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Introduction: Laura Chasin, director of the Public Conversations Project, suggests that the job of dialogue intervenors is to facilitate a fair and balanced conversation. To gain the trust of participants, facilitators should be honest about their own views rather than claiming to be neutral.


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Dialogue Facilitation
Laura Chasin
Director of the Public Conversations Project, Watertown, Massachusetts
Interviewed by
Julian Portilla
2003

Another thing that's probably interesting to people is that there's no one who doesn't have views about abortion, including the 2 facilitators. Both of us made it known, in retrospect I think we actually raised it with the pro-choice people, but with the pro-life people we completely self-disclosed about our prior involvement in the issue. I actually forgot one important thing in my first round of that, and in fear and trembling, remembered there was this one involvement I had forgotten to mention. I went back, afraid it was really going to blow it, but in fact it deepened their trust in a way. So there was full disclosure, and as in all our facilitation, we don't claim to be neutral. We've never claimed to use that kind of language at all. We claim to be able to facilitate a fair and balanced kind of conversation. And because of us continuing to ask for feedback and because of the collaborative way we did things, we had relationships with each of the participants, very deep relationships and very trusting relationships, before we got in the room, and that's true in all our work.

 
The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor. -- Hubert H. Humphrey

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