Don't miss out - Mark your calendar for March 23-29, 2009 now!
By Susan Partnow, co-founder, Conversation Café and Executive Director, Global Citizen Journey
We are beginning to dream and plan for Conversation Week (CW) 2009: these past two years have been a great experience learning about how to develop an exciting way to invite the world to help us identify the burning questions - and they've led us to appreciate how truly transformative the power of our simple conversation café process is.
Now we're inspired and ready to roll out CW in a major way for next year.
There are two ways for you to get involved:
*Join the CW Steering team: We want to expand the leadership for CW beyond the initial founders to invite new ideas. We'll have periodic phone meetings to oversee planning and coordination.
- How can we enhance this initiative?
- What is the best strategy for marketing and outreach?
- What partnerships and related activities are possible?
- Who are potential funders?
- What are ways to learn more from the experience and to make this a truly global conversation?
- How do we enhance the 'harvesting' of the conversations?
- How do move towards embodying the Dalai Lama's call to make this the Century of Dialogue (now that we've survived the 20th Century of Violence).
Your creativity and energy are welcomed!
*Super Host for Multiple City Roll out: We are identifying 3 to 10 key cities to roll out Conversation Week with a big splash next year.
The 'Super Hosts' who step up to co-lead this initiative will dream and work together. We're imagining many possibilities. We can plan special face-to-face host trainings in each city, to help foster a circle of hosts in the community.
We can get the local mayor to declare it Conversation Week. Each city may create a Gala Celebrity Launch or culmination event of some sort - perhaps inviting some locally well known figures to help attract people to a 'super café' event where dozens or even hundreds of participants can have simultaneous conversations, bringing a great energetic charge to the room.
And with this, there will be multiple cafes set up throughout the city for CW (which ideally, will continue beyond). Would you like to bring Conversation Cafés to a bigger level in your community so they will attract lots of people and help more cafes get established?
We are actively fundraising for this initiative and plan to have a modest stipend for the Super Hosts.
And check out the exciting events already scheduled in New York City , the flagship of a national campaign involving six other cities, and a concomitant global activity reaching people in over 100 countries. !
Let us ([email protected]) know if you want to be considered for one of these positions.
