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Deliberative Dialogue : A Tool for Community Building
| Name | Barbara A Brown | | Situation | Some community issues are difficult to resolve. These problems are sometimes referred to as “wicked” problems. Community citizens need to come together and discuss these issues in a civil fashion. They need to be able to deliberate the pros and cons of specific directions for action. They need to share with each other what they value and what is important as a community. | | Response | The county agent has been using National Issues Forums (NIF) for twenty years to help citizens generate the energy and the direction for community action. Citizens come together to deliberate the pros and cons of numerous approaches that point toward different directions for action. These various approaches of action are really different world views that represent different values and concerns. NIF deliberative dialogue forums focus upon three or four separate approaches. The county agent has integrated NIF forums into her ongoing community youth development work. Many of the programs involved with the Children, Youth and Families At Risk program have implemented forums to help create a community vision, to tackle a particular difficult problem by determining what people are willing to do to resolve the problem, and to generally learn the important skills of being a citizen. | | Impact | One community used NIF forums to discuss violent kids. Their forums helped them identify directions for action that has helped them acquire $1,000,000 in grant funding to help them in their work. Youth have identified “the youth voice” as a value that needs to be heard and have worked to help others recognize this. Forums have brought diverse citizens together to discuss the immigration issue, resulting in renewed commitment of understanding and neighborly behavior. Public Agenda Foundation highlighted NIF practitioners in 2006 by interviewing them and publishing a compolation of “Profiles in Coming Together” to commemorate twenty-five years of National Issues Forums. South Carolina and the county agent's NIF efforts was one of nine such profiles. (NIF is supported by Kettering Foundation, a research operating foundation that works to strengthen democracy. See www.nifi.org) The SC Profiles in Coming Together states: "National Issues Forums is an integral part of what we do in community building. We bring youth and adults together to improve communities. The skills that community members learn from participating in forums are simply invaluable. They start thinking as citizens about how to make communities better. Deliberation is not a 'special' process - it's conceptually quite simple - but the end results are phenominal. It's not the one thing that will save the world, but it is an important thing that can contribute, especially as more and more communities do it, it makes the nation stronger.
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Last update10/5/2007
This website is maintained by Tiffany Rodgers.
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