New Directions Collaborative helped to facilitate a World Cafe dialogue at the New Entry Farmers' Project Farmer-to-Farmer Conference in December of 2010. New Entry's mission is to assist socially disadvantaged and other underserved individuals with agricultural backgrounds to successfully enter farming in Massachusetts. The theme of this one-day conference was "Fertile Ground - Connecting Farmers to Farmers to Promote Healthy Soil, Food and Community Health." The event provided an opportunity for about 150 small-scale farmers to come together with their peers to learn best practices and share resources about how to grow a successful farming business.

The World Cafe offered participants an opportunity to explore what enables success in farming, common barriers, and what strategies are most useful in amplifying what works and overcoming barriers. Our facilitation team included a graphic facilitator who captured the ideas in colorful posters around the room. A conference archive collected quotes from participants and conference resources, including an index of valuable resources that participants contributed to at the event.

The New England region of the US EPA had an annual conference with members of nine Native American tribes in the region where they defined joint environmental programs and priorities. We helped design and facilitate an innovative participatory format for this two-day conference with a focus on pollution prevention. Instead of a traditional conference format with speakers and breakout sessions, over 100 participants moved among six small topic areas in various corners of a large conference room, to brainstorm ideas for action.

Each group had a mix of members of various tribes and EPA staff. After suggesting ideas, each group rotated to the next “station” to give input to every topic. By the end of the conference, participants had identified the priority areas of environmental concern and pollution prevention opportunity for the tribes, determined key action items, and identified how EPA’s various grant programs could support their work.

We designed and facilitated a dialogue that brought together sustainable business leaders in Massachusetts to engage with government leaders about how government could help their businesses succeed. These business leaders were essentially pioneers who saw the world in a new way and were out in front exploring this new territory. By bringing them together in conversation, all the participants deepened their understanding of what the emerging territory involved, learned from each other, and together identified four priority areas where government and business could take action:

• Promotion of markets for environmentally-preferable products and services;
• Government procurement of environmentally-preferable products and services;
• Energy conservation, efficiency and renewable energy; and
• Government promotion, recognition, and initiatives to support business leaders, and leverage business leadership.

The results of the dialogue were written up and shared with participants and informed future policy. One of the participants from EPA’s headquarters said “Many of the concepts that we talked about at the Business/Government Roundtable have found their way into recent EPA discussions with the Administrator as we define the agency's vision of stewardship and sustainability.” This dialogue process was replicated in New Hampshire and in the City of Boston with local businesses and the Mayor’s Office. Click here for copies of these reports.