What is a Citizens' Assembly?

Watch our new explainer video and find out

Over the last year, Democracy Creative has narrowed in on citizens’ assemblies as a promising tool for improving democracy in America and around the world. These are panels of regular people selected by lottery and paid to learn and deliberate about a public issue over several months, culminating in a set of recommendations for decision-makers on what to do about it. They’ve been convened by local, state, and national governments nearly 1,000 times on a wide variety of topics, such as climate change adaptation in England, assisted dying in France, and a new development plan for the municipal fairground in Petaluma, California.

We’ve found that citizens’ assemblies are somewhat hard to explain to people in 2 minutes, so we decided to create this video that gets the basic ideas across and mention some of the work Democracy Creative is doing to popularize them. We’d love to get your feedback in the comment section of this post, or emailed to hello@democracycreative.com.

We’d also appreciate if you considered subscribing to our YouTube channel, where we plan to post more informational videos like this one.

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