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Quiz question: What’s the connecting thread between such far-flung places as Krakow, Poland, Berlin, Germany, Gujarat, India, Queens, New York, Charlottesville, VA, Qatif, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bend, Oregon, Rockville, Maryland, Parkland, Florida, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
At middle and high schools, public libraries, including one where we have a thriving bilingual (Spanish/English Democracy Cafe/Cafe Democracia, university student centers, a Unitarian church, coffee houses — just some of the venues where the 21 new Socrates Cafe and Democracy Cafe inquiry gatherings have been inaugurated in 2018, filling out even more our directory of hundreds of ongoing groups the world over.
What else connects them? If you listen to some of my exchanges with these committed and thoughtful souls on our popular podcast The Openist, you’ll see that they believe Socrates Cafe and Democracy Cafe are best suited to forge uncommon common ground, to discover and cultivate those kinds of connections and that type of thoughtfulness and understanding that evolves ever more open selves and societies — and ways that more and more make us all feel connected, and even empowered, despite and because of our vastly varying world views and belief systems, as fellow members of the human family.
Never did I imagine when I started the first Socrates Cafe in a cozy coffee house in Montclair, New Jersey in 1996 that this initiative would resonate the world over.
What’s more, things sometimes do truly go full circle, but in ways that turn into an upward and outward expanding spiral.
What can I mean by that?
The story of Democracy Cafe for 2018, the latest in our more than two decades’ worth of chapters, started this time last year, with an email on this date, as thoughtful as it was exciting, from Hadi Al-ShaikNasser, a medical doctor in Saihat, Saudi Arabia. When he was a medical student in the U.S., Hadi had attended the original weekly Socrates Cafe in Montclair, New Jersey, that I inaugurated in the fall of 1996 and still meets to this day. He was so smitten, as he related in an email and then on our podcast The Openist with what he witnessed — by the kind of critical and creative thinking by diverse participants as they explored questions that were as timely as they were timeless — that he vowed to start a Socrates Cafe when he returned home to Saudi Arabia (before that, he even started one in Omaha, Nebraska when he was on fellowship there). After two years, not only is it thriving in Saihat, but it has had a spillover effect — two dynamic and valiant young women, Jenan Abdullah, a student in dentistry in Qatif, Saudi Arabia, and Noor Al-Hajji, who resides in Al-Hassa Saudia Arabia and is a a graduate student in Geoinformation Studies at Arabian Gulf University, have started three more, in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Moreover, they are in the throes of translating our facilitators guide into Arabic (also being translated in Hindi, German and Polish) — and there is such popularity that the book ‘Socrates Cafe’ is being translated into Arabic and has found a home with a publisher there; it will be released later this year.
One burning question of yours might be: So where does founder and executive director Christopher Phillips (yours truly) fit into all this? Does he just sit back and watch all this unfold from afar?
Far from it. Among other things, I was in 2018, and continue to be, in regular communication with all those heading these groups as they have gone through the process of organizing, establishing and maintaining themselves. I give comprehensive facilitators workshops via online video and in person, and am in the throes of developing a webinar to train trainers. I further personally planted seeds through numerous site visits — in schools and libraries throughout the state of California (Mt. Shasta, Visalia, San Francisco, Sacramento, Weed, Dunsmuir; in Huntington, West Virginia, in Harrisburg and Williamsburg, Virginia; San Antonio (for our annual Conversation with the Constitution); Orlando, Ft. Myers (https://www.gulfshorelife.com/Along-the-Gulfshore/February-2018/Join-Us-to-Discuss-Civil-Discourse-in-a-Polarized-Society-March-13/) and Jacksonville, Florida — in which, all told, well over 1,000 diverse people participated. I penned philosophical essays that relate to our work, and also recorded over 50 Democracy Cafe ‘Openist’ podcasts with people of incredibly sundry walks of life and who shed singular light on what it can mean to be an excellent and open human being that ideally mirrors the evolution of a more excellent and open society — guests included organizers of our groups, as well as the diverse supporters of our work, from the extraordinary pro-democracy mover and shaker Eric Liu, to the libertarian Thaddeus Russell to the progressive public intellectual Cornel West, who is an advisory board member along with Harvard’s rabble-rousing anti-corruption advocate Lawrence Lessig, who personally sent out an appeal that included a request for financial support of Democracy Cafe.
For 2019, our high hope is to raise upwards of $5,000 all told to cover our operating expenses and to make at least another 10 site visits — to parts of eastern and western Virginia, to a library in South Dakota and in Montana to iaugurate Democracy Cafes, a return to Florida to hold more Democracy Cafes, another sojourn throughout New England to schools and libraries, and to Los Angeles, where a unique well-being program for patients with life-threatening and terminal illness at a hospital (staff would like me to give a facilitators workshop and inaugurate an ongoing Socrates Cafe), to develop a more comprehensive written guide along with videos for facilitators and participants to help ensure their gatherings thrive over the long haul.
If you or others you know believe in our mission, and share the perspective of all those organizing and taking part in our initiatives — namely, that now is the time to stand up and be counted more than ever, and for each of us to epitomize the kind of open and inclusive, tolerant and even empathic self that we want to see mirrored in society at large in this age of polarization,
please share and go to our Paypal link
at: https://www.paypal.me/DemocracyCafe Even a very modest donation makes a big difference.
It’s time to recognize more keenly than ever that there is no such person as ‘the other’ — there are only other fellow human beings who have richly different and singular stories and stores of wisdom, and it behooves us to create more spaces and places where we not only inquire (rather than argue) and listen to one another with all our being, via a methodical yet open form of exploration, that enables us to forge the kinds of connections to discover a higher ground, together.
Yours truly,
Chris
Christopher Phillips, PhD
Founder/ED, Democracy Cafe |
