The New Hampshire Center for Civic Life was established in 1999 as a non-profit, non-partisan, state-wide organization housed at Franklin Pierce College, dedicated to understanding and advancing deliberative citizen politics and improving the quality of public life in New Hampshire and beyond. The Center carries out this mission by sponsoring a variety of programs including National Issues Forums Public Policy Institutes and workshops that help community members, educators, and organizational leaders learn skills that would be helpful for convening and moderating community dialogues, called forums. Methods for naming and framing issues in terms suitable for deliberation are also taught at Center workshops. Learning these skills will enable citizens to hold forums on local issues that they themselves frame for discussion.

The Center has two ultimate goals. One goal is to help engage citizens and students in discussing public policy issues in ways that transcend adversarial debate and special interest approaches and, instead, foster greater appreciation for and attention to the common ground upon which citizens can act together to solve their collective problems. It does this by teaching the methods of deliberative dialogue developed by the National Issues Forums and the Kettering Foundation. The other goal is to build civic infrastructure in the region through organizational partnerships animated by the ideals and practices of deliberative democracy. Our work is based on the premise that representative government cannot work well without the partnership of active citizens in directing, complementing, undergirding and sustaining its efforts.

Website: http://www.fpc.edu/pages/institutes/neccl/neccl.html