For our CEE, instead of looking at the issues that we saw on Pitt’s campus, our team wanted to focus on what we don’t see in our community. As we shared our experiences abroad, we found that when others asked about certain topics (e.g. race, religion, gender, etc.), we had no frame of reference for how the community at large felt about those issues. Refocusing on American culture, we also noted that there were topics of debate that were avoided, be it politics, religion, mental health or more controversial issues, like gun rights and abortion. We decided that just because an issue was inflammatory did not mean that it should be avoided in discussion. Our goal was to create an environment where members of our community could discuss these types of issues in a safe, non-judgmental space and could express their opinions on these topics, both to inform others and to learn themselves. The engagement portion of our event was in a roundtable format. As guests entered the room, we handed them a survey that asked them to pick the top three topics that they were more uncomfortable talking about. We introduced ourselves and the Vira I Heinz program, then launched into our testimonies about our experiences abroad and what we saw were issues that were not discussed.  Once we had each given our testimony, we brought it back to American culture and the issues that we do not tend to talk about in everyday conversations. Then we had the audience break up into three groups to have conversations surrounding questions about one of the topics on the survey. There were three topics we talked about, racism, mental health, and sexuality, sexual identity and gender – each topic had two questions associated with it. After each round, we had participant switch groups so that they were with entirely new people. Once all the topics were discussed, we had a cool down session where we asked them how the breakout sessions were, what they talked about, and if it got easier to talk about these topics in this kind of setting.