World Cafe's role in Staging Change

Making change stick is one of the hardest things we face in community and organizational development. That is why the World Cafe is such a crucial piece of the process in the upcoming Staging Change Institute. At Community Performance International, we have worked for over 20 years to bring our story-performance process to communities across the US and abroad because we have found that when people share their personal stories in a safe environment and perform those stories together, it is possible to grow relationships across traditional lines of difference (race, age, educational attainment, sexual orientation, homeless/homed, economic status). We have seen people that would never have met before come together and, like a family, create a new community identity on stage.

This process always produces an upswell of energy and positive community identity. The problem we have found, in the long run, is sustaining that energy and utilizing those amazing new relationships to forge real, lasting community change.

That's where the World Cafe comes in! In 2011, David Isaacs and Juanita Brown worked with us in the community performance project in Jonesborough, Tennessee, called The Jonesborough Yarn Exchange, to include World Cafe conversations as part of their performance process.

We then took the World Cafe into the first ever Staging Change Institute. So now, following the surge of energy brought by a community performance process, we engage the performers AND the audience (where possible) in a world cafe conversation with Graphic Recording. Now the participants can explore the discoveries they made in sharing stories, performing together in a new community, listening to stories that evoke experiences they are familiar with, hearing stories about your place that you never heard, and on and on. All of the emotions and ideas that are brought forth by the story-performance process can provide the background for the Cafe conversation process that follows. This in turn can lead to individual and community action plans.

One of the action plans formulated at the first Staging Change Institute has come to fruition over the last 12 months. In Jonesborough, CPI collected stories, wrote and directed a play called I AM HOME, and it highlighted the deep desire to be "at home" in community, utilizing stories as diverse as a Puerto Rican immigrant standing up to intolerance and claiming her place in her Tennessee mountain town, and a young mother fighting to feed her family and caught between allegiances during the Civil War. The play bonded and energized both the players and the audience. The challenge was to convert the energy of that performance process into the change the community wanted to see. And with new economic hardships facing the community, the I AM HOME cast (known as the Jonesborough Yarn Exchange or JYE) was facing the possibility of not being able to continue this work.