The Village Square

The Village Square is a civic organization that promotes civil and factual dialogue across the partisan divide on local, state and national issues.

"A nervy bunch of liberals and conservatives who believe that disagreement & dialogue make for a good conversation, a good country (and a good time)."

The Village Square was founded by local community leaders who enjoyed across-the-aisle friendships to improve the civility of the civic dialogue.  The Village Square was founded in Tallahassee in 2006 and now has six locations across America.

The Village Square hosts Dinner at the Square - an annual dinner series on civic issues, Take-out Tuesday - a civic forum on local and state issues, and Our Town - a Tallahassee-focused series of programming that includes a "Local Leadership Forum" and "Fast Forward Tallahassee," along with various other program offerings you can find online here.

The Village Square was one of 24 organizations nationally in 2009 to win the Knight Community Information Challenge for their project We the People.  The project, in part, created the public policy wiki We the Wiki, a website that anyone can edit about local, state or national political and policy decisions.  The "Our Town" series is funded through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Fund through the Community Foundation of North Florida.  This project hyperlocal information project included the creation of this TallahasseeWiki - part of the LocalWiki project - to support an informed and engaged community.

The Village Square first formed after a divisive local referendum on whether to buy into a proposed coal plant. The debate quickly turned into an expensive PR campaign that obscured the facts more than it educated the citizens. It also became all about liberals vs. conservatives and all the national issue baggage that comes along with it.  The first board of directors of The Village Square invited both proponents and opponents of the coal plant to participate in an organization that was hoped would create a community forum that could deal with local decisions factually and constructively.  At the end of the first dinner season, leading voices in the debate were invited to participate in All GEOPolitics is Local: Tallahassee's Energy Future.  

You can find a list of current and former members of the board of directors here.

To the Village Square, Inc. is a not-for-profit 501(c)3 corporation incorporated in the State of Florida.  It is supported by community donations.