On Wednesday, September 14, Cary Academy proudly hosted the school’s first ever dialogue conference in association with CA’s Dialogue Across Differences program. Students from Ravenscroft School, Durham Academy, and Cary Academy were in attendance, in addition to panelists Kimberly Shaw, Dawn Osborne-Adams, and Gerald Givens Jr. Designed by Thavish Sindhwani and Thomas George and led by Cary Academy’s Dialogue student leaders, the morning was focused on building a community of dialogue facilitators across these schools.
Panelist Gerald Givens Jr, the President of the Raleigh-Apex NAACP, spoke about dialogues that he had been involved with between communities of color and law enforcement officers. Students also got to hear from former Cary Academy educator Kimberly Shaw who now works as the Director of Diversity, Equity, Justice, and Belonging at the Duke School talk about her work as an associate of Essential Partners, the program partnered with Cary Academy in designing school-wide dialogues.
After the panel, students split up into groups with students from Ravenscroft and CA to debrief what they had found most valuable about the panel, as well as discuss how dialogue is being implemented in their school communities. Many students from Ravenscroft, whose dialogue program is just kicking off, expressed hopes that more time will be allocated for semi-regular dialogues in which students can empathetically explore larger, more significant issues. Cary Academy students paralleled this hope, expressing their enthusiasm with past dialogues they had participated in that had done exactly that.
The morning concluded with a community-building lunch and an optional campus tour for Ravenscroft students.
Thomas George (’24) states, “Our goal for the dialogue conference was to establish a connection with other facilitators and dialogue programs within our community and I think we did exactly that. The outcome of the dialogue conference was significantly better than we anticipated, and I have high hopes for this program and what’s to come.”