Melo planning community meeting for next week in L.A.

Carmelo Anthony is continuing his push for heightened social dialogue with a call to action for his peers.

Anthony, who is with Team USA for its pre-Olympic training camp in Las Vegas, is planning to hold a community meeting of sorts when the team moves to Los Angeles for exhibition play next week. His goal is to gather a diverse array of community members for an open discourse about the issues currently plaguing American society, issues like racial discrimination and gun violence and police brutality, which Anthony has been increasingly outspoken about in recent weeks.

Anthony had previously referred to his planned gathering as a "town hall meeting," but he's no longer fond of that tag.

"Still organizing, (but) I don't want to call it a town hall," Anthony said Thursday, according to Marc Berman of the New York Post. "I like to call it more a conversation. We want to get some of the local politicians. We want to get youth, kids, adults, officers, teachers, community leaders, and athletes just there having this conversation and this talk. Both sides hearing each other out."

Anthony, whose meeting is tentatively scheduled for Monday, according to Berman, said his impassioned Instagram post about the need to incite change in the wake of the police shootings in Dallas two weeks ago "sparked something, so now we have to follow through with it."

"It's something I wanted to do and plan - just a part of continuing what I started already," he said of the meeting. "The problem is people don't have answers, are searching for answers on what to do, how to do it, and who to do it with. We're not going to find the answers overnight. It's following through with the message I put out there and continuing the conversation."

Anthony followed up that Instagram post by delivering a similar message about change while standing alongside Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James onstage at the ESPYs. Earlier this week, he called the American justice system "broken" after the highest-ranking officer in the Freddie Gray case was acquitted of all charges. On Thursday, he came to the defense of the WNBA players fined for wearing black warmups in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"The players have a very strong stance in what they believe in right now," he said. "I don't think anyone should be fighting that at this moment."

Anthony says he currently has a team of people in L.A. canvassing various communities about what should be on the agenda at his upcoming meeting. He also wants said meeting to happen behind closed doors, to encourage as much open dialogue as possible.

"I don't know if it will be open to the public," he said. "I'd rather keep it closed. When you open it up to the public and cameras are there, people don't feel comfortable speaking in those environments. If it's closed, people feel more obliged to say what they feel. Kids and youth feel more comfortable away from the camera."

At the end of the day, Anthony just wants everyone to talk productively and cooperatively about what's going on, and then keep talking about it.

"You got to be keep the conversation going," he said. "Because if you don't, it just becomes another tragedy that happens that everyone forgets about. This time we don't want to deal with that."