Uncertainty, Community, and Dialogue: Insights from Brown University and the University of Minnesota

At our 2026 Higher Ed Community of Practice Summit, held in person and hosted by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, we were privileged to hear from two outstanding campus leaders: Dr. Kelly Collins, Director of the Inclusive Dialogue and Civic Engagement program at the University of Minnesota, and Anthony Medeiros, from Brown University.

These two leaders generously shared the insights, impacts, and challenges of incorporating Reflective Structured Dialogue within their respective institutions.

Building Capacity at UMN

Dr. Collins describes the growth of UMN's collaboration with Essential Partners, from the crisis moment following October 7th to the “aha” experience of dialogue during an EP training.

“That experience fundamentally shifted how I and my colleagues thought about leadership and education, and how dialogue fits in," she explains. “It showed us that if we wanted dialogue to become part of the university and all of our campuses, we couldn't rely on a handful of passionate facilitators or student leaders—although we treasure those folks. We needed to build capacity across the institution.”

“We really approach dialogue as a shared institutional infrastructure,” she says. Staff and faculty trained in Our Reflective Structured Dialogue approach now span numerous departments and centers, including the Office for Equity and Diversity, the Center for Educational Innovation, their Teaching and Learning unit, student affairs, several academic departments, the libraries, and community partners. UMN is now working to develop an institutional Community of Practice that mirrors our own, where innovation and peer learning can develop a thriving ecosystem.

RSD for Crisis and Leadership Development

The goal of Brown University's Community Dialogue Project, says director Anthony Medeiros, is “to use co-curricular programming to develop students into facilitative leaders with high conflict competence that will serve them at Brown in their careers and beyond.” 

Knowing that they would need skilled facilitators, Medeiros invited Essential Partners to lead a two-day Designing and Facilitating Reflective Structure Dialogue workshop in November 2025. They had no idea how soon the skills they learned would be needed.

Following the tragic campus shooting on December 13, 2025, Medeiros invited the students in his program to let them know what they needed. “They asked for a space where they could reflect together and share,” he says, “so they decided that they wanted to go ahead and do their first RSD, and this was going to be the subject.”

With “fantastic coaching and support” from Essential Partners, they crafted a dialogue that would allow participants to name sources of strength they accessed before, during, and after the tragedy. 

“They closed by sharing what gift each of them had to share with the Brown community as we started our journey. That gem was an EP suggestion. Our group came out, not fully healed, but very closely linked, seen, and supported—and, most importantly, with a new collective story that built agency. Dialogue didn't replace the other tools and supports. It complemented them with a structured student-to-student tool that could hold the depth of hard topics while still feeling supported.”

The benefits of training with Essential Partners have also been tangible and measurable for Brown students, particularly among students who practiced facilitation and design skills. “Our facilitators saw major gains compared to the baseline in unwillingness to reserve judgment until they've heard multiple sides … The biggest gain they made was in their willingness to share their views even when they expect others to disagree. This was far and away the biggest thing.” 

“Listening more doesn't mean sharing less,” he observed. “Step up, step back means we want everybody to have the mic, to have a chance to use it, and then pass it on to the next person. Our work isn't about putting a band-aid on disagreement or making it go away. It's about repairing our relationships.”

Watch the complete video to hear more about the transformation work happening on these campuses, just two recent examples from the hundreds of partner colleges and universities across the United States and around the globe.