National Issues Forums (NIF) is a network of civic, educational, and other organizations, and individuals, whose common interest is to promote public deliberation in America. It includes civic clubs, religious organizations, libraries, schools, and many other groups that meet to discuss critical public issues. Forum participants range from teenagers to retirees, prison inmates to community leaders, and literacy students to university students.
NIF does not advocate specific solutions or points of view but provides citizens the opportunity to consider a broad range of choices, weigh the pros and cons of those choices, and meet with each other in a public dialogue to identify the concerns they hold in common.
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There is a way to tackle problems more directly. Deliberative decision making. Find out how to leverage the power of personal experience, different viewpoints, and the kind of intelligent exchange that leads to a shared purpose and acceptable solutions.
There’s a space between agree/disagree waiting to be discovered.
When it comes to society’s most challenging problems, our elected officials are often stuck between a two-party rock and a hard place. That’s because they aren’t getting honest input from the people they serve.
You can change that, by reviving a lost democratic practice: deliberative decision making.
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