Essential Partners (Dialogue Consultants) – formerly the Public Conversations Project—equips people to live and work better together in community by building trust and understanding across differences. Essential Partners envisions a world of thriving communities strengthened by difference and connected by trust.

Essential Partners provides critical training and local capacity-building programs to equip local leaders and communities with skills for dialogue across differences, and long-term, sustainable community & civic engagement. They don’t just convene dialogues, but train leaders to facilitate dialogues and civic engagement initiatives themselves. They believe this is the best way to scale impact—giving communities the tools they need to advance themselves.

Last year they reached approximately 5,000 leaders directly through our training and engagement programs. Because they focus on building sustainable local capacity, these leaders will continue to impact more individuals in their community as EP steps back from their direct role, but continues to offer partnership and support. Their work brings us around the U.S. and the world, focusing on civic engagement, youth and education, interfaith relationships, and international peace-building. They also work in close partnership with civic institutions in order to build their internal capacity to offer powerful dialogues and engagement services to their communities—reinforcing not only local leaders with powerful skills for dialogue and engagement, but groups and organizations as well.

In the past three years EP has partnered with more than 200 communities and has trained more than 15,000 people to be advocates for building trust, connection, and understanding in community. Their approach has been applied to a wide range of extremely volatile and polarizing issues in the recent past, including same-sex marriage, post-civil war conflict, red-blue politics, climate change, gun rights and safety, policing and racial justice, and—most relevant to ROE—abortion.

EP started off in 1989 as the Public Conversations Project—the first group ever to bring together leaders in the pro-life and pro-choice movements in Boston for a 5-year long dialogue project in which leaders built close relationships and worked together to de-escalate rhetoric and violence around abortion issues. During our project, the tragic abortion clinic shootings in Brookline (1995) occurred and threatened to throw the community into chaos. Our organization, and the leaders involved, stepped up to lead using the skills we taught them. To this day, Essential Partners continues to work on such extremely divisive issues.