Higher Education
Cooperation Café Series Toolkit
A cooperation café series is a concrete way to build pluralism (respect, relationships, and cooperation across differences) on campus.
Cooperation Café Series Toolkit
A cooperation café provides ongoing opportunities for students to connect across difference and work together for the common good. Whether it’s over breakfast, an afternoon coffee, a dining hall dinner, or a potluck, these events are a practical way to build pluralism on campus. In this resource, we’ll cover why this format works, ways to set your series up for success, and blueprints for sessions that build pluralism.
Why host a Cooperation Café Series?
A cooperation café series is a concrete way to build pluralism (respect, relationships, and cooperation across differences) on campus. Based on social science about what binds a community together, this series creates repeated opportunities for students to build meaningful relationships and take action toward the common good.
Here’s what distinguishes this approach and makes it effective:
- It’s Recurrent Cooperation Café participants meet repeatedly throughout the year, providing multiple, low-stakes opportunities for students to engage with those whose paths they may not otherwise cross. This approach leaves time for relationships and shared interests to develop between sessions.
- It’s Cooperation-Oriented This approach focuses on taking action around a shared civic cause. While a cooperation café provides ample time for students to talk about and across their differences, it keeps a shared desire for positive change as an incentive, motivation, and north star.
- It Engages Each Person’s Deeply Held Values Effective pluralism building gives people opportunities to work together for the common good while explicitly engaging the values and beliefs they bring with them. This models for students the importance of discovering the inspiring and admirable elements of each other’s stories and belief systems.
- It Prepares Students for Civic Life A Cooperation Café builds practical skills for building cooperative relationships across difference—a critical capacity for students’ ability to build civic and social community and succeed in their careers after college.
(To learn more about the interfaith leadership skills and strategies that underpin the Cooperation Café approach, explore Interfaith America’s Leadership Model)
Set Up for Success
This series can take many different formats, from a standing dinner to afternoon pastries and coffee. Regardless of the format that best suits your campus, here are some best practices:
- Intentional Timing: Try your best to choose a standing time that is convenient for most groups of students on your campus. For example, if many students self-support with paid work in the evenings, you might consider a breakfast meeting. Friday at noon might limit the participation of Muslim students attending prayer services, and many Christian groups meet Wednesday evenings. The particulars on your campus may be different. No time will be perfect, but try your best to avoid times that could exclude whole groups from participation.
- Building Buy-In: Try to recruit students from many different backgrounds to join the group. Depending on your students, you may frame the Cooperation Café as a chance to expand work on issues that are important to them, forge more interpersonal connections, or gain leadership experience. Emphasize to students that they are likely to get more out of the sessions if they commit to attending as many as possible. Sessions are designed to be engaging even if a student can’t come to all of them, but ideally repeat attendance provides a throughline between conversations.
- Setting up the Space: We recommend using Interfaith America’s Setting the Space Resource to prepare students to engage with each other in the fullness of their differences. This proven method helps emphasize to students that the goals of this time are to build respect across differences, mutually inspiring relationships, and cooperation for the common good. This space is not for attempting to change each other.
Sample Sessions
The following session outlines are suggested topics and activities in an intentional sequence. The exact nature, number, and length of meetings can be tailored to your needs and context. Regardless of the chosen format, we encourage you to: host several recurrent meetings over time, begin the series by focusing on an issue of shared concern, surface shared values while building genuine relationships, and end by taking concrete action. The following topics, prompts, and activities are a suggested rough structure that you should adjust to suit your needs.
Session 1: Introductory Session
We highly recommend starting with an exploratory session in which students are invited to discuss the issues that are most important to them, their aspirations for their shared community, and what working toward shared goals might look like. We do not expect to reach a consensus; this session endeavors to introduce students to each other through their mutual interest in the community they share. Beginning by exploring opportunities for cooperation is critical. You do NOT need to end the first session with a plan for a service project or other concrete action. The intention is simply to surface and notice all of the ways that students care about their shared community. This provides a foundation for future action and a shared, positive touchpoint to which the group can return.
Key Framing
- The Promise of Pluralism We live in one of the most diverse countries in the history of the world. That’s just a fact. That diversity isn’t going away. The promise of pluralism is that we don’t have to ignore our differences, pretend they don’t exist, or assimilate into a cultural “melting pot” where everyone becomes alike. Instead, we can positively engage our differences, celebrate our shared values, and work toward the common good without having to give up or change our identities. Moreover, the problems facing our communities are too great to solve by ourselves. Pluralism opens pathways for cooperating on these issues without having to change our beliefs.
- Learn more about this approach to cooperating across differences with our Respect-Relate-Cooperate Explainer and Pluralism FAQ.
- The Importance of Cooperation Being able to work together on issues we all care about is an essential part of pluralism. Throughout the series, we’ll have time to discuss what we care about and why. However, the intention for this series is to move beyond mutual understanding and toward cooperation. We’ll start the series by exploring what we care about collectively as a group and end it by making concrete plans to work on those issues together.
- Our Asset-Based Approach We begin with the assumption that participating individuals and communities are replete with existing strengths, resources, and expertise. We will endeavor to learn about, highlight, and make space for these assets. We don’t ignore challenges, but we seek to tackle those challenges by first asking: What resources do we already have? Define your community by its assets and aspirations instead of its deficits.
Questions and Prompts
For this first session, it is important for the facilitator to get a sense of what students discuss. Instead of pairing students up, pose the following as table topics with a notetaker, ask students to record their thoughts on chart paper around the room, or make sure that groups are sharing out their thoughts. Ensure that you write down things that surface for future reference. If students are really struggling to conceptualize “common good” issues (or “issues of shared concern”), you might throw out a broad array of topics in a non-directive way (mental health, AI, academic success, community needs, etc.) Good questions for this exploratory session might include:
- What is something you appreciate about living here?
- Think of all of the people who worked to better your community over the years. Coaches, teachers, volunteers, etc. Can you recall a group or individual who made a particularly positive impact on you or a group of which you’re a part?
- What do you think it looks like for this community to thrive? What would be the same? What might be different?
- What’s something facing our community that you believe you could improve?
- What’s something you would love to accomplish for your community?
- What’s something you want to leave better than you found it? Or, asked differently, what would you like to make better, easier, or different for those who come after you?
- Why do you think these things are important to you over other issues or opportunities?
- What opportunities to help the community are you already aware of?
Make note of matters that surfaced repeatedly and weave them into future sessions as applicable.
Session 2: Examining our Ethic of Pluralism
After getting to know each other’s aspirations and hopes for the community, consider leading a session to connect students with their own value systems and reasons for engaging in pluralism work.
Key Framing
- Pluralism is already all around us. It’s easy and understandable to focus on the ways that America has not lived up to the promise of pluralism. But what about all the ways in which we have lived up to that promise? Where in our community are people who are very different from one another cooperating and taking care of each other?
- Pluralism is compatible with all sorts of identities. People often assume that identifying strongly with a religion, group, or belief system makes pluralism harder. This is not the case. Pluralism leaders often work across difference because their commitments to their values are stronger than their fear of encountering differences. You can strongly believe that you know the truth and that others are wrong (e.g., there is no god, only people in my religion are saved, Socialism is the only just form of government, social services harm more than they help, etc.) and still be a pluralism leader.
- Encountering other value systems often strengthens our own. People often assume that learning about other people’s values, religions, or political beliefs will change or water down their own. This is not the case. In fact, learning more about other people’s worldviews often strengthens our abilities to identify what in our own backgrounds is most important to us. We trust that we will be enriched by each other’s experiences.
Activity
- Complete the journaling activity from our Identifying an Ethic of Pluralism resource
Questions and Prompts
- What do you think makes someone a bridgebuilder?
- Who is a bridgebuilder (someone who knows how to cooperate across differences) whom you admire?
- What’s something in the world around you that you benefit from that’s only here because diverse groups of people worked together? For example, things like the library system, universities, or the Civil Rights act were all made possible by people with different beliefs choosing to work together. What’s something you benefit from that exists because people from different backgrounds worked together?
- Think back to our last conversation. We talked about the issues facing our community, what it would look like for us to thrive, and what we would like to leave better than we found it. What are the connections between the topics you raised then and the influences we uncovered just now?
Action Planning
Explain to your group that the series will involve a service project you all complete together. Emphasize that they will also be given an opportunity to work together on one of the issues they identified in Session 1, and that it is okay if this project is not connected to the issue that they personally identified as most important.
For a smaller group:
- Ask students to suggest service events in which everyone could participate. Discuss:
- In what ways are these things connected to the issues we raised last session?
- Which one speaks to you?
- Why do you think that is?
- Ask students to come to a consensus about which project they would like to complete with the knowledge that there will be opportunities later on to plan cooperation around other issues as well.
For a larger group:
- Offer two to three options for service projects that students could complete together in your community. It might be helping a local charity, volunteering at a foodbank, cleaning up a natural area, or a different activity. Do your best to pick activities that tie in to the issues students raised in the first session. Here are some discussion questions to help them choose:
- Which project is most interesting to you?
- Why do you think that is?
- Ask students to come to a consensus about which project they would like to complete with the knowledge that there will be opportunities later on to plan cooperation around other issues as well.
Session 3: Appreciating Each Other
Key Framing
- Normalizing Difference We live in one of the most diverse countries in the history of the world. With all of our different experiences, perspectives, and values, it is completely normal and expected that we will disagree with each other sometimes. It’s important to normalize and expect these differences in opinion.
- The Perception Gap We tend to think that people who believe differently than us are more extreme than they actually are. For example, Westwood et al. found that political science research overestimates support for political violence by a factor of six. Studies have consistently found that we overestimate the distance between “us” and “them”—a phenomenon called “The Perception Gap.” That’s not to say there are not meaningful differences between people, but it does show that we overestimate how extreme or different from us a political “other” might be. To demonstrate this concept to students, you may consider showing this video.
- Appreciative Knowledge One way to positively engage our differences is to seek out the inspiring, admirable, and life-giving elements of each other’s stories, traditions, and experiences. This kind of knowledge about one another is called appreciative knowledge. We’ll be exploring some strategies to seek out and discover appreciative knowledge during this session.
Opening Prompts
- What’s a value from your religious or non-religious tradition, your community, or your family that inspires you to do good in the world?
- What’s something positive you wish more people knew or understood about your worldview, religion, community, or background? What might others find interesting or inspiring?
Activity: What makes a good question?
- Share the guidance for questions and examples that you’ll find in our Guide to Appreciative Knowledge
- Ask students to make two lists: one of the questions that they would love to be asked, and one of the questions that they would love to ask others.
Activity: Talk Better Together
- Have students ask each other their questions. One format you may consider using is IA’s Talk Better Together activity.
Debrief: Question Bank
- Have students document their favorite questions that they asked and answered. You can do this on paper, a shared document, or a brief survey. Make sure students have access to their collectively-created question bank as a resource to use when encountering difference and seeking appreciative knowledge.
- With remaining time, invite students to share anything a classmate shared that they found interesting or inspiring.
Session 4: Cooperation in Action
This session returns to an issue raised in the first through a service project everyone completes together. Regardless of the type of service event, we recommend that you continue to engage students’ values through the following prompts.
Key Framing
- Refocus on cooperation Explain that we’re going to revisit the issues we raised in the first session through concrete work
- This is only the first step
Questions to discuss during or after service
- What have our discussions over the last couple sessions (about each other’s deeply held values and the way these values call us to work together) added to the way you think about the common good
- People in this room are different from each other in lots of ways. How has knowing what they care about and why contributed to your understanding of our group?
Session 5: Continuing Cooperation
For the final session, we recommend debriefing the cooperation café, talking about the service project, and envisioning what it might look like to continue to cooperate.
Key Framing
- Ongoing Process Respect-Relate-Cooperate is a virtuous cycle, in which each element reinforces the others. It will never be “finished”. The respect for each other, mutually inspiring relationships, and cooperation forged during this series will continue to grow within this group and outside of it.
Debrief the Service Project
- Have students find a partner. Ask them to talk through the following prompts:
- What did you enjoy about the service project?
- What might you do differently if you were to do the same thing again?
- How did our conversations in this series impact your experience of working with everyone?
- What perspectives do we, as a group of diverse individuals, have that are assets for this work?
- What would it look like to continue working together on this shared concern? Write down next steps and ideas.
Activity: Envisioning Cooperation Everywhere
Tell students that they will now have an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned to different issues they’re passionate about, and to envision what cooperation around it might look like. Put labels with different issues raised during the first session on the tables. Ask students to distribute themselves at the tables labelled with topics they’re most excited about cooperating on, and to stay standing if the table they would prefer is full. Make duplicate tables for more popular issues as necessary. Ask students to talk about the following questions:
- Why are you passionate about this topic? Feel free to lean on your ethic of pluralism or anything else we’ve discussed to explain.
- What resources already exist (on campus or in the community) for this issue? Or, if you’re not sure, how could you find out?
- What’s something that people in this room could do to make improvements?
- What would longer-term cooperation around this issue look like? Be concrete. Think about all the little things—making group chats, inviting in clubs or existing networks, speaking with people already doing this work, finding out what needs to be done, planning events, etc.
- What’s a step you could take together? Pick something that you can and will do.
Close with Gratitude
As a final activity, pass out sticky notes and have students write down:
- something they accomplished because of this series
- something they plan to accomplish in the future
- something they’re glad they learned about a fellow classmate
Have students place the notes on chart paper or in designated spots. Call out all of the things that have been learned, accomplished, and set in motion.
Related Resources
Whether you’re a learner, an educator, or a practitioner, Interfaith America offers a suite of educational resources to help you realize your goals. Use our Learning & Action Bridge to find opportunities based on your role.
