Every year, members of the Leadership Park City class present a number of project ideas to their class. The project with the largest number of votes is then selected as the class project.
Leadership Class 29 member Scott van Hartesvelt says the project their class chose is called “Let’s Talk.” It’s a program designed to increase the quality of civil discourse when discussing controversial issues. He says it’s a communications training program to build skills which focus on connecting with one another, rather than competing with each other.
“The goal is not to make a point or score points, but instead to kind of break down the issues and understand the differences,” van Hartesvelt said. “In terms of need, we all know the examples in this community, be it the equity policy at the schools, or sometimes things more basic, like paid parking at the mountain or even pickleball. These are conversations that as a community, we should be able to engage in and have and walk away shaking hands and being neighbors. But recently, that feels like it's a stretch.”
Class member José Chacon adds that the platform the class has developed can help create consensus.
“Despite where everyone's coming from, we can engage in difficult, complex and you know, sometimes emotionally loaded conversations through a framework that allows that discourse to happen, without a lot of finger-pointing, and just all those things that I think, at the end of the day, that just heat up the conversations - we don't get anywhere,” Chacon said. “We can have conversations on these topics and coexist at the same time and really come to some middle ground.”
Class 29 partnered with the Mountain Mediation Center, whose mission statement is to bring people together to prevent conflict, resolve disputes and build a more inclusive community, as well as with the Park City Community Foundation. van Hartesvelt says the two organizations helped develop the training program’s four pillars.
“They are self-awareness,” he said. “We can't have great conversations unless we understand our own biases and are self-aware of those when we start communicating to connect. The second is active listening, being able to listen with intention. The third is finding common ground, which speaks for itself. And then the last is again, communicating to connect, as opposed to communicating to compete or win.”
Public outreach begins this week, which includes one 3-hour training course, with a 90-minute follow-up a few weeks later to see how people are implementing the training. A second training event will be Aug. 10 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Blair Education Center at the Park City Hospital.
Here is the link to register for the training program.