Food for Thought: How Dinner & Dialogues Are Serving Up Conversations on Education & AZ’s Future
Last spring, Valley Leadership’s Civic Engagement Impact Team launched the Dinner & Dialogue series, a program designed to bring Arizonans together across lines of difference to talk about our state’s most pressing issues and explore ways to move forward together.
These intentional yet informal dinners build upon VL’s Principles of Doing, particularly Building Trust, Integrity, and Driven to Do, providing Arizonans with a platform to address difficult challenges and develop meaningful solutions.
Our first dinners had a theme of civic engagement, emphasizing the need to foster positive, productive conversations with individuals with whom we might disagree. Arizona’s political landscape is often perceived as deeply polarized, yet despite this perceived division, data from the Center for the Future of Arizona reveal significant areas of consensus among Arizonans on key issues, including education, criminal justice reform, and voting accessibility.
This past fall, we expanded the Dinner & Dialogue program as a series of conversations. The Civic Engagement Team will now host two types of dinners each fall and spring: initial dinners focused on the Civic Engagement theme, followed by topic-themed dinners. The topic-themed dinners are available only to those who have previously attended a Dinner & Dialogue event.
We kicked off this new series in October and November with two dinners on K-12 Education, a critical issue for the future of Arizona, and one that can bring up strong feelings.
Participants were asked two questions:
- Question 1: If we had to move one measurable needle for Arizona students in the next 24 months, what would it be—and what’s the most realistic coalition or policy lever to get there?
- Question 2: Given finite dollars and a diverse delivery system (district, charter, private via ESAs, homeschool), what’s the fairest way to balance family choice with public accountability so every publicly funded student shows progress in that one measurable needle—and taxpayers can see it?
Across the dinners, a few critical themes came up during discussions.
Measuring Outcomes in a Fragmented System
In a diverse education landscape, including public schools, charter schools, private schools, ESAs (education savings accounts), and homeschooling, what does quality look like? Who gets to define it? And how do we ensure transparency so families can make informed decisions?
This landscape makes identifying measurable outcomes and building coalitions to impact these outcomes difficult. Many dinner conversations focused on issues such as chronic absenteeism, early childhood education access, teacher pay, and reading outcomes as items that need to be addressed in Arizona’s schools. Underlying these challenges is Arizona’s persistent teacher shortage, which is shaped by teacher pay, preparation pipelines, working conditions, and retention with consequences that ripple across all education models.
Fairness, Choice, and Collective Wellbeing
Many groups discussed the inherent tension between individual pathways to education and collective wellbeing. On one hand, every family, every child, every educator has a story. People draw on their personal experiences to justify what they believe “works” for education, and during our conversations, many individuals shared how their stories have shaped their beliefs, values, and choices.
However, the strength of our communities depends on how well we support our most vulnerable learners. Our public systems, our investments, our policies should reflect that education is for all because a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Public schools play a unique role in welcoming and supporting students with disabilities, and as families navigate an expanding set of education options, it becomes increasingly important that all parts of the system, including charter and private schools, are aligned around inclusion, access, and meaningful support for every learner.
Throughout these conversations, many groups landed on a shared truth: diverse educational pathways should exist, but those pathways must be grounded in equity, clarity, and a commitment to every child’s potential.
Why This Matters and What’s Next
The Dinner & Dialogue program is designed to kick start conversation about how to move forward and address these issues together, but it doesn’t end there. We’re strategically connecting dinner topics with issues that Impact Maker is already working to address.
This means the conversation doesn’t end when the meal is over. We want to carry the momentum forward: with our networks, our communities, and our collective voice, and we’re providing opportunities for individuals to do so.