Conversation Café

How We Built the Conversation Café Initiative
in Seattle

A HISTORY by Vicki Robin

The Cafés arose from the questions, "How can we create a culture of conversation? What is the minimum set of conditions that will allow strangers in public places shift from 'small talk to BIG TALK?'" We believed that conversation is an antidote to loneliness and social isolation, that it's democracy in action and that it could counteract the dumbing down of America.

In July 2001, Susan Partnow, Habib Rose and I each began hosting weekly conversations in cafés to experiment with variations of this theme. Over the summer we developed the basic process and agreements and some of the outreach strategies that form the backbone of the Conversation Cafés. Flushed with our small success, Susan and I and two other inveterate conversationalists met on September 10 to wonder together how we might expand our experiment citywide - nay! nationwide. We even came up with an imaginative plan that we thought we'd do… someday. Then September 11 hit, and within a week I was grabbed with the passion to spread the Cafés throughout Seattle as a way to process this event and respond thoughtfully as citizens. Susan, I and several others became the core team.

Make it a Meme
Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' to mean a cultural gene - a bit of information that self-replicates through a culture. A whole field of viral marketing has arisen from this idea - an effort to create ideas that spread through word of mouth with little input from the originator. We sought to make Conversation Cafés memetic so we designed them to be fun, simple, clear and inviting.

Trick or Treat
The "look and feel" - tone, visuals, language - invoked a "trick or treat" feel - a combination of risky yet safe. Talking to strangers is certainly risky - Conversation Cafés make that safe. The taboos against talking with folks you don't know are major - they might hurt you, reject you, ridicule you or follow you home. At Conversation Cafés you are safe because there's a host who will be friendly, manage the weirdos, keep things going. You don't have to speak, but you'll get a turn to speak. And our promise to everyone: "No committees will be formed." You will not end up with a "to-do" list or further commitments. Many interesting people can't afford one more thing to do - but they would love a weekly conversational oasis.

Mottos and Sound Bites
We have lots of mottos; they communicate the "high play," somewhat hip feeling of the Cafés - that the conversations are both serious and fun. Some are:

• More 'Seattle' than coffee
• We are the talk show!
• Mama was wrong - talk to strangers!
• Tired of small talk, try some big talk
• Conversation - soul food for hungry minds
• Think globally - talk locally

Make it an Event!
A 'culture of conversation' is a vague, slow ooze. How to have Conversation Cafés arrive with a splash so they will attract lots of people? We decided in dreary Seattle to create a mid-winter festival of conversation called Conversation Week with a Gala Celebrity Launch event and at least 2 Cafés a day throughout the city. In the summer we have a food "Bite of Seattle" - in the winter we now have a taste of conversation - soul food for hungry minds, remember? Building toward this event required putting together all the elements with an intensity that made people take notice.

Hosts
If people are going to sit down at a table with strangers, there has to be a seed person, someone who is warm, welcoming, and gets the ball rolling. Hosts don't have to have facilitation skills - they just have to run the process, watch for drift outside the agreements and end on time. A Conversation Café is like a dinner party where the host just wants the guests to all enjoy themselves.

We had 4 host trainings, inviting friends and professionals to be trained in the simple technique. We invited other dialogue, communication, facilitation and mediation groups to cosponsor the event, offering them free publicity through our website if they would do outreach to their members and provide 2 hosts. We reached out to organizational development people and local coaches, suggesting that this would be a way to use their skills to be of service in the community - as well as give them some visibility (though we asked they not market themselves at the Cafés).

Once trained, the hosts were invited to become part of the Host Learning Circle, a rich community of practice that meets about once a month to deepen our capacity to host, to build the initiative, to eat good food and have fun conversations. We also have a listserve where hosts can raise their questions and concerns about happenings at their Cafés, as well as celebrate their successes and track the conversational themes that are alive in the whole community.

The Team
In addition to the prime movers and the early group of hosts, we hired a part time person to do outreach to sign up cafés, assign hosts to cafés, do logistics for the Launch Event and basically keep all the details running smoothly. She put in about 200 hours over 3 months, and through her own networks found a skilled volunteer to do publicity.

The Cafés
Holding Conversation Cafés in cafés, libraries and bookstores solves several problems most groups have. If you meet in a home, you don't tend to welcome drop ins and the group can get stale and predictable. If you meet in a public room, you often have a room cost which means that someone needs to pay - and you never know if the room will be too big or too small. If you serve food, you fuss over set up and clean up. Cafés are designed to be public places. A large group can just spread out to more tables. The café serves food and cleans up as part of its design - indeed, participants in the conversation, from the café owner's perspective, are customers. Café owners also get free publicity through every flyer we distribute and through the website. Some café owners have taken this advantage to heart and identify their establishment as a Conversation Café site - one has even created a special dinner for the group that meets there, attracting up to 30 people at a whack.

We created a sales packet for the cafés, pointing out these advantages and made personal connection with each café owner.

Website
With a cartoonist on board to create a logo and a web designer who took on the challenge of designing the site - both as volunteers - we were able to create a really fun, informative and empowering web presence (www.conversationcafe.org) within 2 months of committing to spreading the Conversation Cafés.

• We put up a personal essay that gave the feel of what the Cafés are like.
• We wrote many short essays that communicated the personality of the Conversation Café initiative
• We wrote a Host Manual that gave everything anyone needed to know to get a Café going.
• We designed documents in Word as signage for tables and for the café window that anyone can download and adapt to their Café.
• We included many quotations about conversation.
• We used a web-based calendar, www.localendar.com, to list all the Cafés.
• We listed all of our cosponsors.
• We had a rich links page to other conversation initiatives.
• We partnered with several similar initiatives nationwide - the World Café, the Commons Café and the Public Conversations Project - that all had January 2002 events around the theme of 911. We listed the underlying principles of all these initiatives under "The Café Collaborative."

It was one-stop shopping for the Conversation Café meme!

Hotline
We got an inexpensive voice messaging service so that people without web access (or who were holding old flyers) could reach a voice recording about the current Cafés.

If You Build It-- and Publicize It--They will Come
True to our populist intent - and our low budget - we worked out inexpensive ways to get the word out widely

The Media
We got listed on the Events Calendars of all the major and neighborhood papers. We used my prior media connections and minor fame (from Your Money or Your Life ) to get radio and newspaper interviews. Eventually we got stories in several neighborhood papers, in The Seattle Times, The New York Times, the Utne Reader as well as a radio interview on Talk of the Nation and a television story on the local NBC affiliate. We made a mini-documentary which was aired several times.

Celebrities
Face it - fame counts in America. We got local celebrities to agree to participate in at least one Conversation Café during Conversation Week, and listed them prominently on all our flyers. They were clear that they were participating as citizens, not as 'experts' - a nice holiday for a famous person. Attendees had the intriguing promise that they would sit down with a mystery celebrity in peer conversation.

Our team, using prior connections, was able to get almost the whole City Council, several beloved religious leaders, some media personalities and some civic leaders to agree to participate. Again, it was a low commitment way for them to serve the community. For the launch event, we got a local author, a local talk show host, a City Councilperson and myself to share the stage in dialogue about "The Power of Conversation to Change the World." We kept our comments as short as possible so that participants spent most of the time in mini-Conversation Café circles.

Creating Buzz Through eMails
We asked all hosts, celebrities and cosponsors to send out emails to their local lists about Conversation Week. Every community has a few 'nodes' - people who maintain extensive email lists and like to send on significant news. And just about everyone has a brief list of friends they can pass things on to. If the email has a link to a website the recipient can evaluate for him or herself, then it's more likely to spread. If the message is short, it's more likely to spread. I wrote an engaging, brief invitation to the event that people could forward with little effort. I kept invitations coming every couple of weeks so that as many people as possible would receive them from multiple sources. Eventually this gives the feeling that whatever the event is, it's the 'happening thing.' In addition, I kept the growing list of hosts and cosponsors informed through emails about small victories in building toward Conversation Week. As they felt increasingly part of something good, important and positive, they became more and more willing to spread the word.

Posters
In addition to putting posters as Word documents on the web, we engaged a postering service ($.60 per poster) to slather Seattle with posters. As with most marketing, it is repeated exposures that allow people to recognize something as real.

Topics
Obviously, 911 was a natural - people needed to talk about the event and the aftermath to understand how their lives - and life in America - were changing. We have since done other community events and find that posing three questions works well - one for the head, one for the heart and one for the need to act. While Conversation Cafés are distinctly not places for groups to organize for action, they are places where anyone can consider, among other intelligent and heartful people, what actions might be worth taking. The questions should be carefully designed to elicit inquiry rather than opinion.

Since Conversation Week we have found that the Cafés are serving primarily as places where people of diverse views can reflect philosophically, politically and personally with others on the times we are living through - they are places to make meaning with other thoughtful citizens.

I hope these few thoughts are helpful to initiators and would-be hosts in any city in the world interested in developing a new culture of conversation. If you want more information, please feel free to contact CC Central.

Blessings to all of you,

Vicki Robin