Stowe on the Go facilitates difficult conversations using historical objects and nurtures common ground for common good.

In a divisive, increasingly polarized world, the Stowe Center helps communities recognize and appreciate where they are united.

Stowe on the Go offers facilitated experiences to help hone deep listening and constructive conversational skills that lead to better understanding of each other. We use museum collection items to ground each conversation in historical context and provide a springboard for discussion that helps lead to common ground.

Our approach helps participants practice skills for engaging in difficult conversations with open minds and respect for difference.

A Stowe on the Go experience leads to more cohesive groups that better understand each other. Our goal is for each person to say: “I will think about what you just said.”

To book your Stowe on The Go experience, please call Angie at 860-522-9258 ext. 321 or email her at mpena@stowecenter.org.

FEATURED EXPERIENCES

Explore the impact of word choice on perceptions and social justice.

Key Takeaways:

  • Recognize the power of language.
  • Engage critically with media and everyday sources.
  • Use your words to foster equity and justice.

Learn about sharing authority and responsibility using historical literary activism stories.

Key Components:

  • Reflect on authority and responsibility.
  • Speak on behalf of others ethically.
  • Build plans for organizational equity.

Develop tools to navigate differing perspectives and build understanding.

Highlights:

  • Explore neutrality and radicalism through history.
  • Situate personal views in the current political landscape.
  • Gain skills for engaging diverse perspectives.

MORE DETAILS

Experience Packages

  • One 2-hour experience.
  • Three 2-hour experiences over 1-2 months.
  • Six 2-hour experiences over 3–6 months.

Includes:

  • Two consultation sessions to tailor the experience.
  • A follow-up session with data insights and success evaluation.

Add-ons:

  • Custom-made experiences tailored to your organization’s specific
  • Contextual and historical research to enhance the experience.
  • Facilitation services for guided collaborative discussions.
  • Literary Activism Lecture: The impact of language on social justice.
  • A Taste of SotG: Exploring labels and language through historical documents.
  • Archival Research: Hands-on lessons and professional insights.
  • Into the Archives: Engaging with primary documents for deeper learning.

An intimate gathering for 8–12 guests. Choose from:

Bring History Home:
A historical tour from the comfort of your home.

  • Spiritualism as Resistance: Discover how 19th-century radicals and marginalized voices used Spiritualism to assert authority, challenge injustice, and envision a more equitable world through the contradictions of speaking the unspeakable.
  • When We Don’t See the Signs: Reflect on the influence of signs and their symbolic meanings through an 88-year-old Stowe House artifact, encouraging participants to reconsider the signs they encounter every day.
  • Bearing Credentials: Examine the power of language and systems of oppression through historic objects like the Black Census of Hartford, challenging unjust narratives and embracing literary activism for self-definition and change.

Invite Us to Facilitate:
Guided discussion to build connections.

Change happens through the committed efforts of communities working for the realization of their shared values in the world around them. While individuals make up communities, individuals are also made by their communities; and neither individual or community can arise completely divorced from the broader cultures (language, images, art) and systems (law, education, government, and more) that surround them.

Stowe on the Go is a unique Diversity*Equity*Inclusion initiative built on the foundational idea that addressing and ameliorating injustice and inequity requires an understanding of both the systems and cultures that define and perpetuate them, and the orientation of individuals and communities within them. In fostering this understanding, and by weaving back and forth between broad cultural ideas and personal relationships to them, our facilitators guide groups through programs that are at once honest and unflinching, and also empowering, focusing on the ways in which communities can refuse, remake, and reimagine an unjust status quo.

Additionally, Stowe on the Go is about more than ideas: it’s about history, with an extensive array of Collections items from the Stowe Center’s Vault to illustrate and instruct. We root our programs in the past, with an eye toward elucidating its complexity, and then facilitate deep conversation about the insights and ideas the past can offer us now. From statuary, to jewelry, to letters, to children’s books, we use our Collections to look critically at how objects and texts can be a projection or a challenge of expectations for ourselves, for others, and for the world around us: at times affirmations of power-as-it-is and at times resistances to it.

Memorable and engaging, inspiring and empowering, Stowe on the Go endeavors to be an initiative that participants take in and then carry on, beyond two hours, beyond their group, beyond what they thought they knew.

MEET OUR FACILITATORS

Erika Slocumb is a scholar of Black history. She is a PhD Candidate in Afro-American Studies and holds a Master of Science in Labor Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. At Stowe Center she expands the narratives of communities of the global majority, in conversation with Harriet Beecher Stowe and her work in social justice and civic engagement.

Anita brings a remarkable ability to tie historical issues to contemporary themes. Her calm demeanor helps all feel at ease and broaden understanding. Anita’s ability to make connections builds common ground quickly and enables an open conversation. Anita holds a PhD in American Literature from the University of Rochester.

Brenna’s skills at facilitating difficult conversations is impressive and combine deep listening with nimbleness from a decade of work in improv theater. They hold a bachelor’s degree in English and Sociology and a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Connecticut.