When Nathan Loutsis was elected to the Kenmore City Council, he learned firsthand the importance of being able to talk with those who disagree with you.
Loutsis often has to reach compromises to finalize new laws or budgets, and though he was elected by a majority of voters, there are people who didn’t vote for him whom he still serves.
“It’s super important to approach those conversations with curiosity,” Loutsis said. “That approach often results in more effective collaboration.”
Loutsis took office in 2024 while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Washington. Now, in addition to being a city councilmember, he serves as the program manager for the University of Washington Dialogue Initiative, a University program housed in Undergraduate Academic Affairs’ Community Engagement and Leadership Education (CELE) Center.
The initiative launched in 2024 as a way to give students and faculty the skills to have constructive dialogue, practice meaningful discourse, and be aware of misinformation and disinformation. Provost Tricia Serio sponsored the initiative with the intention of creating a campus where all students understand the importance of diverse perspectives and active listening.
With orientation sessions and programming throughout the year, students learn how to lead with curiosity, empathy, critical thinking, collaborative problem-solving and mindfulness.
A message from the Provost
As part of the Dialogue Initiative orientation, students watch an introductory video from Provost Tricia Serio who talks about the importance of creating a University focused on curiosity, communication, critical thinking, productive dialogue and active listening.
Listen to Serio’s message to students here.
What started as optional workshops during orientation is slowly scaling up to a tri-campus effort where these ideals are ingrained in the University culture.
“The University, in my mind, is the perfect place to seed and pilot these ideas because you have a collection of people with shared interests who are in school together, generally in the same age range,” said Ed Taylor, vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs. “That’s the perfect set of circumstances to engage in this kind of work that will translate beyond the University and into life outside of campus.”
World events of the last several years, including a rise in racial tensions and protest, the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and political polarization, were felt on campus, too.
The confluence of these issues led to the realization that the University had an important role to play in teaching students the skills of constructive dialogue at the start of their academic journeys. It needed to be done at scale and reach across students’ majors because dialogue is a 21st-century skill that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
“We realized we needed to create the conditions for people to be able to have discourse, to talk about issues, to learn together, and to ultimately get to a place of creating a framework for what it means to be a campus where the varied experiences of our students are recognized and valued,” Taylor said.
UAA’s CELE Center works with students and faculty across all disciplines, making them the ideal program to house the initiative. Learning how to engage respectfully with one another is important no matter what major a student might have, Taylor said.
Practicing skills on and off campus
The Dialogue Initiative work starts even before a student steps foot onto campus.
Starting this year, the work is in partnership with the Constructive Dialogue Institute’s evidence-based Perspectives curriculum, a program that features online lessons and peer-to-peer discussions about managing disagreement and navigating complex conversations with clarity and respect.
Students enrolled on the Seattle campus are required to complete four of the six individual modules and engage in two of the three peer-to-peer discussions at in-person orientation sessions. The remaining modules and conversations are not required for all students, though some programs require their students to complete them.
During the required in-person portion of orientation, students are put into groups of four and told to tell a story about a topic they care about, such as climate change or artificial intelligence or cancel culture.
They each get two minutes to tell their story followed by one minute of reflection and questions from the other people in their group. They are encouraged to remain respectful, to listen instead of interjecting, and to ask open-ended questions, like “Can you tell me more about that?”
Data collection from the 2026 summer sessions is ongoing, but early feedback shows that students are finding meaning in the work. “Students are finding this very useful and applying it both on and off campus,” Loutsis said.
Though this is the first year that the Perspectives curriculum is required for all undergraduates at the UW campus in Seattle, it’s not the first year the Dialogue Initiative has engaged students during orientation.
During summer and autumn 2025, more than 7,000 incoming first-year and transfer students completed the Dialogue Initiative’s workshop. More than 2,400 of those students also completed an optional assignment after the session titled “Dialogue Initiative: Persuasion and Respectful Discourse,” which guided students through a structured conversation with someone they disagree with.
Through this work, students learn active listening, perspective-talking and respectful persuasion. At the end of their conversations, students complete a reflection on their experience. Many said it forced them to focus on understanding, rather than “winning” a conversation and that it gave them a clearer understanding of both sides of an argument.
“Students really value the opportunity to have a place to practice these skills that they haven’t practiced before,” Taylor said.
Once students get to campus, there are also courses promoted by the Dialogue Initiative to keep students engaged in the work. As the program continues to grow, the initiative will also likely hold events and workshops throughout this academic year, Loutsis said.
Revitalizing civic health
The Dialogue Initiative is one piece of the CELE Center’s broader commitment to increasing civic engagement among students. Through community-based internships, leadership training, democratic engagement and more, the CELE Center offers students multiple ways to improve their civic health.
The CELE Center’s work helps anchor the University’s broader Civic Health Initiative, which aims to leverage the UW’s resources to strengthen civic participation and institutional trust on campus and society at large.
In many ways, regaining public trust starts at the University, Taylor said.
“We’re really thinking about what responsibilities come with being educated, whether you’re a Foster Business School student or your degree is in technology, information or health care,” Taylor said. “What responsibilities come with having that diploma and going out to lead in your communities?”
For Loutsis, engaging in civic health work on campus helped him get to where he is now.
As an undergraduate student, Loutsis was involved with CELE Center and Evans School of Public Policy & Governance programs like the NextGen Leadership Corps, which empowers and equips students with skills to serve in the public sector. He also received the Husky Leadership Certificate, which encourages students to reflect on their education, their experiences and what it means to be a leader.
Those experiences empowered Loutsis to engage off campus, too, with local boards, commissions, nonprofit organizations and, eventually, the Kenmore City Council.
More importantly, those experiences helped Loutsis see that civic engagement doesn’t only mean working in the public sector.
For Loutsis, civic engagement can mean volunteering with a nonprofit organization, checking in with your neighbor or classmate, or simply taking the time to better understand someone’s point of view with a conversation.