On Sunday, May 3, two people will walk onto the stage at the Crystal Theatre with no moderator, no set topic, and only one instruction: pick up where the last conversation left off. Then they’ll talk for 30 minutes, step off, and hand it to the next pair. Over 12 hours, that relay will repeat 24 times.

The program is called “The Long Conversation,” and it’s a daylong experiment in community dialogue organized by Western Mosaic Fund in partnership with Carbondale Arts. The event will run from 8am to 8pm and is free and open to the public, with audience members invited to drop in and out as the conversation evolves.

For Western Mosaic Fund Founder Kade Gianinetti, the event is meant to serve as a physical example of how people engage and listen when they are sitting in front of one another — and how that can shape a community as a whole.

“I think really good, strong communities have conversations where people don’t walk away from the table,” Gianinetti told the Sopris Sun. “When we’re actually in conversation with someone and there are challenging big issues we don’t agree on, we’re less quick to pull away or put someone into a box.”

Gianinetti borrowed the concept from a 24-hour conversation hosted by the Long Now Foundation in 2013, an event rooted in long-term thinking and systems-level perspective. The Carbondale version is scaled down — 12 hours instead of 24 — but keeps the core idea intact: a continuous, unscripted thread shaped in real time by the people participating.

The inspiration also comes from closer to home. Gianinetti credits A.O. Forbes, whose “Tomorrow’s Voices” civics course at Colorado Rocky Mountain School challenged students to think about engagement, citizenship and what it means to be in community.

“This idea has been bubbling for a year and a half, maybe two years,” Gianinetti said. “At some point you realize it’s never going to be the perfect time — so let’s just do it.”

And who are the people stepping into the conversation? Gianinetti describes them as a “snapshot” of Carbondale and the Roaring Fork Valley: educators and childcare workers, ranchers and environmental advocates, business owners, elected officials and younger residents stepping into leadership.

Rather than carefully curating a roster, he built the lineup through conversations around town — people he ran into, names that kept surfacing, whoever was available on a Sunday in early May.

“It’s not a deep dive or data analysis into who are the voices we need to hear,” he said. “It’s a snapshot of the people in our community who are available on this day and who touch different sectors.”

While participants will each bring their own experience and expertise, Gianinetti hopes the topics will emerge organically. They’ll receive some pre-reading and light prompting ahead of time, but once they’re on stage, the conversation is their own.

“It’s a really cool arc of a conversation that touches on topics we’re all talking about around the dinner table and out with friends,” he said.

If the structure sounds open-ended, that’s intentional. Gianinetti describes the event as an experiment — something that could be repeated every three years, refined over time or adjusted based on what works and what doesn’t.

The conversations will be recorded, not just for archival purposes but as the starting point for a longer creative process. Over the next year, Carbondale Arts plans to work with local artists to translate the dialogue into a multimedia zine — essays, visual art and other interpretations — culminating in a public release in early 2027.

In a political and cultural moment where disagreement often ends conversations, “The Long Conversation” is built around the opposite premise: that people can stay at the table, even when they don’t agree.

“We don’t have to see eye to eye on everything,” Gianinetti said. “But we’re not walking away from this table. We’re going to work together to make it better.”

Whether that holds for 12 straight hours remains to be seen.

“Do you think it will work?” Gianinetti asked near the end of the interview.

In Carbondale, he believes it just might.

“We live in a place where people care about this community,” he said. “The question is whether we can show up for each other in that way.”

The event is free and open to the public; attendees are welcome to come and go throughout the day.