People Power

What Democracy Requires

This fall Oakland, California, will do something U.S. politics has forgotten how to do: trust the people.

Forty residents selected by public lottery from 20,000 randomly-invited households will serve as delegates to Oakland’s first civic assembly. They reflect the city’s ethnic, racial, age, language, income, and neighborhood diversity. They will gather for three weekends to learn, deliberate, and decide how to turn vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and empty storefronts into vibrant community assets.

They will be paid, because civic labor is labor.

Oakland is far from the first city to engage residents this way. The idea has taken off in Europe and Latin America, often with transformative results. Ireland tasked randomly selected citizens with developing policy on marriage equality and abortion, then voted on their proposals. Bogotá, Colombia now runs lottery-selected citizens’ assemblies under city decree, and reports implementing most of the proposals from its 2025 assembly on waste and sanitation.

Civic assemblies have been influential in the U.S. too. Oregon has had panels of voters review ballot measures for more than a decade. Petaluma, California, turned the future of its fairgrounds over to randomly selected residents. Deschutes County, Oregon, did the same on youth homelessness.

We believe this work matters far beyond Oakland. The nation needs models that reinvigorate democracy and restore trust — in our leaders and in one another. We need models that lift up facts, promote vigorous public engagement, and produce results that meet the highest standards of human flourishing. We need models that bring together the diversity of our communities in authentic processes that value the wisdom, experience, and contributions of all.

A healthy democracy runs on mutuality and solidarity — an understanding that the wellbeing of any one of us depends on the wellbeing of all. That is the foundation of the civic assembly.

There are challenges, of course, to putting this vision into practice. Here are three things important to getting it right.

First, unleash radical imagination. The civic assembly model engages residents in difficult, often urgent issues that government has failed to solve. It’s tempting to dive straight into the problem. But that traps people inside the constraints they’ve been taught to accept. It invites tweaks to failed policies. So, start somewhere else entirely. Before a single policy option goes on a whiteboard, invite participants to envision the best possibilities for their communities. In your wildest imaginations, what could that abandoned space become? Imagination reflects our deepest desires and unleashes our capacity to think in transformative ways. From there we arrive at bolder, wiser, and more durable answers.

Second, assemble the right partners. A civic assembly needs, well, a village. It needs technical expertise, funding, and the support of trusted leaders from local government and civil society. In Oakland, we began with a steering committee of civic leaders and organizations rooted in the community, with a track record of advocating for those pushed to the margins. This group designed a structure that reflects the community and lets diverse participants make their unique contributions as they influence governance for the whole, while keeping focus on those too often not consulted.

Third, plan for impact. Involve decision makers and the public and keep both informed. Assembly planners need to cultivate trust and support from local officials from the outset. Ongoing, honest communication means recommendations don’t come as a surprise but land on the agenda of enthusiastic allies ready to carry them forward. Broad community outreach and technology that promotes transparency matter too. These efforts pay off when the time comes to get recommendations adopted.

This work must extend well beyond a single assembly or a single city. This year, the PolicyLink Summit convenes under a banner that captures the stakes: We Are the Founders. This generation is not merely defending democracy but authoring its next chapter, redesigning institutions to see everyone’s humanity and deliver for everyone’s thriving. In this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Summit is a reminder that the founding is not a moment. It is an assignment.

The civic assembly is one instrument for doing that assignment. How well it works depends on how intentionally we design it — not just to solve a problem, but to revitalize democracy so it serves us all. An assembly that manages participation rather than unleashing creativity, or produces recommendations that sit on a shelf, betrays both the concept and the labor of those who take part. A hollow process makes the next assembly harder to believe in. The goal is not to bolt a new widget onto a failing machine. It is to model, and then build, a democracy of, by, and for the people.

We are just getting started in Oakland. We invite you to follow what 40 randomly selected residents do with three weekends and a lot of community trust. Then look at your own city and invite residents to step into a new way of thinking: relating to their neighbors, solving hard problems, and shaping the future together.

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Angela Glover Blackwell is Founder in Residence at PolicyLink, host of the Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life podcast, and Professor of Practice at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. Micah Weinberg is a Senior Advisor to the Democracy Policy Initiative at the Goldman School at UC Berkeley and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. You can read more of his writing on the Oakland Civic Assembly on the Assembling Oakland Substack.