Impact Quincy hosted a great substance abuse prevention conference last week. It brought together a number of towns working on opiate overdose prevention to share best practices and move their work forward together. I had the opportunity to facilitate two sessions, a break-out conversation and a world cafe for the full group of over 100 participants. For those of you who don’t know about world cafe, it’s a pretty interesting technique for organizing large group conversations. Each person starts at a table, and after discussing one question, all but one ‘table host” from each table move to different tables for the next question. This continues until all of the questions are discussed, and then there’s an opportunity for people to share observations and conclusions with the full group. Its’ a great way to meet people, a great way to help a large groups reach consensus, and a nice way to keep people engaged and actively participating even when they’re in a huge event hall.
This isn’t my picture, (it’s from http://www.studentreporter.org/2011/09/yes-we-can-%E2%80%93-what-can-we-learn-from-youth/), but it gives a good sense of how they look:
