What is civil discourse?
Conversation to enhance understanding.
Four words, easy to remember, but much more difficult to put into action. Here’s a brief review of how our programs approach civil discourse.
Inward Capacity Building
The Context of Civil Discourse
We begin by exploring the context of civil discourse from three perspectives:
I. As part of but different than civility, a much more complex and subjective term.
II. Within the context of other political engagement: it is one tool among many acceptable, peaceful tools for engagement.
III. From our own context of identity and experience: our identities and experiences impact how we connect to and feel about a topic, and the particularities of who is in conversation can impact how we are heard and how we hear others.
Tenets and Permissions
While the training explores a larger set of tenets, they can be distilled to two key habits: curiosity and humility with conviction.
But while we strive to uphold these tenets, often in an uncontrolled environment, we also need to remember several key permissions, explored in the training, to help preserve ourselves and our relationships.
Outward Engagement
Values
Anchoring our conversations in values helps us to:
Rehumanize one another
Provide another way to see what we have in common (while not ignoring our differences)
Preserve the creative space for disagreement
Identify shared hopes
Unlock working together across differences
Complexities of Policy
Determining the right way forward for public policy is a messy process in development and outcome, because solutions may not have equal impact across different groups or issues, and sometimes the best of intentions lead to unintended consequences.
Difference, Anxiety, & Love
To protect ourselves and our loved ones, it is human nature to simplify, but this can be counter productive. As civil discourse encourages us to live into the complexities of ourselves, each other, and our world, how do we operationalize what we have learned?