GROUP THINK, redefined

Culture | April 1st, 2015

GROUP THINK team members Josh Hoper, Nicole Mattson, Brittany Sickler and Karl Warner // Photo by Brandon Hass

A new local program called GROUP THINK is inviting the community to engage with strangers.Fueled by the principle of community inclusiveness, GROUP THINK gathers speakers of diverse backgrounds to share their perspectives and experiences with an attentive audience on the second Wednesday of every month at The Stage at Island Park.

Karis Thompson / Photo by Penny Burns “We spend most of our lives as Americans and as a Fargo-Moorhead community with people with whom we have something in common,” said Karis Thompson, an active community member and GROUP THINK team member. “We wanted to host a conversation like GROUP THINK, where the theme or the conversation would invite or be enriched by a plurality of perspectives – to build a platform or set up a time and place for people who have less in common to find their way into each other’s stories and each other’s presence.”

GROUP THINK is unique in that its two guest speakers engage in the same conversation rather than present their ideas individually. The conversation is theme-centered and fast paced – the speakers talk for just 20 minutes. Then, in next 20 minutes, audience members are invited to add their own insights to the conversation.

“It’s about coming together within those disparate interests and backgrounds and having that ability or that willingness to share but also that humbleness or that ability to step back and look at someone else’s perspective,” said Brittany Sickler, a GROUP THINK team member and economic development specialist by day.

GROUP THINK speakers Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt and Newzad Brifki on The Midwest and the Middle East / Photo by Marisa Jackels of Emerging Prairie

Past GROUP THINKs have included pairing a creative director with an architect, an addiction informatics officer with a criminal justice professor, and a humanities director with a Kurdish community director. Thompson said their speaker selections have been “both intentional and serendipitous.”

“We’ve tended to start with the speakers and then try to find some commonality or to create a container for the conversation that would represent their respective interests and create enough expansiveness with the questions or theme that they can maybe learn within the conversation but also speak out of their own expertise,” she said.

Next Wednesday’s theme is “Home.” The aim will be to look at the concept of home, not necessarily as a physical location, but a place we feel a sense of identity or what Maya Angelou called “the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Featured speakers include Noha Abdelrahman, an artist and NDSU architecture student, and Marian Kadrie, a Baha’i leader and foster parent for more than 300 children.

GROUP THINK will also host a more unscripted version of this discussion over dinner at Habesha Ethiopian Cuisine on April 22 starting at 5:15 p.m.