ROUNDTABLE BREAKFAST: DISRUPTING OLD PATTERNS: Using Agreements to Invite Constructive Dialogue across Differences

ACR-GNY & CUNY Dispute Resolution Center at John Jay College present:  

VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE BREAKFAST

DISRUPTING OLD PATTERNS: Using Agreements to Invite Constructive Dialogue across Differences

KATIE HYDEN

Founded in 1989, as the Public Conversations Project, Essential Partners (EP) helps people build relationships across differences to address their communities’ most pressing challenges. For more than thirty years, EP has helped transform cultures of conversation in schools, organizations, multi-stakeholder initiatives and communities from destructive cycles marked by stereotypes, disengagement and hostility into constructive cultures where questions, listening, storytelling and intentional pauses invite complexity, trust, understanding and forward momentum. They give people the means to strengthen relationships, deepen belonging, and renew hope in their communities, and every year, EP trains thousands of facilitators and leaders across hundreds of organizations and communities to adapt the tools of Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD) to meet their unique contextual and cultural needs.

In this interactive webinar, Katie will introduce the fundamentals of EP’s model, Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD) and offer a taste of how co-creating communication agreements can disrupt destructive norms and create possibilities for new conversation. She’ll close by inviting participants to discuss and reflect on how they might adapt this tool in their own context.

KATIE HYTEN is the Co-Executive Director of Essential Partners. She completed her master's degree in international negotiation and conflict resolution at Tufts University's Fletcher School, where her research addressed foreign policy in religious conflicts. Katie has held appointments as a Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at Tufts University where she developed and co-taught a course entitled “Dialogue, Identity, and Civic Action” and as a consultant for Harvard Medical School's Scientific Citizenship Initiative to co-design a course on science communication for ethical community engagement.

During Katie’s tenure at Essential Partners, she has served as the program lead on collaborations with local grassroots groups, churches, foundations, and colleges, training stakeholders to design, convene, and facilitate dialogues across differences. She has helped communities hold dialogue about topics such as the role of guns in American life, ethnic violence and civil society, racial and ethnic diversity, as well as campus inclusion and belonging.

Prior to joining Essential Partners, Katie served as a mediator and independent consultant in conflict resolution processes and helped develop and manage the first university-wide interreligious institute at Pepperdine University. She was awarded Harvard’s Program on Negotiation (PON) Summer Fellowship to support her research and work with Search for Common Ground in Lebanon. 

Raised in a military family, Katie lived in six states before entering college. She and her husband now live in Massachusetts when they’re not visiting family in Colorado, Alabama, and Australia.