Conversations-In-A-Box toolkit

To get started, download the toolkit, and use it to guide your conversations. When you’re done, come back here and share what you learned. You can also download a mini-version of this kit in postcard form.

We are encouraging people in Alameda County and beyond to have strategic, meaningful conversations with their families, friends, colleagues, and others in the community around the question:

How can we collectively transform public education through the arts to create a better future for everyone?

To help guide that process, we have developed a Conversation-In-A-Box. The goal is to help you initiate a meaningful, arts-infused conversation around this topic and to share what you discuss with a wider community.

The toolkit is built to support conversations around the following questions:

We’d encourage you to think of ways to infuse arts into your conversations. Some examples of things people have been doing include:

• Collectively building a timeline as a way to explore the question, “Where are we now?”
• Quilt-making as a way to explore the question, “Where do we want to go, and why?” People all have been participating in an Alameda County-wide community quilting project as part of Arts IS Education month. That quilting toolkit is available here.

We hope that people will share the outcomes of these conversations here so that others may learn from them and so that we can start building an inclusive, coherent vision for the next 10 years.

This toolkit is meant to support you, not constrain you. Hold it lightly, and do what you think is best to have the conversation you want to have. All we ask is that you have these conversations, that you listen deeply to others, and that you share what you learn so that we can all benefit from your conversations.

Other Resources

• Collective Impact article — This article provides important background on the importance of working as a collective to make an impact

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