各位好友, 佳節愉快!我們希望跟您分享朝邦20周年的大創舉, 並祝福您2020年 平安快樂! 

“Happy Holidays! We like to share this good news with you and wish you a happy and enriching 2020!" 

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“No matter what it looks like, it’s always a people problem." Initiating friendly dialogue between people is the key,” stated Mr. George Yen, Chairman of CP Yen Foundation.

With the mission to facilitate the art of dialogue for positive social change, CP Yen Foundation organized the First Dialogue Impact Award and held the award ceremony today. More than a hundred guests passionate about the impact of dialogue attended the event. The event aimed to leverage dialogue to enhance communication, civic cultural literacy, while emphasizing the importance of respect as prerequisite to dialogues. CP Yen Foundation hopes dialogue becomes a way of life, a part of our culture that helps to solve problems, and moves from dialoguing between people to dialoguing between groups. Further, dialogue can enrich our cultural foundation and collective wisdom.  

The First Dialogue Impact Award is divided into three categories of gold, silver and bronze. A total of 10 institutions were awarded this award with diverse topics that span from educational issues, corporate management, funding for organizations, community dialogues, cross-generational communication and more. Each of the awardees utilized dialogue in various perspectives, including fostering active listening, inquiry to basic civil literacy, building respectful, inclusive and participatory culture to promote positive social changes, to discover the multiple elements of dialogue in Taiwan and to manage internal and external conflict through dialogues.  

George Yen reflected that the purpose of establishing the Dialogue Impact Award is to recognize efforts on personal, organizational, and community levels to promote dialogue, build up a culture of dialogue, and communicate by listening and inclusivity to encourage organizational change, innovation, community development and family harmony. In addition, the Dialogue Impact Award aims to help promote awareness of dialogue in public society, to enhance social harmony and civic cultural literacy through consolidated skills such as focusing, listening and inclusiveness.

Organizations and institutions that received the Dialogue Impact Awards include:

Gold Award recipients

• CommonWealth Parenting “EDU TALK 100” / CommonWealthGroup/CommonWealth Parenting
• Friendly dialogue for Dementia Patients / Department of Health, New Taipei City Government
• Story opens up the dialogue of our lives / Dr. Tsen-Yung Wang, Graduate Institute of Social Work, National Chengchi University

Silver Award Recipients

• 5-month cross-department dialogue exercises / Zhi Shan Foundation
• Badland old trails as dialogue strategies for in-depth experiential, cross-participatory and discovering local identities / Dr. Hsiu-Tzu Chang, Department of Urban Planning, National Cheng Kung University
• Practice and deepening of self-regulation and accountability in Taiwan’s NPOs / Taiwan NPO Self-Regulations Alliance
• Dialogue with Time, Taichung Exhibition / Taiwan Active Aging Association

Bronze Award Recipients

• Non-conventional Agile Management Practice / Titansoft Pte. Ltd.

• Agility Project / Agile Community Taiwan

• JUST FEEL Compassionate Communication on Campus / JUST FEEL

The culture of dialogue can be used for formal and informal communication. In meetings or discussions inside the organization, dialogues should reflect on the following 4 core elements:

1. Empathic listening – listen without interruption when someone is stating his or her views
2. Equality – value inputs from all participants
3. Surfacing the assumptions – in explaining a person’s own views or offering suggestions, first disclose the assumptions of the viewpoint
4. Re-stating – inquiry (clarify issues with open questions), suspending judgments (let go of one’s judgments) and the ability to state one’s viewpoint clearly

Senior media expert Lan Hsuan points out that, while the Internet makes the world more accessible, people tend to stay in their comfort zones. So instead of being globalized, we seem to have moved back to a tribal culture that is closely knitted on the inside but reserved toward the outside world. Language should be a tool to understand others. But without trust, language becomes something with potential to create conflict, hatred and suspicion. By building a wall that blocks away outside world, dialogues become difficult. This is a severe challenge faced by Taiwan’s society right now.

Audrey Tang, Minister without Portfolio at Executive Yuan, states the starting point of a dialogue is mutual trust. Goals would come after that. Tang feels dialogue impact is a form of social innovation. We all experience times when we are excluded by people of different views. That means the purpose of dialogues is not what is being said but what can be achieved when people with different views come together. Open participation is the foundation of social progress.

Jorie Wu, CEO of CP Yen Foundation explains, facilitation the culture of dialogue on the personal, organizational, and societal level requires the awareness and skills on the personal level as well participatory mechanism and culture on the organizational level to preserve the spirit and practice of dialoguing. CP Yen Foundation will continue to organize Dialogue Impact Award to help the facilitation process in improving the quality of dialogues and substance of information. Dialogue is also possible even in organizations where decisions are made by a small number of executives. Dialogues can add innovation and cohesiveness to the decision. Dialogues can also be used for public issues across departments, ethnicity, and countries to solve the issues and bring changes. The basic elements of a dialogue – equality, empathic listening, and surfacing the assumptions are also parts of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: #4 quality education, #5 gender equality,  #10 reduced inequalities, #16 peace, justice and strong institutions, and #17 partnerships. To achieve the UN sustainable development goals, it is clear that collaboration and dialogues of multiple stakeholders are needed.