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. It has grown to include thousands of civic clubs, religious organizations, libraries, schools, and many other groups that meet to discuss critical public issues. Forum participants range from teenagers to retirees, prison inmates to community leaders, and literacy students to university students.

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.

Although all forum activity is locally organized, moderated, and financed, the materials they use in common are produced by the Kettering Foundation of Dayton, Ohio, among others, and promoted by the National Issues Forums Institute. Among the publications developed each year are issue books used in the forums-clearly written nonpartisan booklets that describe the problem and present citizens with the advantages and costs of alternative policy choices. Regular, abridged, and Spanish editions of many of the issue books are available, as are videotapes and, in the case of the most recent books, DVDs. Abridged editions are designed for both adult and young new readers.