The Nevada Forum, a new nonprofit designed to create a structured path for residents to influence state policy, officially launches Thursday with a goal of developing bipartisan legislation for Nevada’s 2027 legislative session, organizers said. The effort, created with backing from actor and entrepreneur Andrew Shue, seeks to move beyond election-year positioning by starting with problems that Nevadans, across party lines, say they want state leaders and residents to address.
Shue told The Nevada Independent that the project is built to help Nevadans communicate across political divides and produce legislative ideas that lawmakers could implement during the 2027 session. He said participants in earlier work sessions did not reject the premise of trying to find common ground, describing how groups typically began contentious and ended in a more hopeful tone. Shue said the initiative is also intended as “civic infrastructure,” rather than a one-time exercise, and that it will need ongoing funding from people in Nevada.
Nevada is one of three states—along with South Carolina and New Hampshire—to participate in what organizers described as a new experiment. Shue said the idea developed about 10 years ago after he felt the country was struggling to tackle major issues from bipartisan perspectives, and he later traveled to 10 states with nationally recognized GOP pollster Frank Luntz to host focus groups on whether people were willing to engage with opposing views to find solutions.
Shue said the forum’s approach grew out of those multi-state sessions, which he described as beginning with participants “screaming,” “pointing the finger” and “talking over each other,” before moving to a more constructive place. He said the project has gone through multiple years of testing and has been developed into a four-phase timeline that will play out over the next year or so in Nevada.
The overarching goal for the statewide effort is to identify a “pragmatic” agenda and, eventually, propose legislation that would be supported by more than 70% of Nevadans, organizers said. Under the phases described for Nevada, organizers said the work will start by launching the initiative, then collecting ideas from residents through an online platform and working with residents, lawmakers and experts on solutions. The final phase will convene what organizers described as a politically and demographically representative group of 50 to 100 Nevadans to propose legislation that could be implemented during the 2027 legislative session.
Organizers said initial funding for the enterprise came from people in Shue’s social and entrepreneurial circle who wanted to use seed capital to show what could be possible. They also pointed to targeted advertising already placed by Meta, saying the company’s records show it spent more than $8,000 on targeted social media ads. Shue said the goal is to make the effort “not be a one-and-done” and to annualize the civic infrastructure work in Nevada.
In Nevada, former Clark County Democratic Party chair Chris Miller and prominent state Republican Greg Bailor are co-chairs, organizers said. Bailor previously served as Nevada’s state director for the Republican National Committee and executive director of the Nevada Republican Party. Bailor said the country has “no shortage of problems to solve” and called the forum a unique opportunity for a large number of Nevadans across the state to have a “new way” to have their voices heard.
Bailor said the forum could help address difficulties for people who want to advocate from outside Carson City, noting that the state capital can be a barrier for residents. Organizers said Miller and Bailor have already counted more than 400 policy ideas submitted to the Nevada Forum ahead of the official launch, and they said the effort is not asking people to take off their partisan hats, but to bring their perspectives to a new kind of problem-solving venture.
Miller said he moved from California to Nevada in 2005 and argued that the forum gives an opportunity for people who were not born in Nevada—often living in more urban areas—to develop a better understanding of the state’s rural regions. He also said the project helped him connect with people outside his party and build meaningful relationships, adding that one benefit is learning different approaches to issues and finding ways to reach a shared endpoint.
Both co-chairs said the effort is focused on the kinds of changes that citizens can pursue but that may be hard to navigate through existing channels. They said formal civic input can be routed through legislators or ballot measures, but that those options can be difficult: ballot initiatives tend to be expensive and often reflect a particular party or cause. Bailor said organizers want to hear directly from Nevadans and have residents’ ideas come forward, rather than limiting the process to approaches driven by signatures gathered for narrower political aims.