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Funding
The campaign group must set an initial estimate of the costs of the Citizens’ Assembly. It must also create an estimate of campaign costs. The combination of these will be the target budget total, to be raised by crowd-funding. Additional sources of funding will be explored e.g. charitable trusts, or others.
The Citizens’ Assembly
The Assembly format is well-defined. Organising responsibility and the budget are passed to a contracted, neutral third-party organiser, such as the Sortition Foundation or Involve.
Building public support for the campaign objective needs to address public understanding of what the Citizens’ Assembly is and how it works. The campaign should reference events such as the Peoples’ Plan for Nature in the UK and the best examples from overseas. It must support local initiatives, actions and community assemblies to maximise public awareness of what to expect and how to participate.
For the Citizens’ Assembly on Water, it is absolutely key that the whole process and its essential integrity are communicated and adhered to rigorously to win and retain public confidence in our proposition.
Advantages of a Citizens’ Assembly
- Decisions are made by a representative, demographically correct sample of citizens in the country.
- Assembly members are independent and not motivated by profit or the electoral cycle.
- Assembly members are knowledgeable; they will receive education in the ‘pestle’ – political, environmental, social, technical, legal and economic issues of water.
- Assembly members then get to deliberate with others from different walks of life. A young parent who needs lots of water might be on a table with a farmer, an ecologist and a retired person.
- They make recommendations in the best interests of everyone’s future.
- Media coverage ensures public access to expert testimony in real time
- How recommendations have been created will be publicly available online, after the assembly has reported.
Water Pressure Landing Page 