The Network for Community Engagement is an outgrowth of the Dialogue Project and other civic engagement activists.  It was created to form a network among various community organizations to foster more civic engagement among local citizens. We provide training for facilitators; technical advice on agendas and venues; volunteer facilitators; and ways to facilitate dialogue, deliberation and story events for community involvement.

The Dialogue Project (DP) began as a collaborative effort between Community Mediation and Interfaith Cooperative Ministries, Inc. (ICM), a council of 43 faith communities, including Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Unitarian and Baha’I congregations. In 1997, CM and ICM established the DP in response to the severe racial tensions in greater New Haven resulting in the shooting of an African-American New Haven resident by a white East Haven police officer as a result of a traffic stop.

During the DP’s first eight years, more than 3,000 individuals from more than 100 organizations came together to dialogue and develop action plans to remedy racial and ethnic discrimination in our community.  After September 11, 2001, for example, New Haven’s Mayor John DeStefano and Hamden’s Mayor turned to the DP to organize a series of Unity Forums in their communities to respond to a number of post 9/11 incidents that reflected anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias.  

In 2008, the DP became a program of CM, independent of ICM and is now named The Network for Community Engagement to encompass deliberation, story and other facilitation models.  The Network often uses the dialogue model developed by the Study Circles Resource Center, now Everyday Democracy, located in Hartford, Connecticut. (See www.everyday-democracy.org.)

The Network has also received funding recently from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the Carolyn Foundation, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Hartford Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church, the Knights of Columbus, the NewAlliance Bank Foundation, the New Haven Register, the Regional Water Authority, SBC, United Illuminating, the United Way of Greater New Haven, and Yale University. We thank these generous organizations for their commitment to dialogue and their indispensable support.

New Haven 2020

This project is a response to the challenge from the Kellogg Foundation, asking communities to listen to the voices of their residents and shape their cities accordingly. New Haven was selected, through Everyday Democracy, as one of eight cities nationally to take up this task. New Haven 2020: It Starts Now is supported by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and implemented through Community Mediation.

This spring and in the year ahead, we will be helping people organize and host dialogues on jobs, education, health care, public safety and other topics: issues New Haveners have told us were the most important to them. Some groups have already begun the process. We will support the work that is going on and encourage new conversations across neighborhoods and interest areas and with those not yet included. New Haven 2020 builds on the renewed interest and the investment in public life generated by the recent national election. It is an invitation to all of us to become involved.

Visit our blog at http://newhaven2020.blogspot.com/

For more information about The Network, please contact David Savage, The Network Coordinator, at  203-401-2045 or write to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .