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occurred, it is unknown if incidents of transformation resulted from these sessions. The question

of whether transformation among dialogue participants occurred is a subject for future study.

Sustaining the conversation, bridging the divide describes the effort involved in the process

of preparing participants to dialogue about social issues they care enough about to engage in such

as race and discrimination. One variable underlying civic dialogue focused on difficult topics is

the ability to have multiple opportunities for that discussion to be thoroughly explored. Regardless

of the composition of the dialogue group, (friends, associates, or strangers) the historical

significance and gravity of racism in the United States necessitates successive and ongoing

opportunities to participate in dialogue conversation and begin a journey to bridging a racial divide

that is deeply rooted in American cultures and communities. With this in mind, it is important to

remind the reader that the composition of the dialogues in Albany had ‘Implicit Bias’ as its initial

meeting theme evolving to race with a majority of African Americans and women in attendance.

Much scholarly work on the benefits of sustained civic and deliberative dialogue exists.

Saunders (2001, 2005, 2011), who has conducted extensive research on the topic of sustained

dialogue, defined and developed a model for effective applications that calls for a focus on

relationships, relational rebuilding, and on-going continuous engagement of dialogue attendees

(Saunders, 2011). Although the dialogues on implicit bias was coordinated by an elected city

official and convened in a mid-sized city, Albany is the capital of New York state and as such

almost functioned as an independent initiative as these events were not designed or based on

Saunders sustained dialogue model or with any true model that I could observe. Several elements

of the framework I can say were good for analysis as they were instructive when examining the

third theoretical proposition derived from examining tension and conflict in dialogues especially

when they are convened to examine race and racism. The participants seemed to want more CCs.

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