Democracy should give us a real say in the decisions that shape our lives, but few people today feel the government is working for them. Inequality is extreme, our economic lives are precarious, and trust in government and all kinds of institutions is at historic lows. All this has opened up space for the reactionary Right—at least in the last election—to win over a multiracial majority of voters. As we defend electoral democracy and organize our people, we also need to build new democratic structures: ones that deepen people’s sense of interdependence and solidarity, build real political and economic democracy, and deliver palpable results that restore people’s faith in collective public action and democratic governance.
Co-governance, in which government and communities collaborate and share power to solve problems together, is one especially powerful approach to structural change. And assemblies—gatherings in which larger numbers of people come together across lines of difference to deliberate together and make collective decisions—are important tools for co-governance.
[Assemblies] can help shift power away from organized elite interests like real estate developers toward everyday people.
Assemblies are especially useful for facilitating participation of large numbers of people and for addressing multifaceted “wicked problems” around which multiple values and stakeholders are in tension and for which there is no single resolution. With models to learn from everywhere, from Bend, Oregon, the Bronx, Bogotá, and Brussels, there is real potential for movements, foundations, and local and state governments to expand and strengthen the role of assemblies in public life as a way to build authentic, effective, multiracial democracy from the ground up.
Types of Assemblies
Assemblies vary a lot: they can be convened by community groups, governments, or both. They can play an official role in governance or sit entirely outside of the public realm. Assemblies can hold either advisory or decision-making power. However they are structured, assemblies can enable everyday people to draw on their values and lived experiences as they work together to guide governments, philanthropy, unions, and other institutions around what issues to prioritize. These structures can help generate collaborative solutions that balance multiple goals, build public support behind those solutions, and hold government and other institutions accountable to ensure their implementation.
Movement assemblies
Movement assemblies are convened by organizing groups to build solidarity and the power to democratically govern their organizations and coalitions. They are not just meetings: they are living demonstrations of collective wisdom and solidarity. They build leadership, deepen people’s commitment, and help participants, organizations, and coalitions align around shared strategies.
I’ve experienced this firsthand as a participant in movement assemblies with groups including It Takes Roots, People’s Action, Put People First! PA, Southern Maine Workers’ Center, and Vermont Workers’ Center. As a guest at Put People First! PA’s first annual membership assembly, I got to watch as the organization’s members shared what they learned from months of research and decided together to focus their statewide organizing on healthcare as an issue around which they could unite poor and dispossessed Pennsylvanians across lines of race and geography. It was a beautiful and effective exercise in collective self-determination that built organizational consensus and commitment, and that deepened the skills, leadership, and relationships of everyone involved. I walked away from that weekend a better organizer and strategist, and with deep, enduring friendships and commitments to the movement that I will hold dear for life.
Civic assemblies
Civic assemblies are another common form of assembly. They are convened either by community groups or governments to solicit direct public input on a single policy question, and they select participants through a “civic lottery” that picks participants randomly but balances them by key demographic attributes to mirror the larger population of their jurisdiction.
Governments and organizations have held civic assemblies widely across Latin America and Europe. In the US, civic groups including Healthy Democracy, Central Oregon Civic Action Project, and CivicLex are working with local governments through recently convened assemblies on youth homelessness in Deschutes County, Oregon, and on land use in Petaluma, California and in Fort Collins, Colorado. Next year Lexington, Kentucky will hold a civic assembly on representation, trust, and civic participation. Civic assemblies can be convened as one-time bodies or, as in Brussels, Paris, and other cities, as standing assemblies that play an ongoing role in government policy-making and budgetary decisions every year.
Civic assemblies can also be a powerful experience for participants. They are especially effective interventions for complex issues where public opinion is polarized or where long-term, sustainable solutions require broad public and stakeholder buy-in. Ireland famously convened a civic assembly to deliberate on abortion policy, a highly contentious issue in the heavily Catholic country. By enabling everyday people to bring their many values and personal experiences into the assembly and to deliberate around the complexities and trade-offs, and by bringing those deliberations to the broader public through an intentional media strategy, the assembly built public support behind reproductive rights and led to a 2017 national referendum that legalized abortion. In the US, smaller-scale assemblies have been held to provide governments with direction on land use, legislative redistricting, artificial intelligence, and health care delivery. For now, civic assemblies are more common in Europe (where they are usually called citizen assemblies) and Latin America (where they are often called consultations) than in the US, but there is real potential to expand them here—especially standing assemblies, which provide an ongoing, institutionalized mechanism for public participation and power in governance.
Governing-Power Assemblies
To my mind, the most exciting assemblies today are experimenting with how to combine movement assemblies’ commitment to power-building with civic assemblies’ direct intervention in public governance. I call these hybrid models governing-power assemblies. By linking structured deliberation with civic organization and mobilization, governing-power assemblies enable communities not only to generate policy ideas, but also to collaborate with government and build the inside-outside power needed to make them real.
Brazil, a world leader in assemblies, offers an example of a hybrid model that combines the best features of movement and civic assemblies. Through multiple assembly models, the government is coordinating with labor unions and community groups to build federated assemblies that have involved millions of residents and which provide direction and accountability to the federal, state, and local governments on health, education, environment, science and technology, rural development, minority rights, and other policy arenas. A staggering seven million Brazilians participated in National Public Policy Conference assemblies from 2003 through 2011, for example, and in recent years the federal government has launched new assembly processes and created a complementary digital participation platform that has engaged 1.4 million people. The assemblies and digital platform are complemented by a third co-governance pillar: policy councils made up jointly of civil society and government representatives (sometimes industry representatives too) that help establish priorities, guidelines, and strategies for administrative governance and legislation.
Taken together, assemblies, digital participation, and policy councils provide both everyday people and organized community and labor groups with authentic channels of participation that have had real effects in administrative and legislative changes that support public health, minoritized groups like elders and Indigenous people, and other priorities identified by everyday people.
Power-building hybrid assemblies are also working in US cities. In Jackson, Mississippi, a city rich in community but harmed by centuries of racism, Black organizers with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, New Afrikan People’s Organization, People’s Advocacy Institute, Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, and One Voice Mississippi have built the Jackson People’s Assembly to bring local residents into direct democracy as they grow their leadership. These leaders work to fix Jackson’s water system, cultivate community safety, and build community power. In the Bronx, the Bronx-wide Coalition facilitated assemblies for residents to collectively develop a vision for their borough, to shape that into a plan, and to work with the Bronx’s Borough President to co-develop the plan into an official economic development strategy and proposal for a federal grant. In Washington state, Just Futures won funding from the state legislature to hold six community assemblies across the state to solicit policy priorities and solutions from communities on the frontlines of injustice.
Investing in Assemblies to Deepen Their Impacts
As these and many other examples show, assemblies are a highly proven model that should play a much bigger role in democratic governance. In the US, the federal government may not be ready to embrace assemblies anytime soon, but state and local governments and their community partners absolutely can. Assemblies that center equity and power can deliver durable impact, provided they are institutionalized and sustained over time.
Both movement assemblies and civic assemblies are powerful democratic tools that should be widely expanded to more places to bring together diverse communities, address a wider range of issues, and find creative people-centered solutions that are tangible and visible. But one thing that assemblies of all kinds have struggled with is deepening their impact on policy decisions and policy outcomes in ways that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
[W]e can recognize and invest in organized, independent community power as an essential part of a healthy democracy.
In learning about assemblies’ successes and shortcomings around the world, I’ve come to realize that deepening their impact requires us not just to facilitate fantastic assembly processes, but to work on better institutionalizing them within larger structures of power and governance. We should institutionalize assemblies across three dimensions: horizontally, across social movements to build civic capacity and countervailing power; vertically, within government to build democratic participation and accountability (especially with public agencies); and longitudinally, throughout the course of the policy process to strategically inject participation at key junctures stretching from agenda-setting through decision-making, implementation and monitoring, and enforcement.
Institutionalizing assemblies and other co-governance mechanisms across these dimensions helps movements build power and deliver wins for their bases, while it helps governments reach beyond the usual players and stalemates to engage directly impacted communities in identifying the most pressing challenges and generating informed, responsive, and effective policy solutions.
Organizers of movement and civic assemblies can strategize around these dimensions, and governing-power assemblies offer opportunities to pursue all three dimensions of institutionalization and impact at once. Since assemblies take significant labor to plan, run, and sustain, governments and foundations should invest in assemblies year over year as foundational building blocks for a robust democracy.
Building Assemblies into Democratic Governance
Co-governance and assemblies aren’t about replacing elections, policy-making, advocacy, or organizing: they’re about deepening them. When designed, institutionalized, and funded intentionally, assemblies can help diffuse reflexive polarization, foster solidarity, and make room for compromise. They can help shift power away from organized elite interests like real estate developers toward everyday people. They can help governments focus on what matters most to their constituents, produce better and fairer policies, and build channels for accountability and trust that extend beyond elections. As I discovered in Pennsylvania, assemblies can be a powerful experience for everyone involved, by engaging people in civic action and building the civic muscles we very much need.
Assemblies are not the only answer to the many challenges we face, but they are a powerful and greatly underutilized tool in our democratic toolbox; one that can generate solidarity across difference, repair injustice, and uphold human dignity.
As I discuss in a recent report for Partners for Dignity & Rights, there are a number of things that organizers, advocates, foundations, elected officials, and government agencies can do to expand and deepen assemblies’ roles in public life. For example, we can build partnerships between community organizations and government agencies, doing the slow but crucial work of repairing harms, building trust, and developing strong collaborative relationships. We can strategically focus assemblies on issues like housing, health, community safety, and well-being that resonate across partisan divides. We can use intentional recruitment strategies, whether civic lotteries or targeted recruitment, to ensure diversity and equitable representation by people on the frontlines of policy problems. We can secure government officials’ recognition of assemblies in policy processes, institutionalize assemblies in governance processes, and move assemblies along the spectrum from tokenistic input toward authentic community power and ownership. And we can recognize and invest in organized, independent community power as an essential part of a healthy democracy.
Organizing assemblies is not easy. Because of their size, assemblies are time- and resource-intensive, and they face potential risks. They can be co-opted by opponents of community power and people-centered policy solutions, undermined by underfunding, or fall into the trap of becoming yet another exercise in “community engagement” that doesn’t give communities any power and doesn’t deliver results. That’s why clear principles, strategic issue selection, careful language, rigorous design, and training and support for participants and government staff matter. In many locales, the best way to figure out how to build political and financial support for assemblies and how to design and run them effectively is to start small with a pilot project, then use that to demonstrate results, make adjustments, and build further support.
Assemblies are not the only answer to the many challenges we face, but they are a powerful and greatly underutilized tool in our democratic toolbox; one that can generate solidarity across difference, repair injustice, and uphold human dignity. It’s clear to everyone that our political and economic systems aren’t working. For people who are struggling to make ends meet in a rigged economy and political system, calls to defend democracy or reject authoritarianism often fall flat. We need new governance models that help restore people’s faith in collective public action by bringing people together across differences, developing actionable solutions, and delivering real, tangible results. Assemblies can help get us there.
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Ben is a movement strategist and consultant. He works with community and labor organizations and partners in government to help build strategies, campaigns, policies, and collaborative governance mechanisms that uphold human rights and give everyday people genuine, equitable power in policy making, governance, and oversight of government and private powers.
