Changing our Consciousness: An Organization with a Mission
Waging Dialogue is a project of Changing our Consciousness, a non-profit organization founded in 2009 by Dr. Alice L. Maher, to develop tools for resolving intergroup conflict and to make them available for everyone; to help each of us develop a greater capacity to see the world through eyes other than our own. Changing our Consciousness has built two decades of innovative projects:
2003 – The Original Waging Dialogue Forums
The Waging Dialogue Forums, our first initiative, were conceived on a hypothesis: that prejudice and aggression are innate to the human condition and can’t be adequately contained until the beliefs and feelings that lie beneath them are given a safe arena for exploration and understanding. We believed that as people became more aware of their conscious and unconscious prejudices and helped others identify those dynamics in themselves, they would develop greater personal insight and empathy toward others, channel aggression constructively, and be able to work together to discover creative solutions to social problems. From 2004 to 2011, we facilitated seven active, moderated, online forums, with over 200 members. Participants from different backgrounds and world views accepted a contract to discuss issues ranging from “Antisemitism and Islamophobia” to “Wealth, Poverty, and the Middle Class.” The radical idea behind Waging Dialogue was that humans should be allowed to be human, and space should be afforded in controlled settings for the human impulse to engage in conflict, even if the boundaries of civility are sometimes tested. Results were mixed. The text-based interaction of these forums diminished communication of complete thoughts. These were the formative years of social media, and few could truly grasp how serious this problem would become for all of society.
2010 – Emotional Imprint
As the original Waging Dialogue listserv forums wound down after years of active dialogue, Dr. Maher analyzed their shortcomings and began to conceptualize the problem as a language yet to be learned, understood, and then taught in an academic curriculum in Emotional Literacy, from elementary through graduate school, using the “thought experiment” model. The model curriculum that we now call Emotional Imprint™ began to take shape through student focus groups, short videos created by filmmaker Max Rosenbaum, and lesson plans designed by special education teacher Victoria Grinman. In 2010, Dr. Maher addressed the Psychohistory Forum. In 2011, Victoria Grinman, Suzanne Amro, an educator in Ethics and Religious Culture, Marshall Alcorn of George Washington University, and Dr. Maher presented EI to the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society.
2012 – Street Squash
In 2012, we were given the opportunity to design, implement, and test Emotional Imprint™ with middle school students at the Harlem-based enrichment program, Street Squash. Our educational consultant Melissa Brand first designed a one-week summer course. It was an overwhelming success, and we were invited back to create a full-year Emotional Imprint course for Street Squash’s eighth-graders. Dr. Brand ran training sessions for the Street Squash teachers and developed industry-standard evaluation materials, to help other educators build upon these pilot programs. We offer our innovative curricula for download at the Emotional Imprint website.
2013 – The Hot Stove Project
Understanding others requires that we understand thought process differences. In 2008, Dr. Lois Oppenheim joined Dr. Maher to co-create a documentary feature film that reframes our understanding of mental illness. With filmmaker Sheryl Franko, in 2013 we released our first film “How to Touch a Hot Stove.” Our film interweaves human stories with insight into the state of the field and multiple competing paradigms. Participants include Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel, neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks, and actor John Turturro. The Hot Stove Project completed its second film, “Daniel, Debra, Leslie (and You?)” in 2019, and it has been made available to academic institutions and medical schools. Visit the Hot Stove Project website.
2016 – Divides
In 2016, we invited students from Hunter College High School and the Street Squash enrichment program to converse with and study the works of four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Vamik Volkan. The students’ essays, stories, and illustrations were compiled into the E-Book “Divides.”
2018 – Catalysis
In 2018, Dr. Maher published her culminating work, Catalysis: A Recipe to Slow Down or Abort Humankind’s Leap to War, presenting a theoretical model that integrates and reframes models from disparate fields. Dr. Maher presents simple pilot projects and shares concrete suggestions for ways that everyone can begin to implement these ideas in the here and now. The Catalysis Facebook page attracted over 400 subscribers. The Facebook group is dedicated to the discovery of creative solutions to political conflicts by imagining the emotional experience of the Other. Participants in our daily discussion threads share a desire to catalyze social change by working to understand the world views of both political parties, locate short and long-term horizons, support creative leadership, and imagine new solutions to longstanding political conflict.
2020 to Present – The New Waging Dialogue Forums
The 2020 pandemic quarantine, while it isolated us from one another, paradoxically offered a new medium for communication – the Zoom Webinar – to expand our research and develop our model. Putting strangers together in a virtual room allows them to see one another as human, and gives them space to contextualize their viewpoints. The disadvantage is that the scope of conversations must be limited due to time constraints. By hosting a combination of live conversations and text-based spaces for continued discussion, we hope to create a hybrid model that addresses the limitations of both the live and text-based approaches.
In the fall of 2020 we inaugurated Dialogue with Dignity conversations. These were productive but too limiting in scope and duration. To broaden our reach, In 2021 we partnered with the Listen First Project and created a longer form dialogue project using a combination of video and text mediums. We hosted a panel discussion of Todd Drezner’s documentary film, The Campaign of Miner Bo, with current and former candidates for the US Congress joining us discuss the experience of running for office in this polarized political climate. We began to incorporate what we call Meta-Dialogue, the process of reviewing our own video-recorded dialogue events, in order to understand what worked and what didn’t and further develop our model. We partnered with Braver Angels to host a meta-dialogue analysis of a Braver Angels parliamentary-style debate.
We are currently running an ongoing dialogue project with multiple dyad pairings. Since 2021 we have demonstrated our model of dialogue and meta-dialogue during the National Week of Conversation. We have become active members of the bridging community, one of hundreds of organizations across the USA dedicated to mitigating toxic political polarization.
Our newest initiative, a microcredentialing, professional development module called the Waging Dialogue Experience, is scheduled to launch by the end of 2024. This professional development program with be offered for purchase through our partner Listen First.
You can view recordings of some of our dialogues on our Youtube Channel
2022 to Present – Civics Corps Experience
We are partnered with Bay College in Michigan and the Collaborative for Compassionate Civic Engagement to bring Waging Dialogue activities to their extracurricular civic engagement program, known as the Civics Corps.
Our Winter/Spring Semester Program pairs students into intergenerational dyads. At the conclusion of the semester, students hold a podcast to discuss their respective experiences. These podcasts can be viewed online for our 2023 and 2024 semesters.
During our Fall Semester Program, the Civics Corps partners with the American Legion and the American Merchant Marine Veterans Association to hold Veterans Speak, an intergenerational conversation between students and veterans.
In 2011 our umbrella organization Changing Our Consciousness received 501(c)3 status and became a non-profit. To support our work, please consider making a donation.