Hosting a Discussion Group on Water, Drought and Climate Change
in your Community
The Hot and Bothered Forums held on April 2016 provided education,
community discussion and inspiration to 180 participants. You can be a
community leader and keep the conversation going in your area.
The presentations are available here. These can be used to support further community discussion.
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Some suggestions that might assist hosting a discussion group are:
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Initiate by sending out invitations to people you feel might be interested, stating the purpose of the gathering, the length of time, and a list of possible discussion topics based on the main presentation topics. (see list here) . Feel free to use some of the photos available on the website to enliven your invitation.
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Gatherings of 7 -9 people can be conducive to good discussion, possibly meeting for 3-4 sessions in someone’s home or office.
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As each presentation is about 8 -10 minutes long , 4 or 5 presentations could be shown at each session with a discussion following.
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It is often helpful to set agreements that help discussions e.g. taking turns and not dominating the conversation, listening to understand the others point of view, not ranting and blaming as it can seed polarities in the group.
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Questions that promote discussion could include:
What did you learn from that presentation? What questions do you still have?
What concerns you most about this topic in our community?
What ways can we work together as a community to best respond to these issue? What resources do we already have? What resources do we need?
How do you feel we did with our discussion today? What was it like to talk with others about these issues? What if anything has changed for you due to this discussion?