong sense of commitment to make sure the spirit of TWC is intact, that we are loyal and faithful to the intention of creating a web of conversations, that we prevent TWC from becoming a fad—a tool to be used for any purpose, and to avoid the temptation of using TWC just for sparking the same kind the results that created the problems we see in the world today. So being a Steward is a two-way function: first, to expand its potential; second, to be cautious and careful and to have very clear what TWC is not for. It’s important to be clear on its purpose, and what we don’t want to create because it’s so easy at this time to find another “flavor of the month”. TWC is a very popular tool partly because there is a tremendous sense of anxiety and dependence on tools, techniques and formulae to solve problems, and that is not necessarily what we want for the future.

Read on for Nicole's whole interview with this wonderful friend and exlemplary steward of the World Café ...