Listening at Scale in California: Inside the Possibility Lab’s Collaborative Model

Collaborative governance—or “co-governance”—offers a model for shifting power to ordinary people and rebuilding their trust in government. Co-governance models break down the boundaries between people inside and outside government, allowing community residents and elected officials to work together to design policy and share decision-making power. Cities around the world are experimenting with new forms of co-governance, from New York City’s participatory budgeting process to Paris’s adoption of a permanent citizens’ assembly. More than a one-off transaction or call for public input, successful models of co-governance empower everyday people to participate in the political process in an ongoing way. Co-governance has the potential to revitalize civic engagement, create more responsive and equitable structures for governing, and build channels for Black, brown, rural, and tribal communities to impact policymaking.

Still, co-governance models are not without challenges. The hierarchical and ineffective nature of our current governing structure is difficult to transform. Effective collaboration between communities and politicians requires building lasting relationships that overcome deep distrust in government. So far, effective models of co-governance tend to be local and community-specific—making it critical that we share stories of success and brainstorm ways to scale.

For this interview, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman and Sarah Jacob spoke with Amy Lerman, director of the Possibility Lab at UC Berkeley, on how California is reimagining public engagement through regional assemblies and community-driven pilots. To read more of the Political Reform team’s explorations of co-governance in practice, see the project page.

Can you give us an overview of the Possibility Lab’s current collaborations with the California state government?

We have been really fortunate over the last few years to establish a wide range of partnerships across California’s state departments and agencies to help support and study high-quality and policy-relevant community engagement and outreach. For example, one of the projects we’re working on right now is with the Strategic Growth Council and the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation. The Strategic Growth Council is composed of representatives from various state agencies that collaborate on land use and climate planning for the state.

In the past, they would bring everyone together in Sacramento each year for a big “Catalyst Convening,” gathering community organizations, local elected officials, and other stakeholders from across the state to discuss these issues. But for the first time this past year, they decided to reverse that model—to go out to the communities rather than bringing everyone to Sacramento—and to focus on regional strategic planning.

We are organizing engagement across nine bio-regions within California. These regions don’t necessarily align with city or county boundaries, but they’re based on ecological systems, like bird migration and topography. In each region, they’re bringing together a few hundred participants, including local elected officials, advocacy and community organizations, regional actors, tribal representatives, and multiple state agency officials. Together, they’re participating in a day-long strategic planning session that’s designed as a structured, participatory process.

Over the course of the day, participants work through several stages. The core engagement happens through structured, small-group discussions guided by facilitators. They start with level-setting, identifying the region’s key challenges, opportunities, and resources. From there, they move into problem definition, exploring the root causes of those challenges, and then collaboratively identifying actionable solutions at both the regional and state levels. Then, each small group develops and prioritizes a set of recommended solutions. Finally, every participant weighs in on each idea and, together, we narrow the list down to a set of policy recommendations, which will then feed into a statewide deliberative event once all the regional assemblies are complete. Ultimately, these recommendations will go to the Strategic Growth Council to inform the state’s strategic plan, spending priorities, and other key policy decisions.

How are you experimenting with digital tools in this process, and how are they being used to increase accessibility and transparency?

We want to understand when and how digital tools can truly enhance in-person engagement, rather than replace or dilute the kinds of deep conversations that have to happen face-to-face.

We’ve struggled a bit with how to use digital tools in an in-person environment without pulling people out of the moment. So much of what makes in-person engagement powerful is that participants are interacting directly with each other, whereas digital tools can sometimes insert a screen between people and their conversations.

We’re experimenting with ways to move people back and forth between digital and in-person modes—using technology in ways that support, rather than interrupt, the dialogue. We try to design activities where participants can talk about what they’re seeing on a digital platform as they’re using it, and then we share the results from everyone’s digital engagement so they can all discuss them collectively.

For example, in the morning sessions, when people are brainstorming challenges and opportunities, we have them work in their small groups to identify the key themes or topics they think are most important to address. Then, while they’re at lunch, we send out a quick individual survey asking which of those topics should be prioritized. It’s a simple way to use digital input to build on the insights coming out of in-person conversations, and it allows participants to set the agenda for in-person conversations during the day.

We also use Polis, which has been a great tool. It allows participants, in real time, to respond to the many different recommendations that come out of small-group discussions. We can then show those results to all of our participants—highlighting where there’s consensus and where opinions diverge. From there, we can better work together to develop the final list of policy suggestions.

Through examples like these, we’ve found that the biggest advantage of digital tools is, of course, scale—you can collect much broader data and engage far more people than you could in a single in-person session. But it can also help people who are in a room together understand and visualize information to inform deliberation and decision-making.

Who are the facilitators and stakeholders involved in the data collection?

We’re trying to balance two things: maintaining consistent data collection so that we can produce clear and comparable outputs across all the regional assemblies, while also iterating on the process so that we’re updating as we learn.

With that in mind, we’re learning as we go to think about the different roles that different players should hold. To give you an example, one of the things we’ve learned along the way is how to best define the role of state representatives. In the first regional deliberation event, we had them directly participate in the small-group discussions. But we quickly realized we hadn’t given them a clear enough role, and they often were put into the position of defending the state government when criticisms came up. In later sessions, we trained state representatives to act as facilitator-notetakers at each table. That shift was important, as it allowed them to serve as sounding boards, contributing information and context, when necessary, and guiding the conversation more productively.

We also have facilitators from our lab who circulate during each phase of the deliberation. Their job is to help problem solve, answer questions, and move conversations along when they kind of get stuck.

So, between the state facilitators, our team, and our planning partners at the California Climate & Energy Collaborative, there are quite a lot of people in the room helping to make sure that these conversations are useful, productive, and well structured.

Beyond the project with the Strategic Growth Council, Possibility Lab has also worked in local contexts like Oakland. Could you tell us more about the public safety reform project you led there?

We started the Oakland project a few years ago as a pilot to explore participatory measurement and evaluation [an approach that involves stakeholders of the program in the evaluation process]. One of the models that really inspired us is something called Everyday Peace Indicators, which measures progress in post-conflict contexts by using metrics from people’s everyday lived experiences.

For instance, it’s been used to understand how communities know when peace is taking hold during justice transitions. One example that stuck with me was from a project in Afghanistan, where people were asked: “What are the everyday signs that tell you whether the Taliban are present or receding from your community?” And the community members said, “Oh, that’s easy—you just look up at the rooftops. If there are satellite dishes, you know the Taliban haven’t been around for a while.” It’s such a powerful example of how context-specific these signals can be.

In California, we are adapting that model to help us work toward very different goals, in very different contexts: for example, to understand health in immigrant and low-wage worker communities, to gauge what successful behavioral health crisis interventions look like from the perspective of those experiencing them, and to look at how residents assess well-being in permanent supportive housing and define success for themselves.

In Oakland, we wanted to better understand what supports or undermines public safety in urban communities and to identify “everyday” signals of progress. So, we adapted the Everyday Peace Indicators approach into what we call the Firsthand Framework for Policy Innovation. That became our first project, where we partnered with six community organizations and brought together nine communities across Oakland. We hosted dozens of focus groups with hundreds of residents, centering people who have been historically underserved by existing public safety systems—justice-impacted individuals, immigrant and refugee communities, and young women who had been sexually trafficked. We wanted to understand their perspectives on safety and on where current systems were failing.

In these focus groups, we asked: “What are the everyday signs and signals you use to know whether your community feels safe or unsafe?” We collected all of those indicators, coded them, and used them to identify potential solutions. We then partnered with the City of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention to map those indicators, source community-driven solutions, and fund small projects so that residents could carry them out locally. You can explore the indicators and read more of the stories from individuals here.

What did community collaboration look like in the context of this project?

The only way to do this work well is in deep partnership with communities. Our expertise is in frameworks, process design, and sometimes resources—whether that’s funding or space—but the community members always know best what their needs are and how a project should be structured.

In Oakland, we met with dozens of community organizations just to understand the landscape. Ultimately, we partnered closely with six of them and provided financial support for their participation. They learned our Firsthand Framework model, and we learned from them about their communities. We co-facilitated all focus groups and data collection, and then brought community representatives back together for large town halls to review.

We also worked with a group of justice-impacted community residents through the Department of Violence Prevention. They played a key role in sourcing solutions from the data and designing and carrying out local interventions based on what the data helped us understand. At every step, we aimed to ensure that community members were leading the process, understanding that the data belonged to them and that they had ownership over the outcomes.

How are other participatory models shaping your current approaches?

Within the field of civic assemblies, there’s some interesting work happening on iterative assemblies, like how to move beyond a single, one-off assembly toward a series of assemblies that build on one another. The idea is to take insights and input from each assembly, feed them into the next, and use that process to learn and adapt over time. It’s a way of creating a long-term system for addressing a particular issue or set of issues through sustained deliberation. It’s this kind of model that will help us move towards seeing deliberative democracy as an “event” to an integrated and institutionalized part of the policymaking process.

We’re also drawing lessons from participatory budgeting, especially around how communities come together to make decisions about resource allocation. Another area we’re paying close attention to is citizen science, as a model for bringing people together in digital space to contribute to a large-scale project. It’s really about finding ways for individuals to systematically collect and share data about their own experiences, which can then be aggregated at a much larger scale. There’s especially exciting work happening around citizen science in the climate and environmental space, and I think there’s enormous potential to apply those lessons to a broader array of social science problems.

How do you approach conversations about the need for sortition when implementing assemblies?

I think sortition is really important for certain kinds of problems. But even the idea of bringing together a “representative” group of people is more complicated than we often acknowledge.

If you look at some of the most commonly cited case studies of citizens’ assemblies, they’re actually quite small groups. That’s partly because deep, in-person deliberation can work better in these smaller settings. So, in relatively homogeneous populations, sortition works well. It provides legitimacy and helps ensure a mix of perspectives and attitudes.

But in a place like California, it can be much more complicated. If you were to randomly select 100 people as a representative sample of the state, it wouldn’t be substantively representative of the state’s diversity. For instance, if a particular racial group makes up 3 to 5 percent of the population, you’d only expect three to five participants from that group in your sample. No one would argue that three people can truly represent the perspectives and experiences of that entire community in a state as large and diverse as California.

So we really need to keep asking: What does “representative” actually mean in practice, and why does it matter? Random selection has its advantages, but it doesn’t necessarily ensure that marginalized voices are adequately present or heard. On issues where race, gender, or other forms of marginalization are central, we have to think intentionally about how to ensure those perspectives are meaningfully included. And that means making sure they are in the room, but also that deliberations are scheduled and structured in ways that support their full participation.

For some policy areas, like public safety, people bring essential lived expertise to the table. Bringing in the full range of these diverse experiences can fundamentally change how we understand and solve public problems.

It comes back to the question: Why are you bringing people to the table, and what does that imply about who should be there and how they should be selected? The core idea is to be intentional about matching the form of participation and representation to the specific policy problem you’re trying to address.

How do you see the models you’ve been working with being scaled and or adapted outside of California?

With the Firsthand Framework for Policy Innovation, we’re thinking about how to apply this work at a broader scale—how indicators developed in one community might be used or adapted by others. The demographic and political heterogeneity of a big state like California means we have a lot of different contexts where we can adapt and iterate on our work. That helps us think about and better understand how the models we are developing here might be used in states that look really different from California.

As part of that, we’ve been developing what we call the IMPACT model—a phased, iterative framework that helps government and community partners move through different stages of collaborative work. IMPACT stands for Initiate, Mobilize, Plan, Act, Catalyze, and Test. At each of these stages, we’re building a set of tools that governments and communities can use together, depending on the issue they’re addressing, where they are in the policy process, and who needs to be at the table.

Across all of our work, we’re really focused on developing adaptable tools that can be used across different types of projects and scaled depending on the problem, the context, and the goals of the collaboration.

How do you measure long-term impact or success when building participatory infrastructure?

The honest answer is that we don’t fully know yet. We haven’t been doing this long enough to see the long-term outcomes. But we’re already seeing meaningful results.

For example, several of our community partners have used the data we collected together to apply for grants, advocate for legislation, and tell new stories about their work. The group we worked with through the Department of Violence Prevention even formed their own collective during the project, which they are calling the “New Narrative.” They are committed to continuing to work across parts of the Oakland community that haven’t always been able to work together, in order to advance public safety in the city. For example, they are interested in how they can work with the city to better support youth programs, mentoring, and other resources for young people.

We’ve also seen our findings feed into new government programs. For instance, in partnership with California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, we’re helping design programs that support low-wage and agricultural workers around health and safety. And our work with the Strategic Growth Council is helping us think about long-term strategic planning to achieve the state’s climate and energy goals.

For us, success looks like partners who want to continue using and iterating on the model and who carry the work forward in both policy and community spaces. Ultimately, we judge our work by whether we are improving people’s lives.

What have been some unexpected lessons you’ve learned along the way?

I’m constantly amazed by how much is happening out there. Whenever I feel discouraged about the state of democracy, this work reminds me of how much innovation and problem solving are happening in so many communities. Real policymaking happens every day in neighborhoods across the country, in how people build capacity and advocate for one another.

When you talk to people about what they care about, not in political science jargon, you see what they’re actually passionate about. Our job isn’t to tell them what we know; it’s to help leverage all the incredible knowledge and expertise that already exists in their communities and that comes from their experiences. That’s where I think the real potential for problem solving lies, and we have the opportunity to foster a connection between communities and the government that helps improve public policies and strengthen our democratic processes.

People know what they need; we just need to spend more time listening to them.