What if the issue isn’t that people don’t care—but that they can’t see the full picture?
Dr. Lori Britt, Professor and Director of the School of Communication Studies at James Madison University, has spent years helping students and communities understand the complexity of the issues they care about. Now, as a 2025 Collaborative Discussion Project Visiting Fellow, she’s developing a new activity for the CDP Toolkit to help others do the same. Focusing on systems thinking, her new activity helps surface connections, clarify complexity, and reveal possibilities for meaningful change.
Already keen to learn more? Scroll down to register for an exclusive preview of this activity and how to facilitate it.
Lori’s work with the Collaborative Discussion Toolkit
Lori has been working with the Interactivity Foundation and its Collaborative Discussion Project for years. “Lori was instrumental in helping us shape the Collaborative Discussion Project in its earliest days,” says IF President Shannon Wheatley Hartman. “She has played a central role in how the project originally developed and continues to evolve. We are so grateful for her contributions and sustained support.”
An early collaboration in spring 2020 laid the groundwork for what would eventually become one of the CDP’s most important resources: the Collaborative Discussion Toolkit.
“We didn’t call it a Toolkit back then,” explains Shannon, “We—alongside colleagues such as Jack Byrd, Jess Friedrichs, Nick Longo, and Janice McMillan—were simply sharing what had worked in our own classroom experiments. Lori and I sorted through the initial collection, developed a common structure, and organized it all into five modules.”
Since that time, Lori has introduced the CDP Toolkit to countless classes, faculty members, and community groups. She has awarded certificates to students, as well as serving on IF’s Collaborative Discussion Program training team, helping build capacity far beyond her own campus.
“I incredibly value the open access nature of the Toolkit,” she notes. While “[m]any of these things exist out there in bits and pieces, the Toolkit brings it all together in a way that makes it meaningful, makes it coalesce, and gives people a meaningful experience.”
Mapping Systems and Revealing Solutions
As part of her Fellowship, Lori is developing a systems mapping activity to support the CDP’s Civic Collaboration module. Building on favorite Toolkit exercises like “Surrounding the Topic” (3.5), the new activity helps participants identify what is connected to a community issue, who is or may be affected, and what potential intervention points could exist.
“Systems mapping can be complex—but even paring down to the simplest concepts, it can be very helpful.”
Lori recently piloted a version of this work with a group of community leaders focused on the ALICE population—people who are “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, but Employed”. “So basically the working poor,” explains Lori; “people who are above poverty, but not yet able to not live paycheck to paycheck, and often have to make decisions about ‘do I pay for food or buy my kid sneakers for school?’”
That mapping helped reveal a key issue: when individuals begin to transition out of financial precarity, they often lose access to the very supports that help stabilize them. Realizing this meant the group were able to consider a new intervention. As Lori puts it, “one of the intervention points can be that once people get out of this ALICE band, what we need to do is not cut them off, but extend resources for two years, with maybe some kind of a requirement on their part—maybe education about budgeting and fiscal planning—so that we’re not just cutting them off. Otherwise they’re going to fall right back in.”
“It was really great to see that intervention point, and the nonprofits now are thinking about different ways they can do that.”
Collaboration that Catches
This is exactly the kind of insight Lori hopes others can make using her new CDP Toolkit activity. Whether used in classrooms, nonprofits, or in the community, the goal is to support deeper understanding, spark new ideas, and ultimately also enhance more effective collaboration.
“It’s been so much fun to see my students say, ‘Dr. Britt, I use this activity with my fraternity or my sorority or my club soccer team, and it worked. It really helped us.’,” she adds. “It’s amazing. I think it’s just so replicable.”
For Lori, that’s the real power of the Toolkit: it travels. As she puts it, “It’s a good contagion that we have—and we need good contagions right now.”
Want to explore Lori’s new systems thinking activity firsthand? Register for her workshop to test the new tool, reflect on how it can be adapted for your context, and take away ideas you can use in your class, workplace, or community. And for those looking to go even deeper, Lori will lead a full Civic Collaboration Coach Training later in the year.
Workshop: Thinking through Complex Issues to Support Civic Action with Dr. Lori Britt
Time: July 17, 2025 @ 1:00 pm – July 17, 2025 @ 3:00 pm
Cost: $40.00
Your Invitation to Collaborate
The Collaborative Discussion Toolkit is free and accessible to anyone interested in promoting inclusive, thoughtful dialogue. If you’d like to learn more about hosting a workshop or specialty Certificate Program, reach out to us.
👉 Start using the free Collaborative Discussion Toolkit
👉 Join a free webinar for an Introduction to the Toolkit
👉 Attend online training in September to become a CDP Coach and deliver customized certificate programs
👉 Contact us for support running a workshop for your team or group
👉 Subscribe to the Collaborative Discussion Project newsletter for Toolkit activities, tips and tricks every Monday
👉 Donate to the Interactivity Foundation to keep supporting valuable dialogue work and programs
