Diversity Awareness Partnership (DAP)’s Listen. Talk. Learn’s are intended to help strengthen our community’s ability to dialogue about race relations by facilitating important and difficult discussions on race, unconscious bias, and our lived experiences. Our hope is that by talking to one another and learning more about communities we have limited exposure to, we will be more effective allies in the ongoing work of racial justice.
DAP began offering FREE Listen. Talk. Learn: Dialogue Across Difference Facilitation Sessions (LTL) in September 2014 after Michael Brown’s death. Since this time, more than 3,000 people have attended an LTL from the business, corporate, non-profit, arts, and faith sectors. The sessions are open to anyone interested in attending. Companies and organizations may request to host an LTL community session at their facility.
Attendees will leave the session with the following:
• Information on the differences between debate and dialogue
• Strategies for answering difficult and polarizing questions about race, racism, and bias
• Exposure to a lived experience different than their own
• Opportunity to process current events
Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in the summer of 2014, our communities locally, nationally, and globally have been impacted by an increasing amount of conversations about race and related issues.
From #BlackLivesMatter to Mizzou to Sandra Bland to the recent killings of both Black men and police, our cultural consciousness around racial bias has been heightened, and we are being expected to understand these concepts with an increased level of dexterity.
Though the core of our conversations has remained the same, the ways we talk about them and the stories we tell have changed. We have listened, talked, and learned. And many of us are ready to do more.
Our Listen. Talk. Learn. More session is designed for participants who have already attended one of our Listen. Talk. Learn. sessions and have begun to ask, “What’s next?” The key objectives for the LTL More are: