UGA’s Honors Program will hold a public policy institute at the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta on June 10-11 to prepare participants to serve as forum moderators, able to lead discussions on local, national and international issues.
Faculty, staff and students from UGA and other Georgia institutions, including community leaders from Duluth Methodist Church, Hands-On Atlanta, and international visitors, will participate in the two-day institute.
A separate National Issues Forum on ways to create global stability will be held on the second day from 10 a.m. to noon and is free and open to the public.
Leading the training efforts are Margaret Holt, an associate of the Kettering Foundation who assists groups with public policy institutes nationwide, and Connie Crockett Gahagan, a Kettering program officer who studies trends in education.
The Kettering Foundation, an Ohio-based non-profit, non-partisan research institute, contributes to the NIF guides used in community forums held every year nationwide. UGA faculty and professional staff will assist in the training.
“Encouraging participation in forums that concern public policy issues is critically important to the maintenance and advancement of a democracy,” says Holt, a former professor of adult education at UGA who has moderated campus forums with student groups and her classes. “Issues like health care, education, social security, our economy, and how we will engage with others in the world should matter to all of us. We need to be well-informed to practice ‘self-rule’ and to inform our policy-makers of our perspectives as we weigh these types of issues.”
Gahagan will moderate the Saturday NIF discussion-“A World Apart, A Common Problem: How Do We Create Stability around the Globe?”-in the Town Hall room of the Carter Library.
This is the second year UGA’s Honors Program has collaborated with the Carter Library in hosting a public policy institute. Last year’s participants included UGA students Hariqbal Basi and Melvin Hines Jr., who have moderated campus forums on NIF topics through the Honors Program and UGA’s Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities.