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Finding Our Voice &Using it in Dialogueto Build Community

By Daniel Fisher, Rebecca Hatton, and Karen Keiffer

National Empowerment Center www.power2u.org

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Collaborative Community Agreement(In addition to the 6 principles of dialogue)

Part I:• Respect confidentiality• Participation in the group at each person's own pace but everyone is encouraged to contribute• Stay on topic unless group agrees to change the topic• Do not interrupt each other.

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Collaborative Community Agreement (con’t)(In addition to the 6 principles of dialogue)

Part II:• Principles before personalities• Limit side comments and conversation• Listen to each other with your heart from a place of not knowing• We are a community• “Nothing about us without us”

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Accountable Community Wellness Organizations (ACWO)

To create green wellness villages, (expanding the idea of a health home to a community) that promote whole health in the whole community throughout its community members' whole lives. The wellness villages would be consumer- driven using format of town meetings in NE. The motto of our organization: "It takes a village to live a full life.” A series of these wellness villages would make up ACWOs

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Community Wellness Dialogues:It is not such a stretch to realize that many physical health problems are the result of a fragmented community. It is well established that social stressors such as low control to responsibility ratio at work (Dr. Robert Karasik), social isolation (loneliness and heart disease, Dr. Dean Ornish), and discrimination (racial discrimination increases blood pressure among African Americans, Dr. Nancy Kreiger) increase the likelihood of physical health issues. So we would expect that a community-wide effort to bring the tools of dialogue to as many of the members as possible would improve the wellness of the community as a whole. Then the open dialogue/organizational dialogue combination could be used to solve the issues facing the community thus giving it community resilience.

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