Register Now for our April Confab on Text Talk Act

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Sandy Heierbacher

Join us Wednesday, April 9th for our next NCDD “Confab Call.” We’ll be talking with NCDD members Matt Leighninger and Mike Smith about the innovative project known as Text Talk Act. The confab will take place from 2-3pm Eastern / 11-noon Pacific.

As part of our role in the National Dialogue on Mental Health project Creating Community Solutions, NCDD and our partners have been experimenting with how the fun and convenience of text messaging can be leveraged to scale up face-to-face dialogue — especially among young people.

The first round of Text Talk Act took place on December 5, and round two is coming up on April 24 (and we hope you’re planning to participate!).

This is new and important stuff here, folks. We’ve been using Mike Smith’s United Americans platform as well as Textizen to design a text-enabled in-person dialogue process. In other words, people get together in small groups of 4 or 5, text into the same number, and start engaging in a dialogue with their group that is prompted by a video, a couple of polling questions, and then discussion questions that come to them via text. Pretty cool!

Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium is the main wizard this, and he talks about this being a way to blend “thin engagement” (what we usually do online and on our phones) with “thick engagement” (the stuff we NCDDers tend to value that takes more time and is best done face-to-face. It’s a way of melding the fun and convenience of texting with the irreplaceable value of face-to-face dialogue.

Along with learning more about the ins-and-outs of this project, Mike will talk to us about how any NCDD member can use United Americans’ technology to design your own text-enabled dialogue projects.

A word on the format: NCDD’s Confab Calls are opportunities for members [and potential members] of NCDD to talk with innovators in our field about the work they’re doing and connect with each other around shared interests. Membership in NCDD is not required for participation.

This will be a simple conference call (audio only), and most participants will also be engaging on a collaborative doc on Hackpad.com to interact with each other, pose questions, share resources, and take notes.

Register Now to Secure Your Spot…

NIFI Announces New “Linked Futures” Deliberations

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We wanted to make sure that NCDD members, especially those in higher ed, saw the most recent edition of Higher Education Engagement News, the periodic update on the American Commonwealth Partnership from Harry C. Boyte. This edition announces a new stage of the collaboration between the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums Institute – both NCDD organizational members – that builds on the Shaping Our Futures initiative. You can read the newsletter below or find it at the NIFI blog by clicking here.

Make sure to note that it’s not too late to be part of the “framework testing phase”, so if you are interested in facilitating a test deliberation around the future of higher ed as part of this new project, find the details for how to get involved below.

March 2014 Higher Education Engagement News

Higher Education Engagement News is a periodic newsletter, edited by Harry C. Boyte, which responds to requests for updates and information about initiatives associated with the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP). ACP was a coalition to strengthen the public purposes of higher education, organized for the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges in 2012, on invitation by the White House Office of Public Engagement.

This issue is devoted to Linked Futures – Communities, Higher Education and the Changing World of Work, a new deliberation being developed in association with the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums. Linked Futures builds on the earlier Shaping Our Futures, 150 forums across the country on the public purposes of higher education. The Linked Futures deliberation will address the crucial question of how to think collectively about changes and challenges often described as an avalanche, which often seem overwhelming. The project is described below.

We are in the “framework testing phase” for the next month (until April 11th). This involves having small groups test how the framework works. The framework gives more detail on the three options described below, but is not a full National Issues Forum “issue guide,” like Shaping Our Futures.

If you are interested in getting in on the ground floor of this deliberation by testing the framework, please contact Harry Boyte (boyte@umn.edu) and copy our project administrator, Hunter Gordon (gordo430@umn.edu), who will keep track. If you want to test the framework we will send it to you, along with facilitator guidelines and an optional questionnaire.

Linked Futures – Communities, Higher Education, and the Changing World of Work

Linked Futures builds on Shaping Our Future – How Should Higher Education Help Us Create the Society We Want?, a National Issues Forum and American Commonwealth Partnership public deliberation launched at a National Press Club event on September 4, 2012, with Undersecretary Martha Kanter and higher education and civic leaders including David Mathews, president of Kettering Foundation, Muriel Howard, President of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, Scott Peters, Co-director of Imagining America, Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of Syracuse University, and others. Shaping Our Future convened more than 150 forums across the country, bringing together college students, parents, faculty, employers, retirees, policy makers and others to deliberate about the purpose of higher education and its roles in the society.

The findings, described in Divided We Fail, a report by Jean Johnson of the public opinion and engagement group Public Agenda, revealed a gap between the ways in which lay citizens outside the policy making arena talk about higher education, and the debate among elected officials and other policy makers. As Johnson puts it, “Facing a more competitive international economy and relentlessly rising college costs, leaders say now is the moment for higher education to reinvent itself.” In contrast, “Forum participants spoke repeatedly about the benefits of a rich, varied college education…where, in their view, students have time and space to explore new ideas and diverse fields.” Lay citizens emphasized the need to broaden, not narrow, STEM education and preparation for other careers, in the context of rapidly changing work roles and globalized workplaces.

The next stage is Linked Futures. A design team with representatives of six Twin Cities institutions– Augsburg College, Century College, Hamline University, Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Metropolitan State University, and St. Paul College – working with the Kettering Foundation gathered concerns from hundreds of citizens in different settings. They addressed the question, “How can communities and higher education work together to address the changing world of work?” A framework is being tested with three options to consider:

• Prepare Students for the Job Market: Our colleges and universities have to raise academic expectations, tailor their programs to the real needs of employers, and direct more of their educational resources toward vocational and pre-professional training.

• Change Jobs for the Better. Many of the positions available to new graduates are poorly paid, offer little in the way of job security or job satisfaction, and are vulnerable to downsizing and outsourcing. Colleges and universities should take the lead in shaping a new kind of workplace…and a new kind of worker, one with the skills and habits of mind needed to thrive in a complex and rapidly changing world.

• Be a Good Partner to the Community. Colleges and universities represent vital anchor institutions, places where the community gathers, engages issues, organizes activities and makes common cause. We depend on them to provide the civic and intellectual leadership that can strengthen democracy and drive long-term social and economic progress.

The Linked Futures issue guide will be ready from the National Issues Forum Institute in September.

What would you like to see at this year’s NCDD conference?

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Sandy Heierbacher

For the next ten days, we’ll be crowdsourcing ideas from the NCDD community about what you’d like to see, do, and experience at this year’s National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation. We’re using Codigital so that we can gather and prioritize your input quickly and easily.

NCDD conferences look and feel a bit different each year because our events are experiments in collaborative planning, and our planning team is highly responsive to our community’s needs and energy.

Remember the “conservatives panel” at our 2008 national conference in Austin (with Grover Norquist!), where we dug into when, why, and under what conditions conservatives support dialogue and deliberation work?
Remember the huge timelines on the walls at our 2006 conference in San Francisco, where we walked everyone through the process of reflecting on how we’ve got to where we are today, as individuals, as a community, and as a society?
Remember Playback Theatre in 2004, the Catalyst Awards process at our last conference, the showcases and networking sessions, and the great speakers and participatory processes we’ve featured at all of our conferences?

NCDD’s national conferences bring together 400+ of our community’s most exciting leaders, innovators, learners, and doers, for an event that enables us not only to network and learn from each other, but to tackle our greatest collective challenges head-on, and to set the direction for our field.

What we cover at our conferences, and how we cover it, is important for this ever-growing, ever-changing field — and we want your input!

Everyone in the NCDD community (members, past conference attendees, subscribers, social media friends) is welcome to participate in our crowdsourcing project. NCDD members are being sent a direct invitation that lets them participate without registering (if you don’t receive it please check for it in your spam folder); everyone else can register at www.app.codigital.com/p/ncdd2 and then follow the simple instructions to get started.

As you consider our intentionally broad framing question, “What would you like to see happen when our field comes together at NCDD 2014?”, think about…

What topics would you like to see covered?
What ideas do you have for awesome activities?
What could we do this year that might improve your work?
What could we do that would help us move the field forward?
What can we do while we’re together that we can’t easily do virtually?
Dream big, or be specific… it’s all good!

For this engagement process, we’re experimenting with an online tool called Codigital, which enables you to gather creative/qualitative input from large numbers of people on any topic, and see which themes resonate with your group. We’d found it to be smooth, simple and user-friendly. We like that people can make edits to each other’s ideas (and then have the group decide which version it prefers), rather than having to add new, slightly different, ideas.

Another clever thing about this tool is that it allows groups to prioritize ideas by asking users to rank two ideas at a time. In other words, you don’t need to rank or vote on every single idea, which allows the tool to scale up and accommodate larger numbers of users. And though this may be painful to some of you, we appreciate the character limit for ideas!

That said, use the comments below this post to expand on your ideas if you’d like. While you’re thinking about what you can contribute to this year’s conference, we encourage you also to test out session ideas below, and use this space to connect with potential co-presenters or co-conspirators.

NCDD Member is New ED at Journalism that Matters

Posted on March 16, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We are so pleased to announce that our friends at Journalism that Matters have selected a new Executive Director from NCDD’s ranks. Peggy Holman is a long-time NCDD member and friend, and we’re proud of her and all she’s accomplished. We look forward to continuing to work with her at Journalism That Matters. You can read the announcement below or read the original on JTM’s website here.

Journalism that Matters is excited to announce that Peggy Holman, a JTM co-founder and long-time board member is now serving as the organization’s Executive Director.

In 2001, Holman joined three career journalists in founding Journalism that Matters to support the pioneers who are shaping the emerging news and information ecology.

In her new role, Holman will oversee JTM’s growth as the organization matures beyond event production and expands into a hub for supporting journalism innovation and community engagement. Said Holman:

“I see an opportunity for us to fill a vital niche by connecting people who are reinventing ways in which the public’s voice enters into news and information. News organizations that are forging new ground around engagement often find themselves alone in the wilderness. We want to provide a place for them to benefit from each other’s work.”

Holman will continue to oversee the Illuminations Project, an initiative shining a light on what’s working in the changing news landscape, that JTM has produced since last year. She is also leading development of the Engagement Hub initiative, a collaborative endeavor to create a peer-based community of practice for sharing resources, connecting people, and growing understanding and skills for journalism that engages communities. Both projects were made possible by a generous grant from the Mott Foundation.

An author and consultant based out of the Seattle area, Holman brings to her new role her experience with engaging organizations and communities in discovering creative solutions to complex issues.

In the second edition of The Change Handbook, she joined with her co-authors to profile sixty-one engagement processes. Her award-winning book, Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity, dives beneath these methods to make visible deeper patterns, principles, and practices for engagement that can guide us through turbulent times.

Journalism That Matters is a nonprofit that convenes conversations to foster collaboration, innovation, and action so that a diverse news and information ecosystem helps communities to thrive. A core belief: journalism matters most when it is of, by, and for the people. Best known for convening unconferences, JTM has a proven track record catalyzing disruptive innovation and fostering new collaborations within the news industry.

The original version of this post can be found at www.journalismthatmatters.net/jtm_announces_new_executive_director.

Montreal Symposium on Professionalizing Our Field

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We recently heard about an exciting conference happening in Montreal this July that we want to make sure our NCDD members know about. The conference, hosted by the Canadian Institut du Nouveau Monde, takes place during the IPSA’s annual gathering, and is part of the important conversation about the professional future of our field. Check out the announcement below or find out more at the IPSA’s conference website here.

The Institut du Nouveau Monde, a Canadian nongovernmental organization dedicated to public participation, is pleased to invite NCDD members to attend a symposium entitled “Developing expertise in the design of participatory tools: The professionalization and diversification of the public participation field”, that will be held in Montreal July 21-22, 2014 during the annual conference of International Political Science Association (IPSA).

The symposium intends to better understand the conditions involved in the negotiation of the participatory design by looking at the actors that initiate and organize public participation. What are the effects of this professionalization of public participation? Does it compromise or encourage the democratic aims associated with public participation? Is it better to use private consultants, to train public servants to oversee public participation, or to set up an autonomous public organization devoted to public participation? How does the approach that public participation professionals take affect their abilities to design effective public participation mechanisms? The approach chosen to answer these questions is a dialogue between researchers and practitioners for a heuristic confrontation of knowledge and experiences.

About twenty researchers are expected to participate in the scientific segments of the two-day programme (see “Panels” in the preliminary programme). Other segments of the Symposium, the “Round Table” and the “Open Space”, mean to engage with public participation practitioners. Our guest practitioners for the Round Table are:

Simon Burral, Executive Director of Involve (London, UK)
Carolyn Lukensmeyer, AmericaSpeaks Founding Member and Director and Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse (Washington D.C., USA)
Peter MacLeod, Principal and Co-founder of MASS LBP (Ontario, Canada)
Michel Venne, General Director of the Institut du Nouveau Monde (Québec, Canada)

You can view the preliminary program for more information.

Please don’t hesitate to forward this invitation through to anyone you think would be interested to come to Montreal to assist to this symposium. The more practitioners present, the more interesting the discussions will be!

Upon interest, there are two registration options:

Participation to this symposium ONLY (July 21-22th) costs $40 per individual (special event rate).
Participation to the ENTIRE IPSA Congress (access to all activities July 19-24) is $260 for early registration.

If you choose option 1, send an email to malorie.flon@inm.qc.ca and she will inform the IPSA secretariat to send you a special registration link.

If you choose option 2, you can now register on the IPSA website: www.ipsa.org/events/congress/montreal2014/registration. You will have to pay the association membership fee ($160 for a regular member, $50 for students). We hope to see you there!

You can find the preliminary program for this conference at www.ncdd.org/main/wp-content/uploads/IPSA-Prelim-Program.pdf. More information on the IPSA annual gathering is available at www.ipsa.org/events/congress/montreal2014/theme.

Should NCDD become the new steward of Conversation Cafe?

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Sandy Heierbacher

NCDD is engaging our members and the broader dialogue and deliberation community on an important decision we’re facing, and we are seeking our members’ input, ideas, and reaction.

Our good friend Jacquelyn Pogue has reluctantly decided to retire from her stewardship of the process known as Conversation Café, leaving a powerful form of dialogue at risk. Jacqueline, as well as Vicki Robin and Susan Partnow (the co-creators of Conversation Café), approached me about whether NCDD would be interested in stewarding the tool, and I believe NCDD has the skills and resources to help.

In case you don’t know, Conversation Cafés are 90-minute dialogues usually held in public settings like coffee shops or bookstores. The format is simple (it fits on the back of a business card!), anyone can join, and the goal is to simply give people a chance to talk informally with neighbors around an issue of shared interest. We have a nice primer on CCs on our site here.

This idea intrigues me for several reasons…

First of all, I’m a big fan of Conversation Café. It’s an elegantly simple process that gets people talking to strangers about issues we usually avoid. CCs are quick, easy to host, low-resource, and are open source (no trademark or sensitivity about ownership).

Secondly, I’ve wondered for years if CCs could be leveraged as an entry point for citizens to experience other, more nuanced types of engagement, and as a stepping stone for broader and wider use of dialogue and deliberation.

And thirdly, the NCDD community as a whole struggles to be able to respond quickly to crises and conflicts as they arise, and to provide citizens with the tools they need to self-organize their own dialogues as needed. If NCDD were to shepherd a self-organized, open source dialogue method that is simple enough for anyone to use, we would be enabling much-needed dialogue to take place more readily and efficiently than is possible now.

So what do you think? Should NCDD move on this opportunity? And if so, how could we do it in a way that best serves our whole community? And if not, what concerns you about this?

Can you see Conversation Cafés being leveraged as a rapid response mechanism in times of national crisis? How best might we make this happen?

Invitation to join the new Transpartisan Listserv

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Sandy Heierbacher

On behalf of all the founding participants, NCDD is pleased to invite you to join the new Transpartisan Listserv. Our intension for this moderated email discussion list is to provide a simple, safe communication channel where individuals and organizations that are active in this boundary-crossing work can connect and learn from each other.

The list is hosted by NCDD through a partnership of NCDD and Mediators Foundation. The following amazing group of people are co-founding the list:

Mark Gerzon, Tom Hast and John Steiner of Mediators Foundation
Sandy Heierbacher, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)
Tom Atlee, Co-Intelligence Institute
Steve Bhaerman, humorist and author
Dr. Don Beck, The Spiral Dynamics Group
Joan Blades and Debilyn Molineaux, Living Room Conversations
Laura Chasin, Bob Stains, Dave Joseph and Mary Jacksteit, Public Conversations Project
Lawry Chickering and Jim Turner, co-authors of Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life
Jacob Hess and Phil Neisser, co-authors of You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong)
Margo King, Wisdom Beyond Borders-Mediators Foundation; John Steiner’s networking partner
Mark McKinnon, NoLabels.org
Ravi Iyer and Matt Motyl, CivilPolitics.org
Evelyn Messinger, Internews Interactive
John Opdycke, IndependentVoting.org
Michael Ostrolenk, transpartisan organizer and philosopher
Pete Peterson, Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute
Amanda Kathryn Roman, The Citizens Campaign
Michael Smith, United Americans
Kim Spencer, Link TV and KCETLink
Rich Tafel, The Public Squared
Jeff Weissglass, Political Bridge Building Advocate

The purpose of this listserv is to introduce potential colleagues to one another, to expand our knowledge of transpartisan theory and practice, and to showcase ongoing activity in the transpartisan field.

Please consider being part of the Transpartisan List if any of the following are true:

You are interested in learning more, and sharing what you know, about current efforts to transcend and transform unproductive partisan politics.
You want to meet potential colleagues who share your concern and are working to improve research, dialogue, deliberation, collaboration, and improved decision making across party lines.
You want to share what you (or your organization) do in this field that you consider “transpartisan” – conversations that break out of the narrow, predictable ideological exchanges.
You believe this subject is vital to our country’s future and simply want to learn more about how you might get involved.

You can subscribe to the Transpartisan List by sending a blank email to transpartisan-subscribe-request@lists.thataway.org. Together, we can ask the questions that need to be asked about this challenging field, and seek the answers as a learning community.

This listserv is one of several exciting transpartisan developments that will be rolling out in the next few months thanks to the leadership of Mediators Foundation – including a strategic convening of transpartisan leaders that will take place the day before this year’s National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation (October 16th if you’d like to mark your calendar!).

About a week from now, Mark Gerzon and others at Mediators Foundation will share some new resources that may be of interest, including:

“Transpartisan:”An Evolving Definition
A Map of the Transpartisan Field
The Transpartisan Reading List 1.0

As Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in her Washington Post editorial on January 27th, “The Promise of Transpartisanhip”:

“At a time of paralyzing political polarization, partisanship has naturally gotten a bad rap. But a reactionary shift toward bipartisanship — toward an anodyne centrism — isn’t the solution. Passion, deftly deployed, is actually an effective political tool with which to advance good ideas. That’s the promise of transpartisanship.”

If you decide to join us on the Transpartisan Listserv, take a moment to read over the listserv guidelines first. The list will be moderated according to this set of ground rules, in order to ensure the list remains safe, productive, civil, and focused.

New Step for Harwood’s Public Innovators Initiative

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We are pleased to share the announcement below about an exciting and ambitious initiative being undertaken by Rich Harwood and the Harwood Institute, an NCDD organizational member. The Harwood Institute is setting bold goals for its Public Innovators program, which you can read about below or in the original post here.

We are also excited to share that NCDD is in talks with Harwood to develop a partnership between our two organizations and networks which we hope will further advance all of our work. Stay tuned for more details!

Our New Goal: 5,000 Trained Public Innovators Ready to Change the Country

I’m glad to announce today The Harwood Institute’s plan to train 5,000 new Public Innovators by 2016. Public innovators are individuals with the mindset and skills to catalyze and drive productive change in communities and change how communities work together. We’ll also grow our Public Innovators Corps to 100,000 members – individuals who actively support this new direction and use our approach to better their communities, organizations and lives.

We’ve put this stake in the ground to counter the growing toxic public discourse, division and mistrust in our society. There is an urgent need to make community a common enterprise. Even the best leaders, organizations, and citizens cannot make progress alone in the existing environment. We must pull together in a common direction.

This year I’ll also continue our new Reclaiming Main Street Campaign in which I’ll be touring the country to lay out what people and groups can do to make communities a common enterprise, and to invite individuals from all walks of life to join this cause. To be clear, this is not an initiative to garner support for the Institute, but rather for the Institute to support the progress I have heard so many Americans say they want to achieve in their communities.

Public innovators – a designation developed by the Institute – share three defining characteristics. First, they have deeply held ideals that serve as a compass for everything they do in their work and community. Second, they are deeply pragmatic; they know that ideals alone will not produce the change they seek. They want to know what works and they are insistent on re-calibrating their efforts as they learn. Third, they understand risk. They are willing to push hard for change and try out new ideas, while recognizing they must align their efforts to what people care about in their communities.

At the Institute, we don’t “create” public innovators. Instead, we help people tap into their own innate potential and capabilities to develop themselves into public innovators. We teach these individuals a practice that involves a mindset of making the community the reference point for everything they do (what we call being “turned outward”) and a set of core competencies that gives them the skills to bring people together to produce results on issues ranging from education and hunger to health care and financial literacy.

Admittedly, our 2016 goals are audacious. But we stand at a critical point in time. The Institute’s efforts – together with like-minded endeavors across the U.S. – can make a real difference in restoring our belief that we can get things done together. Through these efforts we aim to create:

Proof points of change – generating both big and small wins that demonstrate that change is possible;
New ways of working – showing that it is possible to fix our toxic public discourse, increase shared responsibility and make community a common enterprise. These are essential to answer people’s yearning for an alternate path to business as usual;
An army of storytellers – mobilizing people and groups to amplify and spread stories of change. It is imperative to foster a new, can-do narrative that combats ingrained negative beliefs that progress is not possible;
A path for people to act – providing individuals and groups clear ways to get started and take action in their communities and lives. People want to step forward, but they need to see how they can make a difference.

I said earlier that no one group or individual can do this work alone. I believe that. And so one of the ways in which the Institute is achieving these goals is through forging alliances with networked organizations such as United Way Worldwide, American Library Association, AARP and public broadcasting. Literally thousands of local affiliates and individuals in these networks are now using our practice across the U.S. and around the globe.

And we’re starting new alliances all the time. Just last week we launched a new statewide partnership with the Indiana Association of United Ways to develop public innovators throughout the 60-plus local United Ways in the state. We’ll be announcing additional alliances in the coming months. At this very moment, the Institute is building a critical mass of public innovators and organizations in individual communities such as Battle Creek, Michigan and Youngstown, Ohio to help shift the civic culture of those communities.

Throughout the country, public innovators are finding one another and working together. Our new strategy is to greatly expand these efforts in order to marshal the collective energy of individuals and groups to move the country in a new direction.
I hope you’ll join with me in this effort as we:

Bring Public Innovator Labs to more communities in the coming months. Join us for one of these Labs, or even bring a Lab to your community.
Develop and launch a new Public Innovator Certification program over the next 18 months. You’ll be able to go deeper in this approach and get certified.
Recruit 100,000 members of the Public Innovators Corps by 2016. We’ll provide them with ways to take effective action in their communities, organizations and lives. My hope is that you will encourage your friends and colleagues to join with us.
Expand the Reclaiming Main Street Campaign. We’d love to come to your community.

I invite you to write me directly at rharwood@theharwoodinstitute.org about how, together, we can make communities a common enterprise and put our nation on a more productive, hopeful path.

Sponsorship Opportunities for NCDD 2014

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Sandy Heierbacher

Plans are underway for NCDD’s 6th National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, to be held October 17-19, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency Reston in the DC Metro Area. NCDD conferences bring together 400+ of the most active, thoughtful, and influential people involved in public engagement and group process work across the U.S. and Canada (plus a few good friends from outside North America!).

NCDDSeattle-GRs-border Consider supporting this important convening by becoming a sponsor or partner of NCDD 2014. By supporting an NCDD conference, our sponsors are showing their leadership in and commitment to public engagement and innovative community problem solving to leaders and emerging leaders in our rapidly growing field.

Becoming an All-Star Sponsor ($3000), Co-Sponsor ($2000) or Partner ($1000) now provides you with months of PR, building good will, name recognition, and respect for your organization as we proudly acknowledge your support while we publicize the conference.

We hope to have between 400 and 450 attendees at NCDD 2014, and you can see from this chart that we have a strong track record for attendance. Learn more about sponsorship options and benefits. And thank you for considering supporting the conference in this critical way!

When you sign on as a sponsor or partner of NCDD 2014, you’ll be joining an amazing group of peers you’ll be proud to associate with. To give you an idea, here are our sponsors and partners for our last national conference, NCDD 2012 in Seattle…

Share the sponsorship doc with others or sign on yourself: www.tinyurl.com/ncdd14-sponsorinfo

Announcing the 2014 Taylor Willingham Fund Award Winner

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Roshan Bliss

We are excited to congratulate Mr. David E. McCracken on winning the 2014 award from the Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Fund , coordinated by our organizational partners at the National Issues Forums Institute. You can find out more about Taylor, her work in deliberation, and her legacy here. You can read the award announcement below or find the original here.

David E. McCracken, of North Carolina, is this year’s recipient of the Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Fund grant.

McCracken will be working with residents in Haywood County, North Carolina to name and frame local issues and then to conduct four community forums.

Biographic sketch and description of planned deliberative forums work from David E. McCracken:

David E. McCracken is a lifetime military and civil servant with extensive experience in leader development, domestic and international security, and peacekeeping training. He served 29 years as an active US Army officer, mostly in Special Forces, and 13 years as a Department of Defense civil servant. He has been an independent consultant since 2012, and leads a discussion group, Great Decisions, in western North Carolina. The group encourages individuals to think critically about global issues facing policy makers.

He grew up and worked on a dairy farm during his youth, then graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Oklahoma. He holds post-graduate certificates from both the JFK School of Government at Harvard University and MIT Seminar XXI, and also served on the faculty of National Defense University.

His decision to request a grant from the Taylor Willingham Legacy Fund (TWLF) emanated from a question raised during his local Great Decisions discussion series last year. Research into locating a viable information program to better inform citizens on domestic issues resulted in a dearth of available options. TWLF provided the sole source to implement a local forum focused on citizen information. In light of the opportunities during election year 2014 at the local, state and federal levels, he has been awarded a grant to conduct multiple forums to increase awareness among citizens within Haywood County, North Carolina on topics to be generated by forum participants. The result will enable citizens to better select representatives at national, state and local levels who align with their individual priorities. Moreover, he plans to also conduct a youth focused, leader development track that will better educate future voters to stimulate their participation as citizens so that government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’ shall prosper.

Click here to learn more about the Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Fund.

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