Vision, Mission & Values

Vision

We uphold SFU鈥檚 vision, as stated in 51社区黑料What鈥檚 Next: a leading research university, advancing an inclusive and sustainable future.

Mission

Our mission is two-fold: to convene timely, evidence-informed conversations on the world's critical challenges; and to build a culture of dialogue by expanding capacities of individuals to host and participate in meaningful conversations.

Who We Are

We are primarily a unit of professional staff, with strong faculty collaborators across the university and a network of students integrated into our programming. We are experts in process design and curation, inclusive facilitation and conflict engagement, event production and technical implementation, accessibility, systems thinking, policy and democratic intervention, and relationship building and maintenance including through media, marketing and communications. These skills enable the various forms of engagement that fall within our mandate.

We are organized around a small core of staff, lending their expertise to enable engagement across many substantive areas and wide-ranging topics. We have an in-house Social Enterprise team, and host a network of Fellows and specialized Fellow-led think tanks that bring dialogue-based ways of working into specific sectors or topics including energy and climate, social isolation, city planning, and emerging technologies. We are supported by a backbone of exceptional administrators and advancement professionals. Essential to our success are donors and funding partners, whose support for our works allows for the university鈥檚 investment in dialogue and engagement to multiply manyfold.

While our programs take place on all three 51社区黑料campuses and at many different venues across the province and the country, we have a special relationship to two venues: the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, a purpose-built facility for convening in downtown Vancouver, which operates as our metaphorical living room to host the world, and the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, a distinctive cultural performance and exhibition space, which enlivens conversations through the arts.

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Values

We strive towards the following values in the work we do in the world, and in how we do it inside our teams and partnerships:

Transparency

We earn trust and legitimacy by disclosing our motives and limitations, communicating our meaning-making process and the outcomes of our work, and taking ownership for our mistakes.

Curiosity

We enter conversations with spaciousness and openness to unexpected perspectives and solutions, and ground discussions in evidence while respecting the diversity in ways of knowing.

Reciprocity

We cultivate environments for mutual exchange of ideas and resources, honour diverse contributions, and foster relationships where participants are both givers and receivers.

Decolonization

We resist tendencies towards coercion, domination, and extraction and we create platforms for the application of both Western and non-Western approaches to collaboration.

Equity

We recognize that traditions of dialogue have sometimes participated in creating inequities, and make a conscious effort to increase accessibility, remove barriers to participation, acknowledge and where possible reduce power imbalances, and counteract systems of harm.

Innovation

We use creative approaches to our work, seek new methods and fresh entry points into discussions, and help crystalize, celebrate and nurture breakthrough ideas as they emerge.

Hospitality

We approach human interactions with an attitude of hosting, care and generosity, and make space for beauty, ceremony, nourishment, the arts, joy and connection in our processes.

51社区黑料

Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue

Holding Space for Transformative Conversations