A Time to Heal Cafes

Last week my sister-in-love Qwynn introduced her vision (which had also set me on fire) for some work that she (and now we) felt called to do to help advance the revolution that is currently happening - a way to begin to help facilitate and catalyze communities to engage in meaningful growth and change to hopefully begin to address the problems of racism and community and police relationships and dynamics to create safer, healthier communities for everyone but in particular for Black and Brown neighbors and loved ones....

Now we are ready to start sharing a bit of our vision for collaborative events with community organizers to help communities heal the relationships between police and community members. To that end, we will be collaborating with interested communities to host cafe-style events entitled A Time to Heal: Repairing and Renewing Relationships Between Community and Police. We both strongly believe that community led organizations and leaders play a critical role in starting the dialogue related to bridging the divide between the community and police. These events would bring together community members and local law enforcement in very small groups to communicate, engage, and connect in conversations on the topic (particularly during this COVID time - we will be monitoring and creating very small groups with plenty of social distance to allow for connection safely).

A Time to Heal Cafes will be held using a facilitation approach called World Cafe conversations. It focuses on promoting conversations in small groups, addressing critical issues, and moving toward a comprehensive message and increased cohesion among the participants. This approach will provide an opportunity for small group discussion in three-rounds, where participants will be able to discuss three guiding questions on current challenges facing community-police relations. It is possible that each community's first A Time to Heal Cafe would lead to more with the same group if they wanted to continue to meet and work on addressing the challenges facing community-police relations within each community. Cafes are structured to allow the participants to have significant input into the direction and flow of the discussion and the steps identified for action after the event.

We are currently doing a pilot version at a couple of locations but hope to offer A Time to Heal Cafes more broadly as time progresses. Please drop us a note at qgsalazar@gmail.com or virginia.dick@gmail.com if you are interesting in co-hosting an event with us or would like more information and discussion about these events. Now is the time for us to be the change that we want to see in our world - and we hope that we can contribute to the growing need for change and healing to support our Black and Brown neighbors and loved ones and to create healthier, more diverse, safer, happier communities.