📢 June News: Inclusion courses, convening recap, application deadlines!

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Hi there,

This month’s news features stories on new online courses, our member convening in Warsaw, highlights from our learning webinar on digital democracy, opportunities to apply for Accelerator programs, and celebrations of previous Accelerator cohorts.

New courses: Learn how to engage marginalized groups in participatory decision-making!

Participatory and deliberative decision-making can have transformative impacts on historically marginalized groups, such as women, youth, and displaced people (including refugees, immigrants, and internally displaced people). Many programs, however, find it challenging to engage these communities.

Over the past two years, People Powered has worked with a coalition of 13 organizations from the Global South, with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to develop resources to make participatory democracy more inclusive of youth, women and displaced people. We are now launching four new online courses to help you adopt best practices for improving the engagement of marginalized communities in your program!

People Powered and NDI convene to address common democracy challenges

How do we make participatory and deliberative democracy more inclusive? How do we mainstream and institutionalize these practices, to move from one-off innovations to long-term systemic changes? People Powered and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) joined forces to address these challenges at a global convening in Warsaw this May. The event served as both the annual member convening for People Powered and the kick-off meeting for a new NDI program on institutionalizing participatory and deliberative democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. 

Read how we worked together to plan programs on inclusion and mainstreaming participation — and learned and laughed along the way! And let us know if you want to collaborate on an upcoming convening!

Register for learning webinars — Climate Democracy & Mainstreaming Participation!

The learning webinar series by People Powered, Open Government Partnership, and Trust, Accountability, and Inclusion Collaborative (TAI) approaches our last two events — on Climate Democracy on June 18 and Mainstreaming Participation on July 2. We will host representatives from governments, civil society organizations, and funders to explore these issues in-depth. At the one-hour mark, breakout rooms will open for you to interact directly with speakers.

Here are the learnings and innovations covered in our digital democracy webinar

Many governments, organizations, and funders are grappling with digital challenges such as AI governance, the influence of big tech, data privacy, and more. How can we improve how governments engage people in decision-making about these issues? How do we ensure an inclusive and equitable digital society? We facilitated a rich discussion with experts on key challenges, best practices, and questions for the digital democracy field. Read the highlights and watch the recording now!

Apply for Rising Stars Mentorship to receive expert support for your participatory program

The Rising Stars Mentorship Program provides democracy practitioners with expert guidance to launch and improve participatory programs. This online mentorship program connects advocates, policymakers and program managers looking for advice on their projects to on-the-ground experts who can assist them.

We have two Accelerators open for application — Apply by June 27!

Applications for the Climate Democracy Accelerator (CDA) and Democratic Innovations Accelerator (DIA) are now open. Both programs focus on building the capacity of government and civil society organizations to build equitable public participation in various important policymaking issues, such as health, education, climate, and more.

Selected participants will receive free access to online training, expert mentoring and advice, and international peer-learning opportunities to launch or improve a participatory program. Climate Democracy Accelerator participants will also receive funding support for implementing their programs!

Learn how our Accelerators have just launched 26 new climate & digital participatory programs!

Just in the past year, we’ve awarded over $400,000 to launch new participatory and deliberative programs in 20 countries to address climate and digital challenges. Learn about the awesome work our Accelerator cohorts are doing across Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Africa!

  • Shared Future CIC shares a report of the Citizens Jury on Climate Change in Preston City, UK. It details the process, results and recommendation of the deliberation. Read more!

  • Alma Civica launches the first edition of Jajapo Democracia!, a program to support Paraguayan citizens to create community projects to strengthen democratic participation. Alma Civica has also released a statement 

  • Polanda Association ran the first Legislative Theatre project with a legislative panel in Poland to present issues faced by queer students at Jagiellonian University.

  • Ciudadanía Inteligente launches its Spanish newsletter Boletín Inteligente. Subscribe to read more about their work to strengthen democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean.

  • Democracy International with FIDE, are running ‘Ride the Democractic Wave’, a campaign to ask European Parliament candidates to prioritize democracy in their next term.   

  • Coglobal ran a participatory budgeting process at the University of Málaga with a focus on common spaces for students at the faculty of psychology.

Including the underrepresented. This paper from the Federation for Innovation in Democracy (FIDE) presents methods and strategies for ensuring the inclusion of traditionally underrepresented communities in participatory processes.

Legislative theater: Animated presentation. This animated video gives a brief introduction to legislative theater as well as some examples of how it has been used in policymaking.

Integrating deliberation into governance: This article discusses the design choices around integrating deliberative mini-publics into the complex political structures of climate governance, drawing on learnings from six national climate assemblies.

Asian and Russian PB pioneers: This report presents 6 case studies of participatory budgeting programs in Russia and Asia, in collaboration with Kota Kita and the International Observatory for Participatory Democracy (IOPD).

See more featured resources from on the Resource Center