By Juanita Brown, David Isaacs and Samantha Tan | World Cafe website
Reprinted with kind permission from "Changing the World Together", Spring/Summer 2008 Kosmos Journal
PO Box 2102
Lenox, MA 01240. Subscriptions
Juanita
Brown and David Isaacs are co-founders of the World Café, an innovative
approach to large group dialogue being used across sectors on six
continents. Their award-winning book, The World Café: Shaping our
Futures Through Conversations that Matter, is a key resource for
fostering conversational leadership across the globe. Samantha Tan, a
dynamic young leader from Singapore, is a former Research Fellow at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is a founding partner of
the Meristem Group which nurtures leadership skills for change agents
who are creating inspired futures in multi-stakeholder environments.
Together for Tomorrow
Exciting multi-generational collaborations are emerging as we continue to explore this rich terrain. One outcome of the Ojai InterGen dialogues at Meditation Mount will be a series of intergenerational programs in Ashland, Oregon that will be aired on-line and distributed globally. Multi-generational Global Cooling Cafes are being organized in other local communities. The 10th anniversary celebration of the Pioneers of Change, with young change makers in 70 countries, will include a focus on ways to ignite greater multi-generational partnering. Planning is also underway for a large-scale multi-generational Global Passageways event, hosted by Joshua Gorman, founder of Generation Waking Up, and Melissa Michael. The Bali Institute for Global Renewal in Indonesia seeks to become a multi-generational center for global healing and inspired activism across traditional divides. The World Café, along with the Art of Hosting and others, is co-evolving a global dialogue movement on six continents—bringing multi-generational and multi-stake-holder voices to bear on critical issues using powerful architectures of engagement that can enable people of all ages and stages of life to foster both collective wisdom and compassionate action for the common good.
In all these efforts, deeply personal life reflections and conversations about societal transformation are intertwining to create new pathways for co-creating positive futures. Samantha Tan, co-author of this article and co-host of several key multi-generational gatherings, discovered through dialogue with elders outside of her family how working through her conflicts with her own father might be of service to the larger movement.
“I realized that neither my father nor I are ‘right,’ that each of us holds different pieces to the puzzle of creating a beautiful sustainable shared future,” she said. “The challenge then, is to make space for each other, to be loving and patient with each other, and to be in conversations with each other about questions that matter to both of us and our generations. Will it be easy? Not always. Is it worth it? Yes. And perhaps it’s the most powerful and promising way toward the future that we all want.”
Please be in touch with the authors at [email protected] to be a part of future multi-generational activities or have ones of your own to share.
Welcome to Multi-Gen!