About Bridge Builders

Bridge Builders - Center for Dialogue Coffee was created to strengthen dialogue and democratic conversation in Denmark. We work for a society based on Danish values with room for disagreement and diversity, where everyone can feel equal and welcome in a conversation that is constructive and critical.

We want to create a people's movement that works together to tolerate diversity. Because we believe that the responsibility for conversational democracy lies with the individual and the community. That's why we at Bridge Builders also work on both levels.

What does Bridge Builders do for a living?

  1. In the education system, with Bridge Builder Week, Dialogue Workshops and Bridge Builder Training, we qualify and train students, teachers and citizens to prevent prejudice and handle disagreements and conflicts with dialogical tools.
  2. In the workplace: with Bridge Builder courses for companies and organizations where employees are taught how to handle disagreements and differences both internally and externally in order to strengthen diversity and well-being.
  3. In society: with our Dialogue Tour across the country, where we bring disagreements together for constructive and critical debates and dialogues on divisive topics.
  4. For democratic values: by establishing critical debates with closed environments where extremism and anti-democratic attitudes and norms thrive.

Özlem Cekic

Secretary General of Bridge Builders

Özlem Cekic is the Secretary General of Bridge Builders. Since 2008, she has participated in and initiated a number of projects aimed at building bridges between communities. It all started when, during her time as a Member of Parliament (2007-2015), she discovered how rude and unfiltered people can be on social media, and she received a lot of hate messages, often directing their anger at the fact that she is Muslim.

She decided to respond to these messages by visiting the senders and having coffee with them over a conversation about their differences. The fact that Özlem chose to meet with these people who showed so much hostility on the internet caused a lot of attention and publicity - especially because the intention of the dialogues was never to discuss, argue or reach agreement. These meetings created the phenomenon of dialog coffee, which is widely known today.

In 2018, Özlem Cekic was invited to speak at TED's main stage in New York, where she shared her experience with dialog coffee and hate mail. It was a huge compliment to her work that she was given the opportunity, as there had only been one other Dane on that stage before her.

Since then, Özlem has written the book Why does he hate you, mom? where she talks about her upbringing, her time in the Danish Parliament and talks about her Dialogue Coffee meetings.

In 2021, Özlem Cekic's book Thank You for Coffee was published, which serves as a kind of dialog handbook and is divided into sections that focus on different dialog scenarios. It also includes stories from her work as Secretary General of Bridge Builders.

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