West Virginia Center for Civic Life

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The West Virginia. Center for Civic Life is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that helps engage our citizens in community discussions of important public issues that affect our state and nation.

Think. Talk. Act.

Resources

General Resources

2010 Civic Life Institute Participant Guidebook

Resource Guide on Public Engagement

West Virginia Community Development Hub: A New Model for Community Development in West Virginia.  This a statewide non-profit organization with the mission of engaging communities and providers in an intentional, aligned and continuous system of community development. The Hub does this by connecting communities with the Network of resource and technical assistance providers they need to succeed; connecting those resource and technical assistance providers with one another in an effort to align those services to reduce redundancies and identify gaps; and connecting communities with one another to share best practices and reinforce one another's community development efforts.

National Resources for Promoting Public
Dialogue and Deliberation

AmericaSpeaks is a  nonpartisan, non-profit organization whose mission is to engage citizens in the public decisions that impact their lives. AmericaSpeaks uses deliberative tools, such as the 21st Century Town Meeting, to give citizens a voice in local, regional and national decision-making on the most challenging public issues of the day.

CIRCLE (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) conducts research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25.  They work with teachers, administrators, youth workers, young people, and others to set a research agenda and disseminate findings.

Everyday Democracy develops programs and services to help create communities that work better for everyone because all voices are included in public dialogue and problem-solving in order to build a stronger democracy.

The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation works to spark fundamental change in American public life by cultivating, coaching, connecting, and supporting public innovators who are trying to make positive changes in their communities and in the lives of the people who live there.

The Kettering Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan organization rooted in the American tradition of cooperative research. Everything Kettering researches relates to one central question: what does it take for democracy to work as it should? Or put another way: What does it take for citizens to shape their collective future?

National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation provides infrastructure to a growing community of practitioners who are committed to giving people a voice and to working together to increase both individual and collective impact.  The NCCD has created and collected resources from a wide range of public dialogue and deliberation practices.

National Issues Forums (NIF) is a network of civic, educational, and other organizations, and individuals, whose common interest is to promote public deliberation in America. NIF does not advocate specific solutions or points of view but provides citizens the opportunity to consider a broad range of choices, weigh the pros and cons of those choices, and meet with each other in a public dialogue to identify the concerns they hold in common.

Public Agenda, a public opinion research and public engagement organization, works to strengthen our democracy's capacity to tackle tough public policy issues. Public Agenda provides unbiased research that bridges the gap between American leaders and what the public really thinks about issues ranging from education to foreign policy to immigration to religion and civility in American life.  Their work is focused on ensuring that the public's views are represented in decision-making.