• Identify an issue of broad community concern. Some of the issues communities have started with include: race relations; crime and violence; understanding environmental impact statements; or exploring the issues involving proposed developments.
• Let people start where they are. It must be clear from the outset that the dialogue is not just for conservatives, or for liberals, or for 'the civic crowd,' or for any one group. By bringing personal stories and experiences into the discussions early on, the dialogue will naturally welcome people of all backgrounds and points of view.
• Arrange a venue for study circles, and determine whether there will be one facilitator, or shared facilitation within the group.
• For large, community-wide study circle programs, build a broad coalition to implement and sponsor the dialogue. Community members will get involved in the dialogue when people they know and respect make it clear that their participation is essential.
• For small-scale study circles, an individual or group within a grassroots organization (churches, neighborhood associations, businesses, schools, and clubs) need only find a topic of community interest and invite people.
• Aspects of the topic can be determined from one meeting to the next, depending on current issues or specific aspects of interest to the group.
• Facilitators should try to move the group from the personal to seeing the issue within the wider systems at work within their community. (Adapted from: http://www.studycircles.org/pages/artabout/whole.html)

History (from the Co-Intelligence Institute website, http://www.co-intelligence.org/S-ctznsstudycircles.html) Study circles were born in New York in the 1870s. By their peak in 1915, 700,000 people were participating in 15,000 study circles in the U.S. The idea was carried to Sweden by union, co-op, and temperance organizers and by the fledgeling Social Democratic Party to educate their followers. Study circles flourished in Sweden even as it died away in the U.S. Today nearly three million Swedes participate in over 300,000 study circles annually, most funded (but not controlled) by the government with a per-participant subsidy. Swedish communities have even convened study circles to work through major issues facing their towns, with study circle participants turning into activists who then have a significant impact on events.

The U.S. is now blooming with renewed interest in study circles. In 1992, for example, in the small city of Lima Ohio, the Mayor's Office, Ohio State University and a multi-racial Clergy Task Force initiated grassroots study circles on race relations involving hundreds of people. These were so successful that participants created further waves of study circles involving businesses, neighborhood associations and schools - and the next year created a conference in which 40 community leaders from around the Midwest came to learn how to create community-wide dialogues on race in their own cities, triggering a movement that has now grown nation-wide.