Akron residents have a new opportunity to voice their concerns to elected officials, and potentially help create change in the city.
Unify America, a national nonprofit focused on problem-solving and engaging people in democracy, launched a pilot program to address housing in Akron on Tuesday.
Unify Akron will convene the city's first-ever civic assembly of 65 residents, selected through a random lottery, said Morgan Lasher, chief of U.S. democracy leagues at Unify America.
“This is a civic power,” Lasher said. “This is about giving more people voice in the solutions that they want to see in their own community.”
The civic assembly delegates will spend several months researching and deliberating housing issues, Lasher said. They’ll read reports, hear from experts and discuss their own experiences. They'll eventually vote on solutions and present them to Mayor Shammas Malik, city council and other elected officials.
“We’re going to look for at least two-thirds of support for the different recommendations, and then they’ll present that back to elected officials and the community,” Lasher said.
Malik and Lasher signed a memorandum of understanding, establishing a framework of cooperation between Unify Akron and Malik's administration, during a press conference at Bounce Innovation Hub in Downtown Akron Tuesday.
Through Unify Akron, citizens will learn collaboration and problem-solving, with the goal of encouraging elected officials to implement their ideas, Lasher said.
“In this model, it is much more of a partnership, and a way where everybody is operating from the same side,” Lasher said. “These are not political opponents; it’s about trying to find collaborative and collective wisdom together."
The program’s creators decided to focus on housing for the first civic assembly after 18 months of community conversations across Akron, Lasher added.
J. Cherie Strachan, executive director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, was involved in some of the initial planning of Unify Akron, she said.
Strachan has a doctorate in political science and researches civic engagement and political participation. She’ll now serve on a committee focused on accountability, ensuring the assembly’s recommendations have a path forward in Akron government, she said.
“We’re not going to put our thumb on the scale for any particular political party; we want this to be authentic,” Strachan said. “Even if you don’t intend, you could set a policy or a precedent where it gives an unfair advantage to someone, or the perception of an unfair advantage to someone, and so we’re doing our best to make sure that that, even accidentally, doesn’t happen.”
Strachan hopes the initiative will help citizens become more engaged in local government, she said.
“If it results in improved housing policies and something better, that’s fabulous, but the other thing I hope it does is [that] it rebuilds deliberative civic infrastructure in the city, so that people can learn the art of organizing and will be influential long-term,” Strachan said.
The civic assembly is different than a town hall conversation or focus group, Lasher said.
“This isn’t set up as a debate. You aren’t trying to win something; you’re trying to come to the best collective answer, and this also isn’t set up as a dialogue,” Lasher added. “Yes, we need both of those things in our political world, but we don’t have much deliberation, which is what this is — the long-term, collective wisdom, based in reason, and those ingredients that really add to the legitimacy factor after.”
The delegates will meet nine times between March and May. They’ll be paid a $1,000 stipend for their time, with transportation, child care, meals and language support available, she added.
“This is like 10, 11 weeks of depth, which you just don’t get that level of shared knowledge in a lot of our current American public convenings,” Lasher said.
The random sample will be demographically representative of Akron. Community organizers will conduct outreach across the city over the next month to get a diverse group of participants and encourage them to sign up for the lottery.
The delegates will be selected in late February.
Unify Akron is a flagship initiative for Unify America. Lasher said she hopes staff members can use takeaways from this first iteration to develop similar initiatives nationwide.
