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and empowerment. Civic dialogue convened in-person requires high levels of commitment and

personal stake (Jenlink, 2008; Yankelovich, 1991) that are critical for bridging the racial divide

1
and in mending entrenched and “wicked” (Matthews, 2004; Rittel & Webber, 1973;) issues.

Similar to distributive leadership and perhaps more appropriate to the civic dialogue

exchanges that challenged long-held beliefs and perspectives by the participants, is the concept

leaderfulness (Raelin, 2011).

Community Conversations: Civic Engagement, Group Dialogue & Leadership-Exemplified

The focus of leaderful practice is concerned with what groups of people can accomplish

together rather than singularly and this sets forth a model that can exemplify excellence. While

Raelin’s (2011, 2008, 2004) scholarship on the concept of leaderfulness is centered primarily in

management and organizational settings, the attributes of leaderfulness, as a specific form of

distributive leadership are relevant to the practice of civic and participatory dialogue and the

actions successfully used to confront tension and disagreement during the Albany dialogues that

arose out of the groups consideration of implicit bias, race, racism and discrimination impacts.

The concept of leadership-exemplified is a more accurate description of the civic

engagement and frameworks emphasizing participatory democracy (Fishkin, 2009; Gutmann &

Thompson, 2004) because it reflects an approach to leadership that is “collective, concurrent, and

collaborative” (Raelin, 2004, p. 1) process and in many respects corresponds to behaviors and

conditions present during high stakes dialogues. Each Community Conversation group was a

collective of diverse and unrelated individuals consisting of laborers, retirees, educators, students

1 Rittel and Webber (1973) defined “wicked” social policy issues in the context of urban planning theory as a
problem having an unclear diagnosis and definition, and an uncertain cause. The resolution of these issue calls for
defining and identifying the gap between what out to be versus what is.
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