What is Possible, Now?
"What is blossoming in your heart?"
~ Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses
 
Given the ongoing pandemic, our current “now’s” are incredibly different in a lot of ways, depending on so many variables. Where do you live? How old are you? How is the health care system in your country of residence organised? How is your health in general? Are you living on your own or with your family? How is the vaccination scheduling in your country going?

Some of us are still (or again) in narrow places, where possibilities seem to be limited, some of us are beginning to reimagine our lives as vaccinated citizens, and some of us have already started to live this re-imagined life.
 
We received this message from a World Cafe practitioner:
“Yesterday, I saw a video of an onsite gathering. People were singing and dancing together, unmasked, no physical distancing. Like “old times” … (They were all vaccinated and tested negative right before the event.) Shortly after, a message came from a friend who shared that she has not received a single hug in a year… “

So many emotions are stirred up as we are navigating this moment in time: hope, despair, fear, joy, gratitude, grief... So many questions emerge that have no “one-size-fits-all”-answers.

What is possible now? What is currently blossoming in your heart?
These questions take us to a place of (re-)opening, of liberating ourselves and each other from narrow places.

Let’s make sure to ask others how their “now” looks like and feels like. Never assume we know.

We are inviting you to join us for our upcoming Community Cafe in which we’ll dive deeper into the field of possibility - whatever our "now" looks like: "Re-imagining Education - Beyond the Pandemic". This Community World Cafe will be hosted in collaboration with Emory University. Come and join us on April 14th.

Check out some of the other amazing events and activities coming up in April!
An Invitation to Inquiry!
We invite you to consider weighing in on a conversation that World Cafe elder Frances Baldwin opened for us all in the World Cafe blog this month.

Her inquiry is all about not getting stuck in an unconscious pattern with your World Cafe hosting process, and consciously applying the World Cafe Design Principles, specifically when determining how many rounds of conversation and how many questions to use.

This is the kind of open inquiry that is ripe fruit for World Cafe hosts everywhere. As we all know - the greater the diversity of our responses, the better the learning opportunity for everyone. So, whatever your perspective and insight might be on this topic, we invite you to please share it, and be part of the learning!
Re-Imagining Education:
Beyond the Pandemic

A Special Collaboration with Emory University
for the Community World Cafe
April 14, 2021
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Where are we now, living with a global pandemic in all the different ways we are experiencing it in different parts of the world? What can we anticipate or imagine coming next, and in what timeline/s?

How has life on campus changed for students and faculty? What are we learning that might be useful in designing the learning environments of the future?

These are questions that concern us all, and perhaps we will just need to live with them (as Rilke says).

Join us and our colleagues from Emory University for a far-reaching conversation across generations exploring how we are living and learning now, and the potential effects this will have on times to come.

The World Cafe Community Foundation is excited to be collaborating with Emory University and the Emory Conversation Project for April's online Community World Cafe. We'll be joined by Conversation Project coordinators, students, and faculty from Emory.

Students and faculty from other Universities are very welcome, as well. Please help spread the word.
The World Cafe Hosting Dojo
April 7th, 2021
The World Cafe Hosting Dojo is a safe space for World Cafe hosts, offering peer-support and occasional visits by special guests. It's a place to gather together and explore what we are learning as a community of practice. New hosts may find this space particularly valuable, but as many of us have found, to be a good World Cafe host is to be a perpetual learner, so being in a learning space together is no less crucial for hosts further along the spectrum of experience. 

The Dojo is open the first Wednesday of every month - FREE - exclusively for World Cafe hosts and graduates of World Cafe learning programs. 

This collective work is the fourth practice in the Art of Hosting’s Four-Fold Practice: “Hosting Together". It’s only by reflecting together as a Community of Practice that we can realize our potential as hosts, and the potential of the gift we are hosting into the world. 

We invite you to join us for the next World Cafe Hosting Dojo - we will be exploring the area of preparation and revealing the mysteries of a Flow document - what, why, and when?

Come regularly or drop in any time. You are most welcome.
ONLINE HOSTING NOW!
A special offer from World Cafe's Learning Partner weDialogue:
DEVELOP YOUR HOSTING CAPACITY TO INVITE & HOLD SPACE FOR BEING HUMAN ONLINE

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to work with Amy Lenzo (weDialogue Founder and Director of World Cafe Signature Learning Programs), with Holger Scholz and Jan Buckenmayer from Kommunikationslotsen as they explore online hosting now and introduce practices for spaciousness and relationship online.

Four interactive sessions (the fourth one optional).

Starting Friday, April 16th
Discount for Community Table Members
(see the Community Table Calendar for code)
THE DIGITAL SANDBOX
April 29, 2021
The Digital Sandbox is a Community Table initiative that provides a safe space to explore the sometimes daunting new world of technology and online hosting with peers. 

Each month we explore a different topic; we are currently exploring future topics (including April's) through an online exploration using the poll software, Slido. We'd love to have your thoughts on the topic/s you'd be most interested in exploring, too.

Here's how:

  1. Go to http://bit.ly/DigitalSandbox2021
  2. Read the other proposed topics, and if you see one you'd also like to explore, use the little "hand" icon to the right of each suggestion to "vote it up".
  3. If you don't already see it there, use the box at the top of the page to add a topic you'd like to explore in an upcoming Digital Sandbox.

That's all! Thank you!
Note: The Digital Sandbox is for people currently hosting World Cafe or other participatory processes online, or graduates of the Hosting World Cafe Online program.
The World Cafe Calendar
FOR WHAT'S ELSE IS COMING UP
FROM WORLD CAFE & OUR
LEARNING PARTNERS ...
The Community Table is Open to All

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