What is Environmental concerns?

Missed a forum? Keep the conversation going in our Conservation & Behavior Change, Climate Change Education, or another eePRO group!

In partnership with the Kettering Foundation, Environmental Issues Forums (EIF) provides tools, training, and support for engaging adults and students in meaningful, productive discussions about sticky issues that affect the environment and communities.

EIF is building a nationwide network of locally sponsored public forums for the consideration of public policy issues. EIF is rooted in the simple notion that people need to come together to reason and talk–to deliberate about common problems.

These forums, organized by a variety of organizations, groups, and individuals, offer citizens the opportunity to join together to deliberate, to make choices with others about ways to approach difficult issues and to work toward creating reasoned public judgment. Forums range from small or large group gatherings similar to town hall meetings, to study circles held in public places or in people's homes on an ongoing basis.

Forums focus on an issue such as climate change, water scarcity, water quality, or energy. The forums provide a way for people of diverse views and experiences to seek a shared understanding of the problem and to search for common ground for action. Forums are led by trained, neutral moderators, and use an issue discussion guide that frames the issue by presenting the overall problem and then three or four broad approaches to the problem. Forum participants work through the issue by considering each approach; examining what appeals to them or concerns them, and also what the costs, consequences, and trade-offs may be that would be incurred in following that approach.

How did EIF come about?

EIF is modeled on the National Issues Forums (NIF)—a nonpartisan, nationwide network of locally sponsored public issues forums. NIF is rooted in the simple notion that democracy requires an ongoing deliberative public dialogue. People need to come together to reason and talk—to deliberate about common problems. Understand together. Decide together. Act together.

To create EIF, NAAEE rekindled a partnership with the Kettering Foundation, a nonprofit cooperative research organization that focuses on what it takes to make democracy work. Kettering learns in collaboration with—and disseminates insights through—a far-flung international network of community organizations, government agencies, researchers, scholars, educators, and citizens. This network includes dozens of “Centers for Public Life” across the country, some of which are already contributing their expertise in and capacity for promoting public deliberation to EIF.

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Who can use EIF?

EIF will take shape through the efforts and innovations of EE practitioners—like you. Educators in communities, classrooms, conservation and education organizations, government agencies, and professional development may all find something of value in EIF.