Interested in becoming a facilitator? Info. Sessions for the spring 2022 team are happening NOW — PSU students register HERE! GLOBAL PARTNERS We've spent nine years meeting allies in this work—people throughout the world who are eager to learn more about and experience the power and potential of facilitated dialogue. And we've spent nine years studying the best ways to prepare and train our facilitators for these exchanges— dialogues with peers speaking different languages, across different time zones, and with extremely different headlines hanging over our understandings of each other. In short, we've learned that simple facilitator tools and dedicated partnerships are key ingredients to cross-cultural global dialogues that do more than reinforce habitual narratives. With these dedicated partnerships, we've opened the doorway to the future of public diplomacy. Our partners and facilitators help challenge the basic notion that one person could ever represent their entire country or culture. It’s recently become clear that our most committed partners at international sites can team up with our facilitators to co-facilitate across borders. Our longest standing partnership is with our colleagues in Afghanistan. Over the past six years, we have seen five Afghan partners deepen their understanding of facilitation and take on a variety of roles required to support these exchanges. In the spring of 2019, a small number of university students in Iraq were selected to participate in facilitator training. By the end of the semester, four were ready to try their hand at co-facilitating. And since partnering with individuals in Colombia in 2018, two facilitators have emerged as important presences on "the other side." Fall of 2020 brings our first team of students from international sites participating fully in our Foundational Theory and Practice in Small Group Facilitation. The Global partners are responsible for bringing in local University students to participate in the global programming. Each location (Colombia, Afghanistan, and Iraq) has a team of people at each University site that helps maintain the global programming. MISSION To host groups that allow people to “think together” across borders VISION To make visible the crucial role of small group facilitators in every sphere where people conflict and collaborate METHOD Small group facilitators manage information, communication and interaction patterns between people so that they can explicitly and meaningfully “think together” on the basis of their different social positions. DONATE LOG IN © World in Conversation — 2021