The People's Assembly Spring 2023.

Turned out to be quite a controversial thing holding a People's Assembly just before Purdah. It was naïve of us to think that a person's political beliefs could be assimilated into community work. Turns out that people often need to focus on either one or the other to satisfy the current political system, which of course, is not how real life works.

People can be local residents, work in community anchor institutions, be part of lottery-funded programs, and be politically active all at the same time. This is not a conflict of interest, more a better understanding of the unique humanness of our collaborative work. People's Assemblies are designed precisely to prevent someone from using a position of power to unduly influence, and this one was carefully facilitated to be as representative of the broad community as possible.

Assemblies should be enjoyable, bring learning, discussion, and act as unifying bodies where everyone can feel heard, flex their democratic muscles, and feel more powerful. They are based on radical inclusivity, active listening, and trusting the people to be respectful of each other.

Focusing on a neighborhood in Plymouth, invites were sent out to ask people what topical issues they wanted to see if they could do something about. Eight issues were raised, of which we chose three by a show of hands, after reading and listening to brief presentations. People self-organized into groups to discuss, each with a facilitator and minute taker to work up proposals that we could vote on to take forward. The better the facilitation, the easier this was for the group. Follow-up actions were agreed upon.

We managed some racial inclusive workshops in the local primary, cleaned up a back lane, better working together across the use of green spaces, and developed intergenerational work supporting local teenagers. We thought about freedom and accountability; diversity and commonality; action that communities can do for themselves and action from agencies.

If we had not hit such a strong political rebuttal for this work, it is likely that we could have gone much further into working out what this neighborhood had the capacity for to solve its own problems. Instead, we developed other strands of work. Interestingly, at the time of writing, two years later, there is another opportunity to pick this back up with greater confidence and understanding.