Thanks for visiting our California NIF Network website! Our primary purpose is to encourage and to support a 'Deliberative Practice' in the counties and communities of California...but our secondary purpose is to connect our efforts with deliberative colleagues across the country and around the world. So...we're hoping you find our methods and our materials to be helpful in your community work, and to be interesting enough to lead you into your own 'Deliberative Practice.'

In deliberative conversations, people gather to respectfully and carefully discuss some of our most troubling public issues. National Issues Forums (NIF) have provided citizens an opportunity to deliberate together for over 25 years. California was one of the first states to establish workshops in public deliberation...held at UC Davis as the "Public Policy Institute." Today, people gather for NIF-style conversations in the USA and a growing number of other countries for many reasons: to understand a complex issue better; to hear how the issue affects others in their community; to be a better informed voter; to decide what personal actions might be most effective; to network with others who are similarly frustrated by the issue; or to decide how to actively influence public policy decisions.

Take a look around our website...check out the materials...think about how your community might benefit from a deliberative approach to problem-solving. Of course, our best-case-scenario would be that you would want to create a partnership with us, so we could learn with and from each other how to encourage more deliberative conversations...where every voice matters.