PHOTOS: Community Conversations Event Helps People Discuss Middle East
The event held at the Culver City Senior Center Tuesday night featured facilitated conversations between community members.
Participants in the Community Conversations: Spark Healing Through Conversation event held Tuesday, February 25, were divided into 14 breakout groups led by members of the Equity and Human Relations Advisory Subcommittee (EHRAC) and volunteers from the public. These supportive facilitators led discussions in smaller groups, with event moderators Zahra Sakkejha and Ben Ginsberg monitoring the conversations and intervening to advise the facilitators of individual conversations and redirect dialogue.Over 100 people RSVP'd for the "Community Conversations: Spark Healing Through Conversation" event on Tuesday, February 25, and around 90 showed up. Given the intense public comment surrounding the issue at city council meetings, those who attended were required to sign a waiver committing to decorum and respectful conduct before participating. One of the first exercises of Tuesday night's event was to contemplate and write about thoughts on several questions presented by the moderators. Attendees were prompted to consider things like "Why are you here?" and "What do you hope to take away from this?" and spent several minutes writing their reflections on these questions.Before the main exchange between community members, moderators Ben Ginsburg (left) and Zahra Sakkejha (right) introduced themselves to the crowd and explained their hopes for the night. They also hosted a model conversation—with Ginsburg acting as a pro-Israel speaker and Sakkejha speaking as pro-Palestine—demonstrating the focus on internal feelings they hoped to see in the group conversations.Culver City Vice Mayor Freddy Puza participated in the Community Conversations: Spark Healing Through Conversation event on Tuesday, February 25. The Conversation was not originally on the Equity and Human Relations Subcommittee work plan but was put onto the agenda due to the ongoing public demands surrounding a ceasefire resolution in the city. Mayor Dan O'Brien also attended but did not participate in the conversations.Culver City Councilmember Bubba Fish also participated in the Community Conversations: Spark Healing Through Conversation event on Tuesday, February 25. "I am grateful to the EHRAC for bringing the community together for an evening where we challenged our biases, listened to other perspectives, and saw the humanity in one another," Fish told Culver Crescent after the event.Members of the public were handed random numbers that assigned them to the individual groups in which they would have the main conversations. Some groups were aligned in their opinions, while others had more trouble understanding each other. While some emotions flared briefly, the night was mostly uneventful.The conversations lasted around 45 minutes, and each touched on different topics based on the concerns and feelings of individual members of those groups. These conversations were meant to focus on how the conflict and dialogue around it impact participants personally but the history of the region was an unavoidable topic in several of the groups.After the group discussions, EHRAC Chair Samia Bano asked for input from event attendees on how to improve the city's approach to equity. The crowd's answers were written down and displayed at the end of the event.
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