Multi-Sector
Roundtables

The Frieze Center for Shared Society initiates and leads roundtables that bring together academia, the public sector, and civil society in order to develop shared approaches to managing diversity, addressing tensions, and strengthening the capacity of different groups to live together.

What Is a Cross-Sector Roundtable?

The term “cross-sector roundtable” refers to a practice developed over recent decades in which a standing or process-based forum brings together major sectors of society for dialogue, coordination, and joint action around a public issue:

Public sector

government, local authorities, and regulators.

Business sector

companies, industry, and entrepreneurs.

Third sector

nonprofit organizations, civil-society organizations, philanthropy, academia, and community actors.

The term “round” emphasizes formal equality among participants: there is no “head of the table” and no hierarchy of authority in the process of developing insights and making decisions; responsibility is shared. The cross-sector roundtable model emerged from recognition that complex public problems – including shared society, poverty, education, employment, the environment, and social conflict – cannot be resolved by any single actor or sector. A cross-sector roundtable is designed to connect implementation capacity (the state), resources and innovation (the business sector), and practice-based knowledge (civil society).

What Does the Frieze Center Roundtable Model Look Like?

The Frieze Center seeks to adopt a roundtable model in which academia plays a distinct, clearly defined, and central role in convening and sustaining the process.

The
Public Sector

The public sector contributes authority, policy, responsibility, and implementation capacity. Its responsibilities include bringing policy, regulation, and budgets to the table; connecting the process to state and local-government systems; translating insights into decisions, pilot programs, and institutional change; and assuming responsibility for implementation at governmental and regulatory levels. The public sector is not a “client” of the roundtable, but a committed partner.

Civil Society

Civil society contributes practice-based knowledge, public legitimacy, values, and voices that may otherwise remain unheard. Its role includes bringing perspectives from the field; surfacing gaps, injustices, and tensions; assessing feasibility and unintended effects; maintaining a moral and public perspective; and serving as a space for implementation and experimentation. Civil society functions as the roundtable’s reality check and also helps build public legitimacy for its processes and outputs.

Academia

In the Frieze model, academia takes the place conventionally assigned to the business sector: it serves as convener, knowledge broker, and process holder. Academia’s contribution is not a sectoral interest but the conditions that make dialogue and action possible.
  • Academia as an identifier of problems, gaps, and needs.
  • Academia as a provider of relevant research-based knowledge and data, without coercion or the imposition of demands.
  • Academia as a provider of conceptual framing – not advancing a substantive position, but offering ways of understanding through concepts, distinctions, and language capable of accommodating complexity.
  • Academia as a custodian of complexity: multi-sector forums face persistent pressure to reach consensus, formulate “recommendations,” and produce rapid outputs. Academia can slow the process before harmful oversimplification occurs and ask difficult questions: What are we overlooking? Which voices are not being heard? What implicit assumptions are operating here?
  • Academia as a long-horizon institution: government ministries and public authorities operate under political pressure; businesses under cost-benefit pressures; and civil society under moral and budgetary pressures. Academia can sustain a long-term perspective, document processes, and learn from failure without an immediate need to justify it.
  • Measurement and evaluation: academia can develop process-oriented impact indicators and measure outcomes over time.
  • Knowledge translation back to the participating sectors and the public: academia can formulate insights in accessible language and help build public legitimacy for complex processes.
  • Academia as convener and process holder (Convener & Process Holder): academia is not merely another “side” in the discussion, but an enabling institutional infrastructure.

Our Roundtables

Roundtable 1: Context- and Culture-Sensitive Care

The guiding principle of this roundtable is that every therapeutic encounter is also an encounter between two individuals – or among members of a group – who carry a particular combination of identities, contexts, languages, and affiliations. Their meeting therefore also brings into contact the contexts from which they come. Read more >>

Prof. Avihu Shoshana – Social psychology of inequality; education and socioeconomic status in everyday life. Read more >>

Prof. Merav Roth -Clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, expert in trauma and loss, and cultural scholar. Read more >>

Roundtable
Leads

Roundtable 2: State-Oriented Haredi Society

Coming soon…

Dr. Lee Cahaner – Social geographer and senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Oranim Academic College of Education.

Roundtable
Leads

Roundtable 4: Public Discourse among Conservative and Liberal Research Institutes

The Research Institutes Roundtable is an initiative of the Frieze Center for Shared Society at the University of Haifa, bringing together directors, researchers, and representatives of research and policy institutes from across Israel’s ideological spectrum. Read more >>

Dr. David Barak-Gorodetsky – Historian and scholar of religion, Head of the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies… Read more >>

Roundtable
Leads

Dr. Shai Dror Tegner – Historian specializing in polarization, nationalism, and Israel Studies. Read more >>

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Our Courses

Identity and Belonging in a Multicultural Society – Dr. Mirit Hayavi Barak

This course examines how identity and belonging are formed in a multicultural society, considering both the individual and groups and the relations among them.

The course moves from the individual to society: it begins by examining processes of self-construction through socialization and interaction, and then considers the formation of groups, social boundaries, conflicts, and intergroup encounters. It explores different approaches to managing cultural diversity and examines the tensions among personal identity, group identity, and social belonging.

The course then considers processes of recognition, inequality, and privilege as part of a broader web of intergroup relations, and concludes by examining the possibility of building a shared society – a society in which different groups live together through mutual recognition, participation, and cooperation.

Managing Conflict and Diversity in Israeli Society – Dr. Assaf Turgeman

The course surveys the principal cleavages in Israeli society by tracing their roots in Israeli social and political life. It addresses the Jewish – Arab conflict, the religious – secular divide, ethnic cleavages, and the constitutional revolution and its implications for contemporary political divisions.

Skills for Managing Diversity and Conflict across Life Domains – Dr. Ran Kuttner

This course develops skills for managing difference and conflicts arising from difference across multiple settings – from the interpersonal level, through the intergroup level, to the national level. Participants will acquire tools for collaborative dialogue, negotiation, and conflict management, while becoming familiar with the theories underlying the approaches studied. The course will also examine how these approaches can support constructive management of disputes surrounding social cleavages and polarization that undermine cohesion and resilience in different arenas in Israel. Accordingly, participants will acquire both conceptual frameworks and practical skills for action in the social sphere.

The course is reflective in character and, from its outset, invites students to examine how the material challenges their own assumptions and leadership practices, how they might wish to apply it in their personal lives, and what obstacles may stand in the way.

Practical Strategies for Engaging with Diversity in Israeli Society – Dr. David Barak-Gorodetsky

The course offers an in-depth examination of the political and social tensions between conservatives and liberals in Israel, while providing a practical toolkit for conducting dialogue in conditions of disagreement. The theoretical component explores the roots of polarization, focusing on the central role of religion and state, their influence on public policy, and the historical analysis of political strategies and case studies that have shaped Israeli society. This foundation supports the practical component, in which participants practice and acquire skills in deep listening, managing complex dialogue, and recognizing different perspectives. By combining academic analysis with experiential learning and simulations, the course develops the capacity for respectful and meaningful dialogue in situations of disagreement and provides practical tools for building trust and reducing tensions across identity-based, cultural, and political divides.