Last week we got tips from Everyday
Democracy program director Carolyne
Miller Abdullah
on how to get people talking in ways that lead them to take action.
Today Carolyne tells us a bit more about how Everyday Democracy
(formerly known as the Study Circles Resource Center) got its start.

How did Everyday Democracy develop the dialogue circle as a tool?

It
was the brainchild of Paul J. Aicher, whose vision of respectful,
inclusive, productive citizen dialogue as a regular practice of democracy
led him to create Everyday Democracy as the Study Circles Resource
Center in 1989. Aicher, who died in 2002, left the legacy of a powerful
vision for a democracy that is alive with the participation and voice
of all its people.

Mr. Aicher was a businessman and
philanthropist who played a leading role in advancing the idea and
practice of civic dialogue on critical social issues in the United
States. Throughout his business career, Aicher was involved in
community work that would later lead him to become a full-time
philanthropist and national civic leader.

In 1982, Mr. Aicher
sold his business and established the Topsfield Foundation, Inc., based
in Pomfret, Connecticut, to enhance civic engagement and improve the
quality of public life in the United States. After Aicher’s death, the
Board of Trustees changed the name of the Topsfield Foundation, Inc. to
The Paul J. Aicher Foundation.

By the late 1980s, Aicher found
himself increasingly eager to advance grass-roots dialogue as the best
way to address pressing public issues. Yet he wanted to avoid shouting
matches, such as those he’d seen in the peace movement, where hawks and
doves alternately talked past and demonized one another — or where
activists within a movement simply didn’t reach beyond their core
supporters at all. Aicher was eager to foster a new wave of
deliberative democracy, a way through which people from all walks of
life could meet and have a voice in their communities’ futures.

Aicher
found his inspiration for the organization in part from the late 19th
century Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle in New York, which
provided adult education through small-group discussion. At its peak,
the U.S. Chautauqua movement included more than 15,000 “home study
circles” meeting on social, economic, and political issues.

The
American study circle movement gradually faded, but not before it had
taken root elsewhere. Twice, Aicher went to Sweden to learn about the
Swedish program. About the same time, Aicher became aware of the work
of Leonard P. Oliver of the Kettering Foundation in Ohio, who had
written a book called Study Circles: Coming Together for Personal
Growth and Social Change.

Aicher turned Topsfield’s focus
toward the study circle idea. SCRC began by developing small-group
discussion guides to issues of current concern: welfare reform, the
death penalty, homelessness, and — in 1991, when the United States was
moving toward war with Iraq — Crisis in the Gulf. Everyday Democracy
has evolved over time by adapting Aicher’s original vision to meet the
needs of communities to link everyday voices to community change.

What makes the dialogue circles particularly effective in getting people to talk to each other?

Many leaders and citizens are drawn to community-wide
dialogue-to-change programs because they provide what is usually missing
in community life – a process for meaningful, face-to-face
give-and-take between people from different backgrounds and views. The
community-wide scope of dialogue-to-change programs and the ways they
link dialogue to change help ensure that many people from across a
community will come to the table, and that their participation will
make a difference.

These initiatives can make a unique
contribution to strengthening the community and solving public
problems, but they are not “the only game in town.” Effective programs
value and build on existing community work and resources. They help to
multiply and strengthen other community-building efforts. Many
communities are finding ways to connect their programs to other civic
processes such as strategic planning, visioning, service learning, and
shared governance.

What does it take for an organization to start using the dialogue-to-change method?

Identifying
a problem that lots of people from different parts of the community
want to solve, a commitment to hearing diverse perspectives, and energy
and resources to organize an initiative that provides a process for
people to have productive conversations and to link ideas to doable
action and sustained community change.