Living Room Conversations is a conversational model developed by dialogue experts in order to facilitate connection between people despite their differences, and even identify areas of common ground and shared understanding. Within this model, we have developed over 100 conversation guides. 

You can download and use our conversation guides to host a Living Room Conversation in your community - whether that's in your living room, library, faith community, school, work - the opportunities are endless! You can even host a Living Room Conversation online with loved ones from all around the world using video conferencing.

Here at Living Room Conversations, we hope for a world in which people who have fundamental differences of opinion and backgrounds learn to work together with respect – and even joy – to realize the vibrant future we all desire for ourselves and our families. Through applying and adapting our conversational model, we hope participants will build relationships that generate understanding and enable collaborative problem-solving.

With the support of the Fetzer Instititute, we have research data to measure the effectiveness of Living Room Conversations.

• A survey of participants yielding 200 respondents to questions about their experience with and reported benefits from Living Room Conversations. The majority of survey respondents – over 70% – participated in online conversations. Half of all individuals said they were interested in serving as a host for future conversations and more than 60% said they had benefited from participating, enjoying the process and finding it valuable in the longer-term for themselves and others.

• For those who had participated in both our online and in person events, the researcher found no discernible difference in experience between having an online vs in person conversation. In fact, there were some specific benefits of participating online including:

  • Exposure to folks from far and wide, with whom they wouldn’t have been able to converse if not for LRC

  • Ease of organizing and logistics: I love hosting online because people just show up, we don't have to organize and worry about logistics.

  • The tendency to get better racial/ethnic diversity online than in person.

Living Room Conversations: A Tool for Hope, Change, Action

• LRCs counter the narrative of the US being “hopelessly divided.” 

• LRCs are a useful tool for building potential allies and understanding differences.

• LRCs are a promising method for bringing together community perspective on community-level issues.

• LRCs can shift the power dynamic (‘us vs them,’ ‘powerful vs. powerless’) of different groups, community roles, etc.

Evidence of immediate and longer-term impacts:

• Immediate – improved mindset, listening skills

• Immediate – learned something new every time

• Longer-term – application of tools to other parts of life

• Longer-term – interest in systemic change spurred by mutual understanding and “humanizing the other” 

What participants have to say about Living Room Conversations:

• "I'm trained in all these different ways of dialogue and deliberation, but I still come back to the LRC model, because you don't have to be professional. This is a layperson tool. I see those tools being applied in many non-LRC settings. The skills are transferable to church, school, workspace, politics." -Ramona C.

• "People see that there is value in talking to those who have different opinions or beliefs but also they find that they have much in common." - Sue G.

• "There is a lightness of being and humor in LRC, and a spirit of joy…"  - Dennis Mansfield, Author, Business Coach and Podcaster

• "It’s bringing civility back to discourse on controversial issues." - Sue B.