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The Growing Gap between the Haves and Have Nots

Jul 13, 2011 By NIFI Blog 0 Comments

National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) director Bo Beaulieu suggested the following as a possible issue for development into a deliberative framework.  We welcome your comments and additional information about this issue.

Is Income Inequality Harmful to American Communities?

A recent book published by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett titled, The Spirit Level (2009), has created quite a stir in countries across the world. The central premise of the book is that societies or communities that are more equal often do better on a wide array of socioeconomic measures – be they health, education, crime, trust, and social mobility. In essence, people from the same social strata with the same set of qu

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National Issues for Consideration

Jul 13, 2011 By NIFI Blog 0 Comments

National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) director Scott Clemons suggested the following as  possible issues for development into deliberative frameworks.  We welcome your comments and additional information about these issues.

Racism
With our first black President, our prospective on racism and our sensibilities may have changed. The protracted discussion about the President’s birth certificate, however, suggests that the issue is still ripe for a national conversation. Comments by talk radio personalities and the sudden termination of Shirley Sherrod for supposedly discriminatory remarks give further credence to this.

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A message from David Mathews

Jul 13, 2011 By NIFI Blog 0 Comments

The following is a reflection by David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio.

From time to time, the Kettering Foundation updates its research or restates its findings to prevent misperceptions of what its studies show. For example, some may mistakenly characterize the kind of public deliberation modeled in NIF forums  as one of several techniques used to facilitate small group discussions or as a tool for decision making unrelated to action or resolving conflicts. Of course, people use the NIF issue books for many different purposes, and that includes those who are only interested in policy education, which is fine. Still, the NIF books are based on a design taken from two sources: how people today actually make collective decisions in the face of disagreements about how to act and how deliberation has been described in many civilizations dating back thousands of years.

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