By Vince Bzdek

It started with a completely random encounter in a buffet line.

Harry Gottlieb, founder of a national civic organization called Unify America, and his president, Michelle Sobel, were at a Chicago fundraising conference, talking about trying to find a good U.S. city for a pilot project called a “citizens’ assembly.”

A citizens’ assembly is a group of ordinary people selected at random to tackle a tough policy problem and produce recommendations for the government. The idea draws on ancient Athenian democracy, where citizens were chosen by lot rather than election to fill public roles. The assemblies aim to sidestep partisan gridlock by tapping citizens themselves to help solve some of the problems governments haven’t been able to.

The track record of citizen assemblies in Europe on thorny issues — such as constitutional reform in Iceland and climate policy in France — has made them one of the more genuinely exciting experiments in democratic innovation in recent decades, and Unify America was eager to help start one here.

Sobel and Gottlieb found themselves in line at the buffet with a former state representative who lived in Montrose. They were telling him about looking for this pilot, and he said, “Well, would you be interested in just coming down to Montrose and checking us out?”

So they came down and started doing interviews and pop-up events to tell people about their project. They found Montrose’s small size and combination of rural and urban, with its conservative small-town values across a diverse population, to be fertile ground for a citizens’ assembly. They set up a team to take on the problem of problem-solving in Montrose.

The Shared Goal

“The first thing we did was talk to local leaders across the board, in business, health, education,” Gottlieb said in a video recap of the project. “And after a series of conversations, they decided we should focus on the area of childcare.”

The shortage of affordable child care has been a persistent challenge affecting families across southwestern Colorado.

The team from Unify America focused first on hammering out a shared goal on the issue.

That goal was developed in consultation with more than 70 residents and leaders over about 10 weeks in spring 2023.

“If you have the same goal, we don’t need to demonize each other,” said Gottlieb in describing the process.

“We’re a little polarized in the United States, you may have noticed. Could we get many, many, many more people participating in public problem-solving? And might that help us start a movement towards an overall idea that, hey, there might be a different way we could govern ourselves, through deliberation rather than through politics?”

The Unify team found that though Montrose, too, was pretty polarized, the citizens could agree on one goal: that “every parent and guardian in Montrose shall have dependable access to safe, affordable, and enriching child care.”

The Assembly

Then, over 12 weeks, an assembly of 46 Montrose residents chosen in a lottery participated in a series of online conversations where they got to know one another, learned about the child care problem in detail, discussed and weighed the merits of various solutions, and ultimately voted on whether those solutions would improve the current situation.

The delegates formed smaller groups within the assembly called Trusts to foster relationship building.

“What we did in Montrose and that we’ve learned from many other great practitioners, is you have to start with relationship building,” Morgan Lasher, chief of U.S. Democracy Leagues for Unify, told me in an interview. “You have to start by helping people get to know each other, recognizing your shared humanity.”

The Eight Actions

Residents deliberated on eight actions curated by local child care experts and generated 16 of their own ideas for further exploration. Five action ideas received over two-thirds support and were presented to the community. The key proposals that gained strong delegate support included:

∙ Camp Montrose — a partnership between youth program providers, child care centers, and the school district to provide after-school, no-school day and summer programming for K–8 students.

∙ The Nurture Network and an Early Childhood Education Center Upgrade, which would replace aging school district trailers with yurts serving 3- and 4-year-olds, with drop-off/pick-up times aligned with a full workday.

∙ Care Bucks, a subsidy program for families that can’t afford child care, and a Montrose Childcare Providers Fund, a local granting organization to help bridge pay gaps for providers.

∙ Incentivizing larger employers — such as the hospital or school district — to create on-site child care options, with employees of sponsoring businesses receiving discounts.

The Implementation

The citizens’ assembly wrapped up by producing a 96-page community report filled with recommendations, survey findings and actionable steps. During a February 2024 celebration event, local leaders publicly committed to building implementation plans for several of the ideas.

Concrete implementation of new child care spots, programs and funding is still in progress, so the full real-world impact on child care access in Montrose is still unfolding. But the experiment is widely cited as a successful model of civic problem-solving and building cross-partisan consensus.

Unify Montrose

But beyond the concrete steps to solve the child care shortage, there was a bigger halo benefit from the gatherings in Montrose.

“A bunch of community members decided, ‘We want to keep doing this,’ and they formed their own nonprofit, Unify Montrose, to do ongoing public problem solving in Montrose,” Gottlieb said.

Those conversations and deliberations created a deeper sense of community in the town and a new sense of agency for many of its residents. They were talking to each other about important things. They were solving their own problems instead of b—hing and moaning about “government.” They had built a real, tangible way to Be the People.

“After that first meeting, I left in such an incredibly happy, excited, and awe-inspired mood because I saw just how different the people in my Trust were, and they were all motivated to solve problems,” recalled delegate Alejandro Salazar in the report. “The excitement was shared, and it motivated people to come back. I still see an excitement in our community.”

“The fastest way to build a civic identity is to deliberate with your neighbor,” said Lasher, the Unify executive. “That’s why I fell in love with this whole field. It builds community.

“We give all our politicians power and we forget about our own sovereign nature.”

We are a nation of joiners who haven’t had the onramps and infrastructure to participate in the political process in a constructive way in many years, just echo chambers that keep us apart.

“We are a nation of self- government in theory, but we don’t have the systems that match the level of our visions for the country yet,” Lasher said.

Maybe citizens’ assemblies provide one way to better live out our founding creed.

On the civic side, 93% of Montrose assembly members felt the deliberation helped them consider new perspectives they hadn’t considered before, and 91% felt that hearing different viewpoints improved the quality of decision-making. More than 90% felt that deliberation should be used to solve political problems in the future.

The through-line across of this is a sense that civic participation can no longer be delegated — to parties, to elected officials or to institutions. Whether the motivation is patriotic renewal, democratic resistance or local problem-solving, Americans across the spectrum appear to be rediscovering that self-governance requires active, ongoing participation. America’s 250th anniversary in July is serving as a focal point for many of these efforts.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Unify America is already helping two more citizens assembles take root in Ohio now.

“We want folks to feel more agency in their own government,” Lasher said. “If we want people to connect, the national path is not going to plug them in. They have to plug in in their local world. So I think the only place, hopefully, the deliberative wave starts, is in local, small communities and neighborhoods.”

“We have to put the We back in We the People.”

Vince Bzdek, executive editor of  The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.