October 17, 2024 — From 14 September to 6 October 2024, a Civic Assembly on the topic of youth homelessness took place in Deschutes County in the US state of Oregon. On 6 October, Members of the Central Oregon Youth Action Board received the assembly’s recommendations. Later on, delegates from the assembly will deliver their resolutions to the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council, Deschutes County commissioners and the Bend City Council.
“Thanks for giving me hope”
Participating in the Civic Assembly was a very moving experience for all members of the mini-public. “It’s the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt my voice mattered,” said Brenda, one of the 25 assembly members there on the final day. “I definitely came into this process a sceptic,” said Kathryn, growing emotional. “So, thanks for giving me hope.”
The group coalesced on more than a dozen recommendations, each receiving more than 75% supermajority approval, ranked from greatest agreement to least. The top three:
- Develop programs to help foster care youth transition out of the system when they turn 18.
- Establish a physical hub that is a safe space for at-risk teens and allows them to access all manner of assistance programs in one central location.
- Improve the foster care system by linking those exiting the system with access to housing, training and education, informed by the federal lawsuit settlement in Wyatt B. vs. Kotek.
Recommendation 12, which received 82% agreement, is to create another civic assembly dedicated specifically to the closely related issue of housing affordability.
Youth homelessness has risen dramatically
In Deschutes County, youth homelessness has risen dramatically since 2020. “We’ve all seen the impacts of homelessness on Central Oregon and around the country. Our local governments and service organizations continue to work extraordinarily hard to find solutions,” said Josh Burgess, project director at DemocracyNext.
“Too often, other regions delegate the task of helping homeless youth to a small group of leaders and fail to draw on the rich expertise and diversity of the whole community. The Deschutes County Civic Assembly gives us the chance to involve residents from all walks of life in prioritizing policies and resources, bringing us together around solutions that will be more legitimate and sustainable.”
Meetings over four and a half days
The Civic Assembly, which was tasked with developing ideas to combat homelessness in the county with a population of about 198,000, met for four and a half days in autumn 2024. The 30 randomly selected participants met on 14/15 September and from 4 to 6 October. Each assembly member received an expense allowance of 15 dollars per hour. Childcare and travel costs were covered if required.
“We’ve already seen a long history of success using the Civic Assembly model in the US – including a wave of citizen juies in the 1970s, Oregon’s very own Citizens‘ Initiative Review and recent citizen assemblies in Oregon and California,” said Linn Davis, co-project director at Healthy Democracy. “When we bring new voices into public decision-making and empower people with the right process, these processes lead to policy breakthroughs that we rarely see with traditional public participation.”
Support from politicians
Deschutes County Commissioner Anthony DeBone said, “I support this Civic Assembly project that provides the opportunity for my fellow community members to learn about a topic and then provide guidance from the group’s super intelligence that comes from working together.”
The District Committee had voted unanimously on 24 June 2024 to support the Civic Assembly as an innovative way to engage community members in preventing and ending youth homelessness. The mini-public is also supported by the Bend City Council.
Bend City Councilor Megan Perkins said: “It’s really hard for me as a city councilor to understand how the majority of the people feel about something and what solutions they have without putting absolutely everything to a vote, and I think this is a really excellent way of popping that bubble.”
Deep appreciation for fellow assembly members
On the last day of the civic assembly, comments of deep appreciation for fellow assembly members, staff, and the assembly process itself echoed around the room. Lifelong Bend resident, Alex, whose stepdaughter has struggled with homelessness and addiction, said the invitation letter sparked a sense of engagement with the community that he had meant to act upon earlier:
“In my group of friends, we’d sit down, we’d talk about things. At the end we’d be like, ‘Man you know what? I should probably try to get involved in my local community, in politics.’ And then I go to sleep. I wake up. The next day, the next weekend, we’d hang out and get together. When I got that [assembly invitation] letter in the mail, it was like, okay this is it. I’m gonna do this now. It was that push that I needed. And for me personally, I think these should continue and I would love to be a part of it. I’m going to hold myself accountable and make sure I start following through with some of these recommendations we’ve made, and get more involved in the local communities.”
Civic Assembly is a pilot project
The Civic Assembly was an initial pilot of the Central Oregon Civic Action Project (COCAP), a first-time collaboration between Deschutes County, the City of Bend, the Regional Housing Council, Oregon State University – Cascades, and the nonprofit organisations Healthy Democracy and DemocracyNext, supported by the Ford Family Foundation, Brooks Resources, Omidyar Network, Porticus, Quadrivium, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The organisers of the project have been working with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication on the technical aspects of the Civic Assembly.
This assembly was enhanced using various technologies with the goals of increasing the quality, transparency, and trust of the process. It is already common practice for the plenary sessions to be recorded in Citizens’ Assemblies, as these are also open to the wider public to observe. What was new is that the organisers additionally recorded the small-group conversations, with the consent of assembly members for the full recordings to be used purely for the purposes of research by MIT CCC and OSU Cascades Laboratory for the American Conversation. No recordings or transcripts of the small-group conversations will be shared outside of these two groups, who are only going to be able to use them for research with approval from MIT and DCU’s Institutional Review Board.
Shedding light on how conclusions were reached
The assembly organisers believed that assembly members would opt in to share highlights of their conversations with their fellow citizens to shed light on how they reached their conclusions. Any sharing of highlights from the small-group conversation recordings with the wider public after the assembly is over will require the additional consent of assembly members. Similar examples to how such highlights could be shared in public-facing websites include the Be Heard Durham Portal, NYC Public Health Corps Portal, and the Real Talk For Change Portal.
In July 2024, around 12,750 invitations were sent out to randomly selected residents of the county with the official support of the city and county councils in Central Oregon. From the applications received, 30 participants were randomly selected for the Civic Assembly on 1 August 2024.
The democratic lottery for the Civic Assembly followed these steps:
- A mailing was sent to 12,750 randomly selected addresses.
- A population profile was created, looking at age, gender, and so on – using mostly Census data.
- People replied to the mailing using a simple form that asks for only what’s needed to run the lottery: demographic info. It’s not an application or a test – no essay questions or special qualifications.
- All replies were placed into an open-source computer program that creates dozens of possible “Assemblies” – all of which matched the population profile. These were all “counties in one room” – each included different individuals, but all of them matched that same Census data for age, gender, etc.
- There was a public lottery event, where one of those potential assemblies was chosen as the official one. Then, the organisers contacted folks, told them the news, and worked with them to make sure they can serve.
Homeless people included
The inclusion of people with personal experience was a central point of the assembly. Of the 12,750 invitations, only 12,500 were mailed to random residential addresses. The other 250 were distributed to people currently experiencing homelessness – including young people – by the service organizations who work with that population daily. Members of that community were included in the mini-public.
In addition, the organisers have been collaborating with the Central Oregon Youth Action Board, which is a group of young people who have experienced homelessness and are now advising local government officials. The YAB helped develop content to inform the assembly and will have a seat at the table with local officials when the assembly recommendations are presented.
