Community Dialogues

Since founding in 1994, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center research has been conducted to identify the best ways to stimulate interracial dialogues that foster improved interracial understanding. Critical to this success has been awareness of existing barriers to interracial understanding and having the ability to treat these as challenges to be met. Unless special care is taken in all interchanges about race between white and blacks because they can become a dialogue of the deaf, but with understanding of the barriers, the Freedom Center has designed a dialogue program that works.

Dialogue across racial lines is almost non-existent in our society today, and especially in Greater Cincinnati. The Freedom Center hopes that the encounter with the Underground Railroad and its history of interracial cooperation will make visitors more willing to engage one another in honest, open and sincere dialogue. When used under the right circumstance, dialogue can be a powerful tool for creating "social capital" - building trust and good will among participants. Alone among the more familiar forms of discourse - such as debate, persuasion, argument, negotiation, advocacy and casual discussion - dialogue is deliberately designed to enhance mutual understanding and respect: to help participants understand one another better and to draw them closer together.

A Community Forum has three aims:

To provide Greater Cincinnatians with an opportunity to talk with others, to listen to others, and to ask questions of content experts including Freedom Center knowledge leaders.
Recognize that some people will only desire to "listen" and others will have a need to "talk."
Provide community groups with home for an intense, dialogic focused explorations with the goal of fostering expanded understanding and a readiness to act on that knowledge.

A Freedom Circle has three aims:

To permit participants to talk as part of a racially mixed group about their response to their Freedom Center visit in the light of their own interracial experiences, understandings, and concerns.
To permit participants to hear other's interracial experiences, understandings, and concerns.
To provide a basis for increased hopefulness among participants that interracial understanding can occur and to equip participants with a model for further participation in interracial dialogue.

For more information, call Angela Corley, Director of Community Affairs at 513-333-7518 or acorley@nurfc.org.