The Global Dialogue Collective
A community committed to advancing dialogue in the world.
We are a global and dynamic community of dialogue practitioners, each responding in our own way to different challenges, problems and needs in our respective communities. Our world is in conflict, fueled by a human values crisis, the absence of critical (self-) reflection, and our growing inability to communicate with one another, across differences. We view dialogue as a transformative tool that holds the potential to engage minds, hearts and souls, to expand our understanding and build our capacity for compassion, coexistence and humility. Our Collective is a learning community that supports, inspires and challenges each other in our dialogic practices around the world, with the conviction that each dialogue encounter inches us closer to a more peaceful world.
PROGRAMS
Global Dialogue Collective focuses on advancing the quality and impact of dialogue, strengthening our capacity for self-reflection, critical thinking, and empathy, and bring these skills to others. We provide an international forum for mutual inspiration, support, challenge, and development.
Through periodic workshops, member-driven discussions, open forums, online engagement, experts sharing their innovations, and active exchanges, GDC curates an exciting dialogue-driven online environment. Each online encounter will be announced in a timely fashion on our social media channels and mailing list, describing the thematic focus of the gathering, as well as its format.
The following are examples of programs that GDC has hosted in the past, and will continue to evolve with you- our members’ input- in the future. Being a collective, we continue to experiment and refine these with your feedback and engagement. Community members help shape the agenda and serve both as experts and as learners. These learning together sessions are free and open to all who are engaged with or simply curious about dialogue.
Mino Akhtar
Mino Akhtar is President of the Global Dialogue Collective. Mino has been a dialogue practitioner for 30 years in both corporate and non-profit settings. She worked with The Dialogue Project which hosted dialogue in Manhattan around Palestine/Israel conflict. She was co-founder of the Bergen County NJ Womens Interfaith Initiative. She also served the Global Women’s Fund, NJ Women’s Fund and Together Women Rise in strategic planning, change and leadership roles.
In corporate settings, she worked in IT on Wall Street for 20 years before changing careers to organizational change. She facilitated leadership and team development incorporating dialogue in change and innovation initiatives in global and intercultural settings in financial services, telecommunications and pharma industries.
She is an advisor/consultant to WISE (wisemuslimwomen.org) to advance the status of Muslim women. She has a BS in Computer Science from CUNY and an MA in Transformative Leadership from California Institute of Integral Studies.
Rebecca Cannara
Rebecca is Executive Director of Universal Human Rights Initiative. She has worked in social work and education for 25 years. She has served youth and families experiencing homelessness, developed a cooperative preschool, and produced online curriculum on mathematics and on homelessness. She received her master’s in Education from UCLA, where she trained in the University of Michigan model of intergroup dialogue and conducted research on providing dialogue as part of the professional training of pre-service educators.
Robert Corman
Robert coaches leaders on how to integrate their deepest calling into the complexities of work and life. A former criminal and environmental lawyer, he ran an activist grantmaking foundation, a notable polling organization, and consulting firms serving national nonprofit and for-profit institutions. He helped create and lead philanthropies, academic institutions, youth agencies, nonprofit associations, and international NGOs, including A Growing Culture.
A poet and student of various spiritual traditions, for 12 years he apprenticed to a shaman whose cosmology drew its focus from Mayan and Yaqui cultures. Robert was lead editor of Journeys and Awakenings: Wisdom for Spiritual Travelers, an anthology. He has offered workshops in dialogue for many years and has often used his dialogue skills in dramatically challenging settings.
Trina Talukdar
Trina started working in Kalighat, one of Asia’s largest red light areas, at the age of 18. Her interaction with commercial sex workers spurred her passion to co-found Kranti at the age of 22. Kranti empowers girls from Mumbai’s Red Light Areas to become social change leaders.
Trina was Director of Venture and Fellowship, South Asia, for Ashoka, a global organisation across 90 countries, investing in the leading social entrepreneurs of our times. Trina led Ashoka both in South Asia and Southern Africa. Trina worked with American Express, Philanthropy, in Washington, D.C. and New York, where she built American Express’ leadership program for non-profit professionals.
Trina continues to be a serial social entrepreneur, kick-starting critical development work in the field of 21st century leadership. Her most recent venture is Bolti Bandh, that builds dialogue between politically polarised people. As Chief Visioning Officer at Fields of View, Trina focus on scaling Fields of View’s digital serious games and getting them into the hands of diverse stakeholders, from policy makers, to businesses, philanthropies and citizens, to build sustained dialogue and action on civic issues.
Tom O’Connor
Tom O’Connor, Ph.D., is internationally recognized for his communication, facilitation, and cultural-change skills. His companies, Transforming Corrections & Transforming Communication, use dialogue and implementation science to help agencies advance the implementation of evidence-based practices and achieve better outcomes for their clients, the community, and staff. Better conversations, better outcomes. Tom grew up in a working-class area in Dublin, Ireland and now lives as a dual citizen in the US, in Salem, Oregon. He has degrees in law, philosophy, theology, counseling, and religion. He lived as a friar (a wandering monk) for nine years with the Catholic religious order called the Carmelites. In his work Tom integrates several strands of learning such as David Kantor’s theory of structural dynamics, the evidence-based practices of Motivational Interviewing, the work of Bob Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey on adult development, Ron Heifetz’s work on adaptive change, and Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy of consciousness and interiority. Following Lonergan, Tom believes that “authentic collaboration is the source of legitimate power”, and that dialogue is central to authentic collaboration.
Nancy Dixon
Nancy is the founder of Common Knowledge Associates, a consulting firm that helps organizations create conversations where knowledge transfer happens, knowledge sharing is rampant, knowledge is created, and where innovation arises. Before founding Common Knowledge Associates in 2000, Nancy was a Professor at the George Washington University for 15 years, and before that at the University of Texas, in Austin. She holds a Ph.D. in Administration with a minor in Sociology. She is the author of over 40 publications including eight books, among them, Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know, Dialogue at Work, Perspectives on Dialogue, and The Organization Learning Cycle. Among others, Nancy has served as a consultant to Americares, Seed Global Healthcare, USAID, Zimmer Biomed, and the World Bank Group.
What she cares deeply about is that the people who work in any organization have a voice to influence what their organization does and what it stands for. Her aspiration is to help make organizations worthy of organizational members putting their life’s blood into their work, because
all of us have a desire to have our labor serve something that we view as worthy. She believes that happens when organizations learn how to hold dialogic conversations.
Maja Nenadović
Maja is a dialogue practitioner, program design consultant, monitoring and evaluation specialist, facilitator, civic and human rights education trainer. As an international debate coach, she has worked in 40+ countries worldwide.
Since 2012, she has implemented “Across Divides – Training Workshops for Depolarizing Communication”, a methodology developed and tested in the field through a series of workshops and dialogues with both people using discriminatory and hate speech rhetoric and with individuals targeted by it. Maja holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, on the subject of Monitoring & Evaluation in the area of democracy promotion. She is the co-founder of Reflectory, a consultancy working in the fields of conflict transformation, participatory democracy, civic engagement and social cohesion.
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