On Collaborative Governance

The one question we need to ask ourselves every day is, what is the antidote to fascism?

The answer of course has always been the same: The antidote to fascism is a combination of community, creativity, humor, and courage. These ingredients bake a democratic imagination, and we must cultivate it. An antifascist culture is by definition a democratic culture, and culture is the implementation of imagination.

Above and beyond voting, a healthy democracy requires that neighbors are able to talk with each other across differences. To ensure their own success, democracies must always prioritize creating the conditions in which this can happen, from an institutional perspective. Whether we are talking about city councils or the federal government, every level of government should be creating spaces and opportunities for regular people to come together in common purpose, and to build community together as part of their civic duty.

Jury duty is an example of how we currently do this. We convene a group of people, broadly representative of the community, to learn, deliberate, and make really consequential decisions together. This is something that we are proud of as a democratic society– that ultimately the fate of those accused of a crime is in the hands of a group of their peers. The model is not perfect, but it is a model the general public understands. Overall, more than 8 in 10 people who receive a jury summons respond to it, and people who are chosen to serve on juries generally take their civic duty very seriously, as they understand the stakes. Selecting a representative group of people at random is called sortition, and is a model that can work in settings where different kinds of important decisions are being made. Indeed, we can have a society in the near future, particularly at the local level, where all sorts of decisions are made by representative bodies of regular people in communities across the country.

In a 1932 Supreme Court opinion, Justice Brandeis wrote that “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” His opinion has been taken to mean that in a healthy democracy, cultural, geographic, and economical differences should result in localities experimenting with how to govern themselves in ways that will be most effective and appropriate for the local context. Particularly at the municipal level, cities are much more nimble than a state, and it is much easier to pilot a governance experiment through an ordinance or a ballot initiative. Pilots are a great vehicle because they allow for creativity. Pilots have a built in expiration date where the whole experiment gets to be evaluated. Even if mistakes are made, these can be corrected. Residents, electeds, and administrators can see how the experiment worked, and reassess. There are cities, counties, and states experimenting with collaborative models of governance all over the country. They are fighting fascism and reimagining democracy today. I want to share some with you.

In Los Angeles County, the largest in the nation with 10 million residents, voters approved Measure J in 2020. The measure requires that 10% of the County’s unrestricted general fund budget is invested in community development and wellbeing, and prohibits the use of these funds for carceral proposals. The office of Supervisor Holly Mitchell is leveraging these funds to implement a Participatory Budgeting process around anti-carceral community investment  in each of the 19 unincorporated areas within her district. Participatory Budgeting is a process through which a certain percentage of the jurisdiction’s budget is allocated for residents to decide how to spend. Residents get to propose projects, learn together with the support of the County, discuss and deliberate, and ultimately make decisions as to how to spend the available funds. 

In Portland, OR, it started with a democratized Charter Review Commission. A city’s charter is its constitution. Charters tend to be reviewed by small groups of advisors convened by the mayor or city council. These advisory groups are usually seated with individuals in the community who already have access to power, and are not reflective of the community. However, through fierce community advocacy, in 2020 the city’s government convened a group of 20 community members, diverse in geography, race, age, and occupation to the Commission. With a bit of funding and two years to learn together, and engage in a meaningful co-learning and decision making process with the broader community, a number of questions were put on the ballot in 2022, which the voters approved, radically changing the elections and governance structures of the city. Changes included expanding the city council body from 5 to 12 councilors, and implementing ranked choice voting elections, with three winners per district. Before this process, Portland had one of the least diverse governing bodies in the country, now 50% of the councilors are women, and nearly half are people of color.  

In Lexington, KY a community organization, CivicLex did it by implementing a Civic Assembly to have a community review city charter process. A Civic Assembly convenes a random group of residents, representative of the community through sortition, like a jury. In Lexington, a group of 32 residents came together over a handful of work sessions to learn about, deliberate, and make decisions about their city’s charter. In this case, as the Assembly was convened by a local organization, for the sake of accountability the city agreed to publicly respond to all their recommendations. In the end the governing body put all the recommendations of the Assembly on the ballot, including compensation for councilors, attendance and accountability measures for councilors, and formalizing a mandate to convene a diverse Charter Review Commission every 8 years. Lexington voters will decide on these questions in November of 2026.

In Detroit, MI, State Senator Stephanie Chang has been convening a broad and diverse coalition, including various community organizations and coalitions, providers, and other stakeholders to come together to create solutions to the water insecurity faced by thousands of MI residents who have their water services cut off for lack of payment, and the social and public health impacts of this. Though the values and guiding principles of the community groups, the water providers, and other stakeholders are sometimes diametrically opposed, all agree that residents should be able to pay their water bill, so they are bridging across their differences to write legislation that can help address this.

We can fight fascism by building spaces and processes today in our cities, counties, and states where communities participate as decision making partners with their local governments. Our federal government is not equipped for this kind of experimentation, but at the local level we have the opportunity to build a new American experiment from the ground up. We are doing it already. You can do it too, in your community.