Lifting Every Voice: "I'd love to understand your thinking better."

Excelsior’s Center for Social Justice, the Civic Engagement Rope Team, the Underground Railroad Education Center, and the YWCA of the Greater Capital Region are thrilled to invite you to participate in our 2025 democratic engagement dialogue sessions.

How do we lift every voice? Let’s explore together the meaning of democracy and ways to engage with others when we all have different ways of thinking. Join us for a series of conversations hosted by Excelsior’s Center for Social Justice and the Civic Engagement Rope Team.

During each session, the conversation will focus on:

• Our collective exploration of the meaning and power of democracy as a way of thinking and a lifestyle.
• Strategies to create and engage in dialogue that transcends disagreement, promotes inclusion, leverages our diversity, and strengthens democracy.
• Concrete actions we could pursue to participate and promote democracy in our daily environments.

This particular session, we will be honored with the participation of Dr. Milton Bennett, who as part of our democratic engagement dialogue series will keynote for Excelsior the day before (May 28 at 2PM EDT) on Intercultural Communication: “Developing Intercultural Consciousness for Multicultural Survival”.

Dr. Milton J. Bennett is an adjunct professor of intercultural communication in the Department of Sociology at the University of Milano Bicocca, Italy. He is also the director of the Intercultural Development Research Institute, co-located in Washington State, USA and Milan, Italy. He is known for originating the Development Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (i.e., foundational model of the JEDI Framework and the Intercultural Development Inventory Excelsior University is integrating into its justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts), and he has consulted with hundreds of universities, companies, and communities throughout the world on topics of international and domestic intercultural relations. 

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