I was in the Twin Cities recently on book tour, and was invited by a very well-funded nonprofit that specializes in a captivating approach to spirituality and existential matters — including a wildly popular public radio program — to meet with several staffers.
Anyway, I thought that maybe, just maybe, they realized that though I approach such matters from a somewhat different angle via ‘Socratizing’, they recognized that we are nonetheless very much kindred spirits, and that they likely wanted to have me on the program and talk about mutual matters of the heart and mind.
But what they really wanted to know is: how can they replicate successfully with their own public dialogue initiatives what I have been able to do year in and year out?
This is by no means the first time has happened to me (hell, I even once was invited by a national group on dialogue on deliberation not to speak about my work — but to give them suggestions about how they could garner publicity for their work; as if I had some sort of magic wand). Heck, this is not even the first time this has happened of late.
Just a couple weeks earlier, a program officer I esteem tremendously who is with a nonprofit in a tony area of New York that has hundreds of millions in funding contacted me for the very same reason – how can they match what I do with their own attempts at dialogue in the public sphere. Here again, they were doing some public dialogue outreach, with very mixed results, and wanted to know how in the world it is that I have hundreds of groups around the world — with many of our groups, Socrates Cafe in particular, in existence for well over a decade — in communities of all sorts, and motley participants of all ages, in all sorts of venues (cafes, senior centers, plazas, churches, homeless shelters, you name it), yet in my case with a budget of less than $3,000 (yes, you read that right).
These good people weren’t interested in the Socrates Cafe initiatives per se — only in how they could replicate with their own initiatives the success I’ve managed to achieve.
What these two thriving nonprofit corporations had in common with the dialogue initiatives they were trying to spearhead — and that I gently made clear to them both — was that their initiatives were generated from the top down; and though well meaning and of value, they were too canned and constricted and controlling, hence making it very challenging to get ‘buy in’ from a wider circle than their already-existing followers and acolytes.
What differentiates our hundreds of Socrates Cafes around the globe is that they are grassroots generated and initiated. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Even the very first Socrates Cafe I started in the fall of 1996 in Montclair, New Jersey — and which has continued to meet each and every week after all these many years, even though I lived there for just one intensive calendar year — continues to this day because those who take part feel so invested in it.
Anyone who cares to can take a stab at facilitating. The questions philosophically explored are pitched by the participants themselves and chosen democratically. A person in the community organizes it, finds a place a space (and often has to go to the lengths of finding a new meeting space when the existing one closes). It is their group. Many over the years have of course invited me to inaugurate their gathering and give at least a formal workshop on what the ‘Socrates Cafe method’ is all about, so they can be sure to get it right. And those groups tend to last and last (what is so beautiful in particular is how many Socrates Cafes are mainstays at public libraries, one of our greatest bastions of democratic inclusiveness — no accident, since that is also the heart and soul of Socrates Cafe, making us kindred in every respect.)
Best of all, participants come with an air of anticipation, because they have no idea beforehand what question they will choose to methodically explore. They don’t want to know. The other gazillion-dollar funded groups with dialogue initiatives take the opposite approach it seems, and tell people what to talk about, alas — as if people can’t figure it out for themselves, and even come up with far better questions. Children are particularly adept at this)
Unlike most nonprofit dialogue initiatives, I had no grandiose plans. At the outset, my one and only goal was … to establish one single group, in Montclair. That was it. But what I did touched a chord with people, including the media. And so when a feature was aired on Public Radio International way back when, and then another appeared in the New York Times, it just soared in a way I never imagined, and I began traveling the world over (going deeply in debt in the process) to help establish groups anywhere and everywhere people were committed to make ongoing over the long term.
Though I did use a Nolo press book to gain nonprofit status about a year and a half after I started Socrates Cafe (just in case funding ever did miraculously come my way), I never planned to start any sort of traditional nonprofit, never planned to ‘institutionalize’ our initiatives in any traditional sense.
My goal, my one and only goal, was to revolutionize the way that very diverse and motley people engage with one another and explore questions, to revolutionize the way they encounter one another, to go many steps further than civil conversation, and to create a new habit of human encounter (based on old habits inculcated by the Greeks of old, especially Socrates). I wanted to steer people away from argument and debate, and guide them into the wonderful world of exploration and inquiry, utilizing a method that lends itself to the discovery of the new and novel, of the unfamiliar, of new portals and possibilities for human being and doing, for the discovery of uncommon common ground — and hence evolve and revolutionize self and society at one and the same time (society is a type of self, after all).
I tried explaining this to some of those who invited me (in a sadly circumspect way — always wish people would be more upfront). You should have seen the look of astonishment (not always blended with admiration) when it struck them that I don’t do this for the money. I do this because this is my mortal moment, and I want to make our world more livable and lovable, more thoughtful and connected, reasonable and empathic. Since bringing two children into the world, I have redoubled my efforts to make this so. Those with whom I was explaining this would not be doing what they do if they didn’t get good salaries and benefits. I work as a volunteer (though I’d love to get a salary), and support myself modestly with my writings and doing other kinds of work that I frankly don’t enjoy so much but that pays the bills. I do this because I feel a sense of mission, consider this a calling. So I labor for free at this labor of love.
Needless to say, after the long meeting, I never heard from any of them again. Not so much as a thank you. They had picked my brain, and now would go back to their gazillion-dollar-funded initiatives and plot how to further and better brand their work and maybe somehow incorporate my insights if it would help them.
I don’t write this in a snarky way; that isn’t my intent. I write this to distinguish the entire approach and ethos — bottom-up rather than top-down, grassroots generated rather than organized from a hierarchy above. And we do it whether we have funding or not. There is another group with which I’m familiar that also aims to formulate what it calls “all the right questions,” that is very traditionally organized and institutionalized, with lots of paid staff — but that has no method, only protocol (though this group and another with which I am intimately familiar, that operates a ‘cafe’ on a ‘world’ scale, according to its brand) claims to use a method that is in reality nothing more than protocol for engagement in conversation rather than real inquiry. (And there is one that claims to be a ‘cafe’ about ‘conversation’ that forces people to pass around ‘talking keys’ before they can speak; just so sad. Dialogue is messy, chaotic at times, impassioned — and yet it can be methodical, and stress above all else, as we do, the art and science of sympathetic immersion, of careful and deep listening.)
We use a method and ethos that is time-tested, that is proven to be transformative, that enhances relationships with self and other and society all at one and the same time. That revolutionizes in the best sense how we encounter one another, and ourselves.
And so we have no funding of any traditional sort. What we do have is success. Successful outcomes in every measurable and discernible way imaginable. Hopefully one day a philanthropic funder will come to see just how effective we are, and decide to fund us. (Oh, one philanthropic did write, expressing interest in funding — only to tell me insultingly — not to me, but to all those who take part in our gatherings — that she’d ultimately concluded it was “too good to be true.” In other words she clearly didn’t think people were capable of rising to their higher angels in the way that we go about to it — once again selling people, and our initiatives, short in every way.)
I’ll polish this later but wanted to go ahead and get it on our blog before I hit the road for the day to travel to my next dialogue destination. https://socratescafe.com/?p=204, we carry one. We’re having a 20th Anniversary Socrates Cafe Symposium in the Twin Cities in October. We’ll be giving facilitation workshops, holding panel discussions, bringing together Socrates Cafe participants and facilitators and organizes from hopefully the world over (including organizers of our other initiatives, including Constitution Cafe). Hey, philanthropics who fund dialogue initiatives, hey you folks who picked my brain, care to join us — just for the sake of it, just to advance us further along the path of human good at a time when tragedies are unfolding because of a breakdown in dialogue?
Come join us. Come see for yourself why, in a world of increasing polarization and intolerance, Socrates Cafe brings together and connects and transforms, in love and goodness, the most likely bedfellows.
Come see.