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Introduction:
Laura Chasin, director of the Public Conversations Project, suggests
that the job of dialogue intervenors is to facilitate a fair and balanced conversation.
To gain the trust of participants, facilitators should be honest about their own views
rather than claiming to be neutral.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Dialogue Facilitation
Laura Chasin
Director of the Public Conversations Project, Watertown, Massachusetts
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Another thing that's probably interesting to people is that
there's no one who doesn't have views about abortion, including the 2
facilitators. Both of us made it known, in retrospect I think we actually raised
it with the pro-choice people, but with the pro-life people we completely
self-disclosed about our prior involvement in the issue. I actually forgot one
important thing in my first round of that, and in fear and trembling, remembered
there was this one involvement I had forgotten to mention. I went back, afraid
it was really going to blow it, but in fact it deepened their trust in a way. So
there was full disclosure, and as in all our facilitation, we don't claim to be
neutral. We've never claimed to use that kind of language at all. We claim to be
able to facilitate a fair and balanced kind of conversation. And because of us
continuing to ask for feedback and because of the collaborative way we did
things, we had relationships with each of the participants, very deep
relationships and very trusting relationships, before we got in the room, and that's true in all our work.
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