Building Leaders and Resilient Communities through Effective Dialogue

Building Leaders and Resilient Communities through Effective Dialogue

Insight Debate and Dialogue works with your organization to improve educational experiences and outcomes through effective communication within and across campus communities

Trusted by educators and students across the country

Students enthusiastically embrace our program

“I liked the structure of it. As someone with very strong and, honestly, extreme opinions, it was very tempting at times to want to jump in and argue with people. But after the beginning, I got over that urge and learned to sit down and actually listen to people.”

Reggie Anderson

“This is my first time joining something like this, and I really liked it. It’s been so informative and insightful to hear both sides of the arguments and be part of a community that’s accepting everyone’s opinions.”

Luis Fowler

Our Approach

We lead student and faculty/staff groups through active learning experiences designed to make it easy for them to share their authentic, sometimes-unpopular views. We help them navigate the conflict between different views in a way that enables the group to transcend the conflict and forge deep bonds. This process develops leadership capacity in students and lays a foundation of civic resilience in the community as a whole.

We equip people to be better leaders, colleagues, and citizens

We cultivate solutions through three interconnected principles:

Collective Inquiry
The best solutions emerge when we bring together multiple ways of knowing. Through structured dialogue and collaborative exploration, we create spaces to develop nuanced understanding and actionable solutions that work.
Leadership Development

Nurture leaders who can navigate complexity with practical wisdom and serve the collective good with creative problem-solving. Our leaders learn to balance competing priorities, integrate diverse perspectives, and make ethical decisions suited to specific contexts.

Civic Resilence

Foster resilience by bringing together insights from across the political spectrum to develop sustainable solutions. Lasting resilience comes from understanding how technical, social, and ethical factors interact in real-world contexts.

Help people in your organization engage with different perspectives

We utilize proven methodologies that allow for curious, empathic, and open-minded engagement.

About Us

April Lawson Headshot

April Lawson

Co-founder

April’s journey to this work started when she left her Kansas home and moved to Yale. At Yale she found a community of debate that empowered her to develop her own philosophy through deep conversations with friends and public debates with wise peers. She also encountered a deep chasm of misunderstanding between the culture she’d left in Kansas and the culture of the coastal Ivy League, and she has desired ever since to find ways of bridging that chasm.

After graduation, April served in various government and government-adjacent capacities ranging from the Treasury Department to David Brooks’ office at The New York Times, while also volunteering with a variety of community organizations. Among these was Braver Angels, the nation’s largest grassroots nonprofit dedicated to bridging the partisan divide. Fascinated by her volunteer work with Braver Angels, in 2019 she decided to accept their offer of full-time employment.

At Braver Angels, April built their debate program and culture based on her own transformative experience at Yale, tailored to the contemporary cultural and political context. One of her key areas of focus was higher education, and the Braver Angels College Debate and Discourse Program was eventually recognized as a unique, best-in-class model within the field. In 2024, desiring to deepen her work with individual colleges and universities, April teamed up with Dr. Justin Eckstein to co-found Insight Debate and Dialogue.

Justin Eckstein

Co-founder

Justin Eckstein (PhD) is a distinguished scholar and practitioner in argumentation. Dr. Eckstein has made contributions to the academic discourse through his recently published book, “Sound Tactics,” his co-edited collection “Cookery,” and numerous peer-reviewed articles. Eckstein’s expertise is grounded in decades of competitive debate experience, spanning various formats at local, national, and international levels.

This practical knowledge has informed his academic work and led to innovative applications in real-world settings. Dr. Eckstein worked the past 10 years with state debate coalitions designing and organizing candidate debates for both local and national offices. In higher ed spaces, Dr. Eckstein has pioneered the implementation of circular debate formats which fosters more engaging and inclusive forms of democratic engagement.