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Citizen Infrastructure

Deschutes Civic Assembly on Youth Homelessness (2024)

TL;DR. Over two weekends in autumn 2024, 30 randomly-selected residents of Deschutes County in Central Oregon worked out 23 proposals to prevent and tackle youth homelessness. What makes it notable isn’t just the topic: it was designed from day one not to be a one-off, but to seed permanent civic infrastructure in a politically divided region.

At a glance

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WhenSeptember–October 2024, two weekends
WhereDeschutes County, Central Oregon
Who30 delegates by civic lottery (sortition); outreach to ~12,500 households plus 250 hand-delivered invitations
TopicHow to prevent and tackle youth homelessness
OrganisersCentral Oregon Civic Action Project (founder Josh Burgess), with Healthy Democracy, DemocracyNext, and a youth Action Board with lived experience
Outcome23 proposals, being adopted in part at local and state level

What happened

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Central Oregon is about 8,000 square miles of high desert — three counties, eight municipalities, and a confederated tribal region — and it carries the country’s divisions in miniature: a progressive urban centre in Bend surrounded by a conservative rural county. Thirty delegates, broadly representative of that whole area, met over two weekends to learn about youth homelessness, hear from people with lived experience, and deliberate their way to recommendations. The organisers insisted the first one be impeccable on quality — bringing in local, regional, and global partners (including DemocracyNext and the delivery non-profit Healthy Democracy) — because a poor first assembly would have burned the region’s trust before the idea could take root.

Why it’s more than one assembly

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The project treats the assembly as the start of building civic infrastructure, not the end. The Central Oregon Civic Action Project is incubating a regional hub — hosted by the local council of governments (for its reach across the region) and partnering with the community college, the university, chambers of commerce, and the tribal areas — and has formed a 15-member steering committee of civic leaders to hand leadership back to the community. Other regional institutions, including a university and a museum, want to run their own assemblies next, which is exactly the catalytic, ecosystem-building effect that slow, relational groundwork is meant to produce.

How it went

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Burgess frames the work as augmenting institutions, not replacing them — every municipality he met already had “improving civic engagement” as a stated goal, so “helping you connect with your electorate” proved a winning pitch. The honest tensions were the familiar ones: experimentation versus institutionalisation (they made and learned from mistakes, like under-using social media), how much of a firewall to keep from the institutions they’re trying to change, and the risk of “catastrophic success” — an antibody response once the work is seen as a threat. Their answer was relentless cross-partisan relational work (hundreds of hours) and a catchphrase that names the stakes: your seat at the table. See institutionalising deliberation for why the permanence is the hard part.

Sources

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