This 20-page interim report titled Citizens at Work, presents preliminary insights derived from public forums that were held with a focus on either of two different issue frameworks. One is titled, Health Care: How Can We Reduce Costs and Still Get the Care We Need? and the other is Making Ends Meet: How Should We Spread Prosperity and Improve Opportunity?  The information contained in the report was presented and discussed at the A Public Voice 2016 event held May 5, 2016 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

The following are excerpts from the report:

About 2,800 people from across the country have participated in more than 250 forums on either health care or making ends meet. About 210 of the forums have been face-to-face meetings. The remainder have taken place online, using a platform called Common Ground for Action, which is designed to reflect what happens in in-person delibertive forums. This platform was developed by Kettering using the same principles used in preparing issue guides...

Health Care

Compared with citizens in earlier forums, 2016 forum participants are farther along in working through a set of difficult choices. Many of them have moved beyond partisan framings and divisive rhetoric to consider what trade-offs they might be willing to live with. Considering that rhetoric and partisanship have become prominent even in health-care policy debates, deliberative public engagement has become a more compelling alternative for making progress on this issue...

The greater clarity that people expressed on health care in the latest forums stems, at least in part, from health care's status as a major issue in national politics over the past 20 years and over the past decade in particular. But this progress suggests that there now may be an opening for officials seeking to resolve some of the long-standing deadlocks on this subject...

Making Ends Meet

While citizens in the most recent forums have advanced in working through difficult choices related to health-care policy, the same sort of progress is not apparent in the forums in which people considered questions related to prosperity and economic opportunity. They are at an earlier stage in their thinking when it comes to this issue...

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was a landmark event that is only now beginning to be fully understood. Its effects on the nation and on the concerns of citizens are still unfolding, especially in the parts of the country--and the workforce--that have not shared fully in the recovery of the past seven years. The public is only beginning to make sense of what this major global event meant...

Making Ends Meet forums showed that citizens are deeply concerned about those who are struggling financially, but they are unsure how best to spread prosperity and increase opportunity...

Click here to download the Citizens at Work report.