What your group needs of you:   Attend consistently Create and abide by ground rules Share your personal experiences Listen with an open mind to others Analyze and reflect on what you hear Commit to the dialogue and the group Invest yourself.

 For any number of reasons, you’ve joined a Sustained Dialogue group. Maybe you are bothered by division and tension in your school community. Students might self-segregate on your campus according to race or ethnicity, or maybe your community is reeling in the aftermath of a hate crime or a public display of bigotry. It might be that students on your campus are talking heatedly about a race problem – and you don’t see what they’re so upset about. Maybe a friend involved in SD has been asking you to come along to his or her dialogue meeting, to see what SD is all about.

 

Regardless of what brings you to Sustained Dialogue, we are excited that you have joined an SD group. You’re adding another perspective, another set of experiences, another person’s energy, another voice to this social movement. You’ve decided that something needs to happen…and you’re ready to take a risk, to step up, to believe, to make a difference, to take the lead, to start from the beginning, to open up, to talk it out, to listen, to take action.

 

 

 

Signing up to participate in SD is different from taking part in other extracurricular activities. In your SD group, you will talk about your campus community, and you will likely think about “social problems”. Chances are you will disagree with an opinion that someone voices, and you will probably be moved by a story someone tells. You might find yourself cracking up over dinner with your group, or maybe you and your fellow participants will attend a dance show, poetry reading, or baseball game of someone in your dialogue group. SD isn’t student government, debate team, or a social club. It’s different from “community service”, and it should never feel like class.

 

Participating can be a lot of fun – and a lot of work. It can be inspiring, infuriating, upsetting, and hilarious – all in the same day. We ask that you commit to your SD group for a year of dialogues every other week and intermittent social gatherings, and we look forward to seeing what comes of it.

 

 

Your dialogue will be organized by 2 trained moderators. We encourage you to turn to your moderators whenever you need to – if you are looking to find out more about SDCN, or you are frustrated by SD, or you are struggling with something that happened in a dialogue. Moderators step into the moderator role in order to serve as a resource to you and to others, and are eager to help you improve campus community.

You should expect your moderators to maintain neutrality in personal and contentious dialogues. Moderator neutrality may frustrate you; participants commit to sharing personal stories and beliefs, so why shouldn’t the moderator? Remember that this neutrality helps the moderators fulfill his or her responsibility to diffuse tense dialogues and to ensure that dialogue remains productive.