It’s 5:30pm on a Thursday. A large classroom slowly fills with adults, most at the end of a long workday, ready to unwind. They’re greeted by smiling hosts, invited to make a name tag and grab a Banh Mi sandwich. As tables and bellies fill up, the organizing director of local labor council MLK Labor stands at the front of the classroom and sets the stage for the evening. Everyone here has been invited to participate in a Community Assembly, to meet for three hours every Thursday evening for the next three weeks. They’ll share their experiences working during extreme weather events, discuss challenges and possible solutions, and work together to create a set of recommendations for the City of Seattle to protect workers from a changing climate.
This was just one of three Community Assembly efforts that People’s Economy Lab had the pleasure of supporting as a Movement Partner in 2024.
At People’s Economy Lab, we believe that the communities closest to a problem are also best positioned to come up with a solution to that problem. That is the heart of the Community Assembly model. Community Assemblies are a tool for building policy grounded in lived experience and collective vision. Each Community Assembly is rooted in the leadership of a trusted community-based organization or grassroots group with long-standing relationships and credibility.
What It Means to be a Movement Partner
As the Movement Partner for these Community Assemblies, People’s Economy Lab stewarded a replicable model for people-powered governance and offered strategic support to the Assembly Anchors (Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council, Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, and Equitable Recovery and Reconciliation Alliance) to plan and host their Assemblies. Movement Partners are systems-oriented, advocacy and policy-focused collaborators that support Assembly Anchors with access to funding, expertise, and strategic guidance. We designed guidebooks and trainings, offered real-time coaching, and attended each Assembly session to support data collection. No two Assemblies looked the same, and we consider that a strength of the model.
For example, for the MLK Labor and Urban League Assembly sessions, we provided note takers and offered substantial support in analyzing and summarizing themes from the data collected. Both Assemblies were funded by the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment, in partnership with the Green New Deal Oversight Board. As part of that collaboration, PEL also facilitated training for the Oversight Board and will present a report to the Board on the Assembly outcomes.
In contrast, ERRA chose to audio record all of their sessions and invited us to participate more relationally in the Assembly discussions, rather than quietly taking notes. Participants in ERRA’s Assembly requested continued support from both ERRA and PEL to strengthen relationship-building and advance action planning. We are now working together to identify how best to follow through.
In 2025, we’re continuing to meet with Anchors to work on next steps, in particular what’s required to move the Assembly participants’ recommendations into action.
Reflections
Designing the Community Assembly model meant walking the line between structure and flexibility, between intention and adaption. We knew from the beginning that no two Assemblies would be the same. Our role as Movement Partner was to build a flexible container for each community to show up fully, yet sturdy enough to hold complex, nuanced, and at times emotional conversations about power, justice, and the future. This model is not a one-time intervention. It is a practice in participatory governance. By helping communities shape policy through facilitated dialogue, strategic design, and relationship-centered processes, we are not just making policy recommendations. We are practicing a new way of doing democracy.
These Assemblies reminded us that governance isn’t just about decision-making, it is about who gets to define the problem in the first place. And we believe the people most impacted should lead that work.
Highlights from the PEL team:
- Faduma Fido: “As designer of the guidebooks, trainings, and core structure of the Assembly process, I experienced firsthand how much intentionality it takes to build a container that can hold complexity, healing, and strategy all at once. These Assemblies are about practice, not perfection, and about giving communities the tools and space to shape the policies that affect their lives. That is how we move toward the governance pillar of the Just Transition framework. We are not just reimagining policy, we are reimagining how power is shared. It was powerful to witness community members move from pain points to policy solutions. That is the potential of this model.”
- Tatiana Brown: “The knowledge in these rooms is palpable. Our role is to create a gathering where community members who intimately understand their realities can forge the path towards solutions that serve their needs. It is then that we can work jointly with government partners for a collective commitment to bring these solutions to fruition. Assemblies gift us the ability to engage more directly, solve more quickly, and serve our communities more effectively. It offers an alternate path for communities who have long been excluded from the discourse to enter (and lead) the conversations.”
- Laura Nash: “Attending these Community Assemblies, it was so clear that their value goes beyond community members co-creating solutions. It was energizing to witness people negotiating and building relationships across industries, across generations, finding common ground with neighbors they hadn’t spent much time with previously. Everyone had the opportunity to share their perspective, to be heard, and to feel their collective power.”
Policy Movement Building in Washington: How Three Community Assemblies Addressed Climate and Economic Justice
Protecting Workers from Extreme Weather
MLK Labor, King County’s central body of labor organizations, hosted a Community Assembly over the course of three weeks in September and October 2024, bringing together over 50 union workers to shape labor-forward climate policy. From home care workers and teachers to construction workers and grocery store clerks, participants named the real impacts of extreme heat, smoke, and cold on both their safety and their ability to care for others. Their collective question: How do we protect workers in a climate-compromised economy? Union workers spoke about heat stroke and smoke inhalation, frozen pipes bursting throughout the county and flooding public buildings, their students’ and patients’ physical and mental health, and more.
Their recommendations were bold, clear, and rooted in direct experience:
- Protect indoor and outdoor workers from heat and smoke.
- Retrofit public infrastructure for climate safety.
- Ensure no one, including unhoused community members, is left out of emergency planning.
- Invest in data gathering to understand the consequences of work during extreme weather and the Jumpstart funds needed to back it all up.
Building Community Climate Resilience
Washington’s second oldest civil rights organization, the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, invited Black and other historically underserved community members to participate in a Community Assembly centered on building climate resilience and equity. The Assembly had a three-phase approach. In phase one, participants explored foundational questions about climate resilience, focusing on systemic barriers and lived experiences, especially relating to environmental justice. In phase two, they dreamed big, envisioning climate resilient homes, neighborhoods rooted in mutual aid, and inclusive cities. In phase three, they translated those visions into actionable policy recommendations grounded in community priorities. From redlining to displacement, participants named root causes and shaped solutions that center cultural preservation, equity, and community power.
They agreed on the following recommendations for the City of Seattle:
- Invest in grassroots leadership.
- Address immediate needs like housing protections, food security, and green infrastructure.
- Embed cultural preservation through anti-displacement strategies and community-centered development.
- Strengthen co-governance frameworks to ensure accountability and community leadership in policy making.
Economic Justice and Small Business Development
The Equitable Recovery and Reconciliation Alliance (ERRA), a collective of more than 90 BIPOC nonprofit and business leaders, hosted a cross-state Community Assembly focused on economic justice. With sessions in Spokane, Tacoma, SeaTac, and on Zoom, ERRA facilitated a participatory process that made space for nuance across geographies. Spokane and Seattle-Tacoma participants surfaced distinct needs and contributed unique recommendations, demonstrating the importance of regional specificity in policy development.
They proposed a three-tiered funding request:
- Infrastructure and foundational support for organizing, research, and analysis.
- Support for grassroots organizing and mobilizing communities to implement a Community Activation Plan.
- Support for capacity and relationship building to strengthen trust and ecosystem-wide collaboration.
What happens next?
The next part is the tougher part—where strategy meets action. Now that each Community Assembly has created a set of recommendations, we need to figure out how those recommendations become reality.
As mentioned above, MLK Labor and Urban League’s Community Assemblies were funded by the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment. The recommendations from their Assembly will shape the Green New Deal Oversight Board’s future priorities and policy and budget recommendations for ensuring that climate justice is a core priority of the City’s environmental work.
ERRA’s Assembly was funded by the State of Washington Department of Social and Health Services. We’re thinking through how their recommendations could be turned into state policy. We’re also considering local policy solutions and funding opportunities.
In every case, implementation requires collective pressure. PEL and our partners will stay engaged, but the strength of this model comes from communities continuing to organize, tell their stories, and hold systems accountable. PEL sees the Community Assembly model as one piece of a broader Collaborative Governance infrastructure. In 2025 and beyond, we will continue exploring additional models, from participatory budgeting to deliberative democracy, that put community voice at the center of public decision-making in Washington State.
