The call is out to make Martin Luther King Day a National Day of Service--"a Day On, Not a Day Off." This year, why not make Martin Luther King Day the day you commit to helping people in your community use a different, more productive way to talk about difficult public issues? The National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) has recently released a new issue guide to help people talk about income inequality as part of a national conversation that will be reported to policymakers in Washington, DC.

This free issue guide was developed in 2014 by the David Mathews Center (DMC) for Civic Life (Montevallo, Alabama) and Alabama Public Television for Project C: Lessons from the American Civil Rights Movement. It is a 22-page guide that presents three approaches for deliberation. As described on the DMC website - "The resource encourages students to explore the difficult choices that citizens faced in Birmingham, Alabama on January 1, 1963.

This new issue guide titled Making Ends Meet: How Should We Spread Prosperity and Improve Opportunity? from the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) is available as a free download.

The Bernard Osher Foundation has provided a $1 million endowment to 119 colleges and universities across the nation to establish Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI). These institutes are housed in the Continuing Education departments of the schools and offer noncredit courses for senior citizens. The National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) has been offering a course entitled Learning from Others: The Power of Public Deliberation through the OLLI program at the University of Dayton.