These youth summits involved three events in Waco, Texas, designed to build on the President’s Summit on America’s Future. The first event, held on the campus of Baylor University on September, 1997, attracted some 1200 young people from Central Texas to learn about how they might serve their communities. The second event in 1998 combined about 600 youth and adults in dialogues about how to make the dreams of youth come true. The third event involved a celebration of service and additional facilitator training. The PDC trained facilitators and coordinated the group sessions for each of these events.

The PDC led a day-long conference for Columbia Basin College and WSU to establish a grass-root dialogue to explore life-long learning and community service to Hispanic communities in the Tri-Cities area of Washington. The conference engaged about 100 community members from diverse groups in a variety of creative dialogue formats to explore future relationships between institutions of higher education and the community.

Under the title “Keepin’ It Real,” a group of students and teachers from three high schools participated in a public dialogue process that was integrated into their own training to lead public dialogue events at their schools. Students from Cupertino High School served as peer trainers. This was intended to be a “pilot project” leading into full-scale projects in three High Schools in the district. Although there was great enthusiasm among the participating teachers and students, there was not funding for the full-scale project.