Living Well With Difference is a project in Luton, run by The Feast Youth Project in partnership with Youth Network.

We are running dialogue workshops with school-age students with the aim of equipping them to have more constructive discussions about divisive issues. The students will explore The Feast’s Guidelines for Dialogue as a framework for the kind of dialogue that leads to increased understanding of one another – dialogue that allows people to understand “the other” even if they can never agree with them, in order to create a platform from which they can work together to bring life into their community. They will then practice the art of constructive dialogue...
 

Not compromising – but Living Well with Difference

In a climate where there are increasingly issues that divide, we are teaching young people to live well with difference.
This is about being confident in our own strongly-held beliefs and opinions, yet with the openness towards someone whose beliefs and opinions are very different, without making “the other” an enemy.
This is about learning the skill to listen in order to understand someone else’s different, and even (to us) offensive, point of view in order to be able to work together on creating a society where we can work together for the good of the community we live in.


Using the Feast’s Guidelines for Dialogue

The Feast’s guidelines for Dialogue are a simple, but powerful tool in which to create the climate for a dialogue that values each person’s dignity and worth. A dialogue where everyone can be heard. A dialogue where the aim is not to about insisting I am right, but to understand why someone else thinks the way they do.

The kind of dialogue through which real change can come.

We have experienced the transformational power of these guidelines in our own lives as practitioners. We have also seen the impact of them in the lives of young people. We know they work!

Here is a link to them: https://thefeast.org.uk/resources

We are running workshops for school-age students. Working with college leaders, we are creating bespoke workshops in which students explore the guidelines for dialogue and put these into practice by discussing a tricky topic of their choice.
We are also running a workshop for teachers and youth leaders, where we will look at how we can help the young people in our classes and youth groups to have more constructive discussions about difficult topics.

Our aim is for people to be confident in their perspectives and beliefs, yet have a real openness to someone whose perspective and beliefs are very different, and possibly offensive to us. For people to understand the value of good dialogue with those who might be on the other side of a divide. For people to have the skill to meet “the other” and not to push them away as an enemy. In this way, we empower people to be those that bring wellbeing and life into a community – agents of a culture where we live well with one another, and where we value each person’s dignity and worth in refusing to make “the other” an enemy.