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Instructor: William Potapchuk, Community Building Institute 

10:00 to 5:00, Saturday 10/29, 11/5, 11/19, 11/20 (Sun.), 12/3, & 12/10

This course addresses participation, decision-making and issue framing around contentious issues. Deep divisions, fractured communities and contentious issues require effective processes that can bridge divides while framing and addressing difficult choices. This course can help prepare you as an analyst, facilitator, process designer and consultant.

This course will address the question of How do we move from conflict analysis to sustainable and inclusive interventions that help stakeholders and the public reach outcomes that matter and strengthen democracy? Course participants will learn conflict assessment and intervention designs, ranging from small group dialogue and deliberation to facilitated consensus building and large scale, multi-layered processes. Course participants will learn how to assess situations for collaboration possibilities, how to apply collaboration principles and theories to real planning and problem solving situations, and how to design processes to build meaningful and implementable plans, policies, recommendations or agreements.

Communities across the globe are faced with an increasing array of challenges from political and racial divisions, to environmental degradation and broken educational systems. This course will explore questions such as:
• How do communities make progress on tough and contentious challenges?
• What does it really mean to attend to race, ethnicity and culture in a collaborative process?
• How can we work with conflict over land use, development, and the environment?
• How can collaborative processes be used to improve life chances for children and families?

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Bill Potapchuk is President and founder of the Community Building Institute (CBI). CBI works to strengthen the capacity of communities and organizations to conduct public business inclusively, collaboratively, and effectively with the goal of building healthy, sustainable and equitable futures. He also has served as a facilitator and mediator in a wide range of settings, including successful efforts to merge school systems in North Carolina; build a new zoning ordinance in Loudon County, VA; strengthen affordable housing policy in Arlington, Virginia, and build consensus on a green building ordinance for Washington, DC. Believing that communities need to build their capacity to work across differences, he helped found Collaboration DC, an initiative working to support the use of collaborative practices to address tough issues. He has worked with co-authors on Learning from Neighborhoods: The Story of the Hampton Neighborhood Initiative, 1993-2003, Community Development: A Guide for Grantmakers on Fostering Better Outcomes through Good Process, Negotiated Approaches to Environmental Decision Making in Communities, and Building Community: Exploring the Role of Social Capital and Local Government. He has co-authored chapters for the Deliberative Democracy Handbook, Consensus Building Handbook and the Collaborative Leadership Fieldbook.

*Core requirement for Collaborative Leadership certificate, open to all MS and PhD students For more information on the course, please contact Bill Potapchuk, [email protected] or the Certificate Director, [email protected]