Civic Assemblies: A Framework for Community Colleges

A practical guide on how to host your own assembly.

May 13, 2026

Shutterstock.com / Roaming Panda Photos

Hollie Russon Gilman, Sarah Jacob, Elena Souris

Introduction

Community colleges play a unique role in their neighborhoods: They’re trusted institutions; serve diverse student populations; and have deeply rooted networks across local governments, businesses, and community organizations. Many of these schools were also founded with civic missions, dedicated to preparing enrollees both for the workforce and their roles as constituents in American democracy.

As a result, community colleges are particularly well-positioned to carry out nonpartisan civic engagement efforts – and to experiment with innovative forms of democratic deliberation, such as civic assemblies.

Civic assemblies are forums where a representative sample of the community act as a jury, reviewing information about a local challenge, deliberating amongst themselves, and then providing recommendations to decision-makers.

While civic assemblies have long been led by governments or civic engagement organizations, community colleges can also implement these tools, either to support internal administration or to host an external-facing assembly in partnership with a government or another local organization. When doing so, schools could help administrators and local leaders break through difficult, long-contested challenges that have otherwise reached a standstill – such as developing an AI Code of Ethics or deciding how to use a public plot of land.

This guide is a starting point for students, faculty, and administrators interested in organizing civic assemblies on their own campuses. The following sections cover the design process, answers frequently asked questions that tend to arise when planning an assembly, and adapts current literature on the subject into a practical framework suited to the resources and strengths of community colleges.

The information in this guide draws on research into assemblies and other forms of civic engagement carried out by New America’s Political Reform program, including the team’s research focused on civic opportunities at community colleges.

What is a civic assembly?

Civic assemblies (also called citizens’ assemblies) are forums designed to involve everyday people in institutional decision-making. Through a process called sortition, or a “civic lottery,” organizers create a group of randomly selected and demographically diverse participants. These delegates then discuss a policy issue with experts and officials. After deliberation, the participants produce specific recommendations.

Assemblies fall within the broader category of “mini-publics,” bringing everyday people into meaningful collaboration with officials and decision-makers. This model fosters productive dialogues that transcend partisan politics, connects constituents’ insights and recommendations to concrete policy outcomes, and effectively uses representative sampling to ensure that communities are equitably represented.

Four Phases of an Assembly

Phase 1: Planning & Recruitment

Identify an issue to focus on and create a representative sample of constituents to serve as delegates. The delegates are then broken up into small groups led by neutral facilitators.

Phase 2: Learning

Assembly members attend presentations given by experts, ask questions, and discuss their reactions in small groups.

Phase 3: Deliberation

Participants deliberate in small groups and revisit their original ideas. Conversations are mediated by facilitators, ensuring that all voices are heard.

Phase 4: Decision-making

Delegates vote on key questions and submit final recommendations – including the reasoning behind them – to decision-makers. Those officials then review recommendations and provide the public with their final decisions.

Who Participates?

Delegates

Number of Participants: 12 – 24

Role: Students, faculty and adjuncts, administrators, staff, community members who represent the full diversity of affected stakeholders, a wide spectrum of perspectives, and a range of lived experiences.

Experts

Number of Participants: 1 – 10

Role: Administrators, community leaders, elected officials, and faculty who share their knowledge about the chosen topic.

Facilitators

Number of Participants: 2-4

Role: Neutral moderators that have training in facilitation. They can be administrators, community leaders, students, or officials, but must not overlap with the leaders or organization who will receive recommendations.

Decision-Makers

Number of Participants: 2-5

Role: Officials that have authority to act and or respond to the recommendations such as deans, department chairs, or local officials.

Planning the Assembly

Step One: Identify the Right Topic

The topic should be concrete and focused on the local level. It should be an issue that potential delegates have personal experience with and could feasibly help tackle in their communities.

Step Two: Design the Assembly

Budget: Identify what resources are available for the assembly to determine scale and scope.

Key Questions: What external resources are needed to get this underway? Could a pilot process offer a proof of concept for funders and grants?

Format: Determine how members will convene. In-person meetings are the best way to facilitate dialogue; however, organizers may want to design a virtual component to help make participation more accessible.

Key Questions: Can delegates easily come to in-person events based on the geographic size of the area and transportation available? How can organizers ensure active participation even during virtual formats?

Outcomes: Secure buy-in from decision-makers.

Key Questions: Who are the decision-makers who will consider the assembly proposals? What is the final deliverable and what form will it be presented in (for example, a white paper, a set of recommendations)? How will the deliverable be shared with the broader public and what opportunities might that offer for other forms of engagement?

Length: Establish both the cadence and duration of assembly meetings. While many assemblies span over several days and weeks, community colleges can adapt the timeline to fit accessibility needs.

Key Questions: How far apart should the individual sessions be? How many hours in one day can participants be asked to commit to this process? Would weekends or weekdays work best for target groups?

Step Three: Supporting Delegates

Compensation: Food and paid stipends are two of the most common forms of compensation. Course credit could also be provided to students who participate in an assembly.

Key Questions: What resources would be most useful to delegates and help them overcome any barriers to participation (such as taking time off work)?

Accessibility: Translation services, transportation, childcare, and hybrid or online platforms can all help make assemblies more accessible for participants.

Key Questions: Are there any specific mobility, language, or audio/visual/sensory adaptations that would make the assembly accessible for the delegates?

Step Four: Choosing Delegates

Identify a Sample Pool: Start with as large of a pool as possible. Based on the question you’re hoping to address, this might include the entire community of residents; the staff, faculty, or student body; or the members of a specific academic department.

Send Invitations: Once the pool is identified, use a software to select a random but representative group, such as the suite of open-access tools developed by the Sortition Foundation. Then, send out messages to those people via email or mail, inviting them to reply by a set deadline if they are interested in participating.

Create a Lottery: After the deadline passes, collect the responses and use the same software to identify a final participant group that reflects your community in terms of age, gender, location, socio-economic status, and attitudes/ideology. The final group can be as small as 1-2 dozen or as large as 30-50 people.

Frequently Asked Questions

What resources are required to host a civic assembly on campus?

For in-person assemblies, organizers need 1) a dedicated meeting space 2) tailored and supportive resources for participants (including food, drinks, transportation, childcare, etc.) 3) sortition technology or a dedicated person to develop a representative pool, and 4) advertising and communication materials (e.g. flyers, email outreach). Additionally, 5) delegates should receive stipends and/or class credit.

Community college students and faculty have many competing demands on their time. How can civic assembly timelines be adapted to fit into other obligations?

Assemblies can certainly be updated to fit participants’ capacity. For example, a citizen’s assembly could be as short as three meetings, spread apart over the course of a few weeks. This could include two, 8-hour deliberation meetings hosted on Saturdays, plus a final 2-hour presentation meeting and discussion with decision-makers.

How should organizers identify a good topic for a citizens’ assembly on their campus?

The best assembly topics are concrete, extremely specific, and touch on delegates’ lived experiences. However, it is also critical that assemblies’ recommendations are reviewed by decision-makers who can influence the issue being discussed and are supportive of the participatory process. Therefore, in some cases, it can be helpful to start by identifying potential decision-makers, securing their commitment to participate in the assembly, and then designing the topic for deliberation around their jurisdiction.

Do leaders have to implement every idea that comes out of a citizens’ assembly?

No, but transparency is critical: Leaders do have to commit to meeting with assembly delegates, considering the recommendations, and reporting back on the status of those suggestions.

How can citizens’ assemblies be made accessible for participants who may not be able to participate in person?

Citizens’ assemblies can be hybrid or virtual, using digital tools like Zoom and discussion facilitation programs.

Sortition is a complicated process that requires some technical skill. Is it possible to host a citizens’ assembly without it?

It is possible to host a citizens’ assembly without sortition, but in that case, organizers should take extra care to make sure that the final group of participants 1) reflects the demographics of the broader population, 2) includes people with lived experience with the issue in question, and 3) does not only include self-selecting “usual suspects” who are already deeply engaged in similar processes.

How long does it take to plan an assembly?

Timelines can vary. Organizing a pilot event can take a few months, whereas an assembly hosted in partnership with government officials or community leaders can take a year or more from design to implementation.

Glossary of Common Terms

Sortition: A type of random sampling, used to select a group of participants that reflects the demographics of a population as a whole. It involves the use of software to accurately create both random and representative groups.

Delegates: People who live in the community and are affected by the issue in question. They participate in the assembly by reviewing information, discussing it amongst themselves, and providing final recommendations to decision-makers.

Random Sampling (Stratified): A method through which a population is “divided into smaller subgroups, or strata, based on shared characteristics. Then, a random sample is selected to ensure the final sample better represents the population.”

Deliberation: A process where a group of people discusses a challenge in order to identify questions, address concerns, and find potential solutions.