For Hosts

Basic resources for hosts

Note: New resources now available for hosting online Cafes during our current Pandemic!

Whether you are just starting out, or are a seasoned café host, these resources are for you!

  • Use the Quick How-To Guide to get started right away. It provides a short summary of the process.
  • Be sure to print out some of the much-loved Conversation Café wallet cards so each of your participants can have the process and agreements right in front of them.
  • And download the snazzy infographic-style Mini-Guide or just the Café agreements if you’re hosting online Cafés.
  • The underlying principles upon which Conversation Cafés are based are described in Core Principles for Conversation Cafés. It’s a good idea to review this prior to hosting a café.
  • When you are ready to delve into the process more deeply, the Complete Hosting Manual will come in handy!
  • You can even participate in Vicki Robin and Susan Partnow’s original How to Host a Conversation Café video training.
  • Tips on selecting a place for to host your Conversation Café are provided in Location, Location.
  • Promotion tips from long-time hosts can be found in Promoting Your Café.
  • Find a treasure trove of other materials to help you host a café, including everything from posters and flyers, tools for using Conversation Café with youth, question banks and topic ideas, and more. Some materials are available in Spanish, Hebrew and Japanese.

Participate in the Conversation Café announcement list and listserve:

We’ve created a one-way announcement list to share news about Conversation Café happenings once in a while (no more than monthly). We encourage all of you to subscribe to that list if you have some interest in CC’s by sending a blank email to conversation-cafe-subscribe-request@lists.ncdd.org.

If you’re a Conversation Cafe host or promoter (or want to be), also consider joining the new Cafe-Community listserve – a discussion list we’ve modeled after the NCDD Discussion list to encourage CC leaders to network, share information, and discuss key issues facing the CC community. To join that list, send a blank email to cafe-community-subscribe-request@lists.ncdd.org.

Join Conversation Café on social media:

Follow the CC Twitter stream: @ConvoCafe (www.twitter.com/ConvoCafe)

Participate in the CC Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/ConversationCafes/

Tell us about your Conversation Café experience!

We strongly encourage any of you who have hosted CCs to take a minute and complete the quick form at www.conversationcafe.org/main-survey to tell us a little about your work and interests. Our main interest right now is to learn about what is currently (and has been) going on in the Conversation Café community, and this would help us a great deal!


 

RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON DIALOGUE:

A list of some excellent books can be found on the Richmond Action Dialogues website.  The Resource Center of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation website also shares hundreds of resources designed to help dialogue facilitators.