“I had an amazing time learning about how to facilitate and what dialogues can truly accomplish. I would like to work on making facilitation training embedded in Beverly Public Schools and create a more open community willing to have uncomfortable conversations.” Wow!! What feedback from one of our youth. Based on our June debrief session, as well as anonymous surveys, our first year of training 12 youth (8th-12th grades) was a huge success! 100% of youth who responded said they strongly agree/agree that the BDYC helped them learn how to effectively facilitate a dialogue and how dialogue can be used to bring community members together for productive conversations. So what’s next??
We are reluctantly saying good bye to two graduates who are off to college next year. One of them, Elodie, has already jumped in to help facilitate a Living Room Conversations at the Beverly Public Library. Of the 10 remaining youth, it seems most are very eager to come back next year to continue to practice dialogue skills and serve as mentors to a new cohort. The Cummings Foundation has provided us with a 3 year grant to continue this work—for which we are incredibly grateful!! Their funding allows us to pay 12 youth for their time both getting trained in the workshops and facilitating. Now that we have the momentum and interest to build this program by both accepting new youth into the program and continuing to train and support the first cohort to continue their work, we are looking for additional funding. Would you be willing to invest in helping us expand the Beverly Dialogue Youth Corps to allow even more youth to be trained? Thank you for your support! You will definitely want to keep up with all of our news—so make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter and check our social media regularly!!
