Richard Young is the founder and executive director of CivicLex, a Lexington, Kentucky nonprofit he launched in 2017 that builds civic knowledge, strengthens relationships across the city, and pushes local institutions to be more responsive to residents. It runs civic engagement programs alongside a local newsroom. Previously he was executive director of North Limestone CDC, Lexington’s first place-based community development corporation, where he raised $2.2M and helped create a new city zoning classification. He has also run the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, co-owned a coffee shop, and co-founded MusicWorks, Kentucky’s first El Sistema-inspired youth program. He is an Ashoka Fellow.
So I’m not sure that you know this, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s also sort of, she’s a neighbor and she helps people tell their stories. And she has this beautiful question, which I stole from her because I can’t think of any better way to get into a conversation out of nowhere. But it’s a big conversation. I kind of overexplain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to.
Sounds great.
The question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.
Yeah, I come from Kentucky. This place that I live in, I wasn’t actually born here, although most of my family’s from here. I’ve got some family here in Lexington where I live, and then the rest of my family’s in a more rural county in Kentucky.
But I wasn’t born here. My family moved back when I was five. I’ve always had a really complicated relationship with Kentucky, especially when I moved back and as a young man.
But throughout my 20s and 30s, I gained, I think, a better understanding and appreciation for the depth and complexity, not just here in Lexington, where I live, but all across the state. Thanks to relationships that I started building, and I feel like this place has really raised me into a person that values place, into a person that thinks of place as sort of the starting point, right? Both for my work, but also for, I would say, almost everything about my life.
So the question of like, where are you from is a question that I feel like I hear a lot. And 15 years ago, I don’t know how I would have answered that, but I feel like now it is, yeah, I’m from Kentucky.
Yeah. And what does it mean to you to be from Kentucky? Are there moments or sort of circumstances in which you feel the Kentucky in you in a particular way?
Yeah, I think I feel the Kentucky in me most thoroughly when I’m outside in nature here. There’s something really special and sort of sacred about the land here in Kentucky. It is diverse and bountiful.
It is a state with a lot of regions that really have their own topographies and ecologies that are incredible and beautiful. So I feel like a Kentuckian, especially when I’m in nature, when I’ve got my feet in a creek, or when I’m climbing a hiking trail. But I also feel like a Kentuckian when I’m around other Kentuckians. Your voice changes, right?
I feel like there becomes this unspoken permission of like, oh, I can actually just talk how I normally talk. And I don’t have to sort of vaguely disguise. I don’t have much of an accent to begin with. But what is there, there’s a subconscious effort to cover it up when I’m talking with other folks around the country.
But when I feel most like a Kentuckian is when I’m around other ones. And when I’m out in nature. And I think both of those come from a lot of my 20s, I spent deeply involved in an organization called the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange that sort of took me throughout the state and helped me build a lot of really deep and meaningful relationships with some of the closest relationships I still have to this day.
And it also sort of seeded my work into the class. And so I think those are two things that were really deeply ingrained in me, the sort of people in the history of the people here, and then the land and the place that we are in.
But to me, what it means to be a Kentuckian. I think it really depends on where you’re from. To me, I think there are a few things that are really special about being from Kentucky.
It is a place where people are incredibly kind and incredibly resilient. It’s a place where folks really value being a neighbor, really value each other. It’s a place where people feel a really deep sense of pride of place.
We have 120 counties in this state, which is a lot of counties.
Wow.
And everyone’s really proud of their county, right? Like when you ask people where they’re from, they’ll be like, Oh, I’m from Perry County, or I’m from Muhlenberg County or whatever. And so people have a really deep pride of place of the county, of the very specific place they’re from. I think people have a shared identity as Kentuckians.
And then for me, I think there’s also this deep thought tradition in this state. Some of the writers and thinkers that have most clearly informed my approach to my work and my approach to my life — Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton and bell hooks — are all from the state and have had, and have, equally, I think, shared deep complex relationships to this place, to the land and the people that are here. So yeah, that’s what it means to be a Kentuckian, I guess, to me.
Yeah, it’s beautiful. Thank you so much for that. I always ask this question, do you have a recollection of being young, being a boy, and knowing what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did young Richard want to be when he grew up?
Young Richard wanted to do a lot of different things, but all of them were in some way related to snakes and/or dinosaurs. So take that for what it’s worth. My mom tells the story about how I was in preschool or kindergarten, and all the parents were around, and they were going around, kids, what do you want to be when you grow up, in this like firemen, policemen, and I was like, I want to be a herpetologist. Was a weirdo then and I’m a weirdo now.
Yeah, though. Yeah. If it had to do with snakes or dinosaurs, I was super into it. Thankfully, I guess my career doesn’t involve those two things now.
Yeah, so catch us up now. So tell us, where are you, and sort of introduce the work? What keeps you busy? What are you working on?
Yeah. So my work is here in Lexington, in Fayette County. And it’s focused on trying to build a sort of civic life in my community, in which people have a meaningful say over the decisions that shape their lives. For me, a lot of that is rooted in the past, like, sort of 15 years of when I moved back to Kentucky after school. I did not go very far for school, just went across the river to Ohio.
So it wasn’t that far. But moving back home, I sort of made my way into community development and found myself really exploring these questions of agency and who has a say over the decisions that shape their lives. I had a really complicated job that was challenging in a number of ways.
And I think through that experience, I really gained an appreciation for our role in civic life, being to enable others, right? But that is what everyone’s role should be, is to enable other people to more deeply experience our sort of shared civic life. And so that kind of led me into starting the organization that I run today, which is called CivicLex.
And we’re about nine years old, soon to be 10 next year. And our work is focused around, yeah, trying to strengthen the civic health of our community, trying to help folks understand and engage in local issues here, help people connect with their neighbors and build new relationships. And ultimately try and reimagine the role that our public here in Lexington plays in the decision-making process that shapes every aspect of our community. Yeah.
I mean, you hinted at it a little bit, but I guess there’s two questions that are bouncing around in my head and hopefully they come out in one coherent question. I guess the first thing is sort of where did this begin for you, like the origins of CivicLex, but then how do you talk about the problem? I imagine you encounter a problem that needs a solution. And I guess I’m wondering, what’s the diagnosis, or how do you describe the situation that you encountered that sort of has driven you and that CivicLex is trying to address? How do we talk about what the diagnosis is?
Yeah. I think in my previous job before starting CivicLex, like I said, I was in the community development space. And in that, I remember hearing these sort of two distinct conversations that were happening at the same time in my day-to-day life.
Like one was with policymakers where I was in city hall, sitting on boards and commissions or trying to move some sort of legislation through local government. And I remember hearing frustrations from government about like, oh, no one knows what’s going on here. No one’s engaged. Like no one knows anything about government, or people show up and they’ve got a bunch of bad information and dah, dah, dah, dah, but we really want people to be involved, but they’re not involved. And so we don’t know how to do that.
And then I remember observing just the same 30 people in the majority of city meetings, right? It’s like the same, very much a case of the usual suspects. And so government, I think, recognized that there’s an issue, that people were not deeply engaged and the people that were engaged had some sort of self-interest beyond, in more of a professional capacity, right, than in the sort of live life as a citizen.
And then at the same time, I remember doing community development work, you spend a lot of time talking with folks that are just going about their daily lives. And I remember hearing so much from my neighbors and the folks that we were working with that they felt like their perspective didn’t matter. And that not only did their perspective and opinion and experience not matter, but that it was actively trying to be suppressed and kept out of decision making in local government. And so essentially, I heard two different sides of this sort of dynamic between government and the public, like saying the thing that the other, what probably would have wanted to hear, that they didn’t want them in decision making, and people were frustrated that there weren’t broader perspectives in decision making and vice versa.
And so, I remember hearing that a lot. And when I left my previous organization, I got this tiny little grant, $5,000, which at the time felt like enormous to me, to start a project related to how we could use the public transportation system here in Lexington to help people understand civic information and to better increase access to civic information about voting or information about local government or anything like that. And through that project, I ended up sort of growing it into what became CivicLex. And now we’re a 10 person organization that is a much larger, more broader thing than I think I could even imagine at the time.
And I think for me, the diagnosis is that right now in this country, we are sort of living through a series of sort of social civic crises that I think are, in many ways, deeper and more profound than a broken political system that people point to all the time, or XYZ political thing of the moment, right? I think people feel or certainly feeling a lack of connection to other people. We’ve built parasocial relationships online that we’re substituting for our actual social relationships of people that truly care about us and depend on us.
And I think the even bigger crisis is just a crisis of agency. People feel like they don’t have any decision making power over their lives, right? And it’s not just political civic, right? It’s economic. People feel like we have an economy in which they have no agency, a political system which they have no agency, a cultural system in which people don’t feel seen or valued or included. Even in our algorithms, right? And the music that we listen to on Spotify or whatever, right? That is being served up to us, right? It is this feeling of things constantly being handled, like here, your decisions are already made for you. Here’s the sort of pathway that you’re going through in your life.
And I think that that crisis of agency is really where our civic life has been. It comes from an erosion in our civic life, associational life in communities, the Kiwanis clubs and Rotary clubs and Boy Scouts and churches and all of the things that people did when they were young, and 30, 40 years ago, and longer, to feel a sense of connection to place and to each other. Many of those sort of outlets have disappeared, are we’re increasingly legislating at the federal level. Right.
And I think the growth of centralized political life in DC has eroded people’s ability to feel like they have any meaningful say over the decisions that are shaping their communities. And I think that all of that has led to a point in which people are so frustrated with not just our political institutions, but every institution in this country, be it higher education, we’re even seeing collapsing numbers in the military, which is the institution that traditionally Americans feel like they have the most trust in. And it’s a real crisis. But to me, I think it really stems from a sort of cynicism that comes from this lack of agency that people have in our day to day lives. Yeah.
You said one thing that really struck me is that those means so many things that I want to explore. Maybe it’s news to me, but I feel like when you said that we’re legislating at the federal level, I feel like I’ve had that observation under the surface, but never been explicit about it. Can you say more about what you mean? It seems to me it’s hinting at a past that I don’t know.
Yeah. I guess one thing is that the federal government isn’t doing a whole lot of legislating, so I think that’s an important part. But I think the trend over the past, like 70 years in this country has been to increasingly centralize political decision making. And that has some positives and it has some negatives, that’s for sure.
But I think you can see it in both political parties, right? For Democrats, I think, the Democratic Party used to be the sort of party of labor, which is a core part of associational life. And there used to be really robust Democratic parties in every community in this country. And I think culturally, the Democratic Party is thinking a lot more about major metropolitan areas and DC. And so the sort of emphasis of where energy is being put, both in the types of legislation that are being created, right, thinking about these big, large bills that have these sweeping ramifications across the country, are increasingly centralized.
And you’re seeing that in the Republican Party as well. The sort of foundational thinking of the Republican Party was at one point, at least, around federalism, and the idea that communities should have the strongest say over the decisions that are shaping them. But I think you’re seeing, especially over the past 10 years, a Republican Party that is much more willing to have centralized control in DC. And so I think what we’re seeing across both of those parties is that faith and trust in Congress, and in elected officials in DC, is cratered, because it has become an ineffective system.
And I think, rising up in sort of the wake of that, I think, is community decision making, is where communities are having to step up and take care of themselves, because the federal government’s become too gridlocked and inept to do anything about it.
And I think an important piece of this is that, much like government, everything is becoming incredibly centralized, right? And this grand irony of, we have the option to access more information than we’ve ever had and connect with more people than we’ve ever had. We’re also increasingly moving towards like a monoculture where everyone all across the country is thinking and talking about the same things. And so, I just think that it’s not helpful for our sense of agency and our sense of connection. We’re actually losing touch with our own communities and gaining touch with a sort of national monoculture. Yeah.
And I’m trying to remember where — I think civic health might be one of the first times I encountered that language was maybe in your work. And that feels to me like a relatively new idea, the idea that you could be held, just the metaphor of civic health. So what can you do and what do you do at CivicLex to try to address — I mean, there’s so much of this is trust underneath this lack of agency, but it also seems to me that so many of these behaviors have really just been normalized. This disengagement has become normalized, right? So what can you do to address these problems?
Yeah. I think the two things I’ll preface this with is, it all takes an incredibly long time, right? The work that we’re trying to do is about both changing individual behavior and group behavior. And either one of those is challenging on its own. But trying to do both individual, group, and I guess institutional behavior all at once is really hard. So it just takes a long time. And we’ve seen a lot of change over the past 10 years, but I know it’s going to take 10 more years for us to even start to make progress, like really meaningful, deep progress on a lot of the things that we’re hoping to see. So there’s that sort of preface up front.
The other preface I would say is that you can also start with the tiniest little thing, right? You can start to address civic health in your own community through talking with your neighbor. Introducing yourself, if you don’t know the people that live on every side of you. That is a way to start.
For us, what we’re trying to do is sort of focus on these three aspects of civic health, how folks understand and get involved in local decisions, like local civic issues. We think about that at sort of levels of civic literacy. And we do a lot of work around that. Helping people connect with their neighbors, that sort of thinking about social relationships, social cohesion, and people feeling a sense of sort of belonging through their mutual relationships and commitments to one another. And then through this sort of how we make decisions as a community. And that is really looking at these sort of processes that civic institutions in our community use to engage residents in decision making. So we’re working on all three of those things.
In that first bucket, on helping folks understand and get involved in local issues. We do a number of things. So we have a newsroom that covers public meetings here in Lexington, local governmental meetings. We have a youth civic education program that is in every single high school in Fayette County, where we’re teaching students about how to get involved in local government, and how to make change on issues that they care about, whether that is anything from how to get more trees in your community park to how to address issues like gun violence. And then we also do adult civic education work where we’re trying to build this sort of baseline skills for folks in our community, so that when they go to get engaged, that engagement is coming not just from a place of knowing an issue, but knowing the systems and structures and how to navigate them.
In the second bucket, we’re working on helping folks connect with their neighbors. There’s sort of two big ways that we do that. The first one is working on public spaces in our community. So parks, the road systems that people use, libraries, these sorts of public spaces are incredibly important, because they are the place where people are most likely to casually and frequently encounter folks that are different from themselves. That type of sort of repeated interaction is incredibly important for building a sense of empathy in the community, right? For building a sense of belonging in that like, oh, I exist in this place alongside many other people, some of which are very similar to me, some of which are very different from me. So we work to bring public perspective into the design process around public spaces, and then also work to activate those public spaces.
At the same time, that’s sort of like a passive way that people build relationships. A more active way that people can build relationships are through events that bring people together. And so we host some of those events ourselves, but we also make investments into community organizations here in Lexington, to start new clubs and groups, to throw community block parties, to start new newsletters that are talking about the things happening in their community. We just actually announced six new mini grants today for six public events that six different neighborhoods are going to be throwing this fall across our community. And these are relatively low lift investments, $250 for us, but can make a really big difference, right? These sorts of block parties are like the places where people build new sort of relationships with the folks that live near them that they can depend on in times of crisis down the line.
And then the last part of our work, which is focused on decision making, is probably the largest part of our work. And that is really about taking some of these really big processes like comprehensive land use planning, or city budgeting, or public space design, or our city charter review, and trying to build processes that are different from the traditional, like everyone meet in a gymnasium and yell at each other, right? Trying to build something that is meaningful and rewarding for residents. It’s meaningful in that it does something, like their participation has meaning, and it’s rewarding in that they want to do it again. It’s not punishing. They’re not leaving being like, well, that was a waste of my time. They’re like, oh, that was actually enjoyable, and I want to do it again. And processes that are helpful for local government, that actually give them meaningful information that they can use to make a better decision.
So, we’ve run a number of these projects. These typically tend to be large multi-year projects that are focused on a specific process. Most recently, we hosted a civic assembly around our city charter review process. But how those three things speak to each other, helping folks understand and get involved in local issues, connect with their neighbors, and participate more effectively in decision making. The best of our work is sort of at the intersection of those three things. So, yeah, that’s what we do.
That’s amazing. I really just have such admiration for what you’re doing.
And I am particularly, maybe selfishly, wanting to talk about the institutional challenges. I encountered citizens assembly as this process that felt new to me. I had experiences in my small town that introduced me to the difficulty that the small local government has in doing all this — bringing community together, getting people engaged, making decisions, all that stuff.
And I remember this one guy — he said it so succinctly, I always quote him — that media changed unbelievably, technology changed unbelievably, culture changed unbelievably, but these local institutions have stayed fundamentally unchanged for almost hundreds of years. And so I’m wondering, and I have this experience here, how do you think about those institutions? Everything from the public meeting to the way that meetings are run and the spaces in which they’re held — do you have a way of either thinking about it or talking about it?
And underneath this is this experience I’ve had — and this is all very selfish — that everybody is engaged in a way that’s very focused, sincerely, on an issue, right? People are there because they care about something, and it can be very difficult to get them to pull their gaze, or maybe just broaden the aperture, to take in the conditions of the conversation. And I struggle with that quite a bit.
And so I’m wondering, what are your feelings about the current state of public meetings and that kind of engagement experience? Let’s say you get them to engage with the institution, but the institution has this way of operating that can be frustrating, of course. So I’m going to stop talking there. I think you feel my question.
Yeah, it’s not great, Peter. It’s pretty bad. I think I have so many thoughts on this. I could talk about it for like five years. A couple things I’ll say up front: one, yes, these institutions haven’t changed a lot that meaningfully in the past 50, 100, 150 years, right? That is bad.
Also, that is good, right? I think one of the things that I say a lot to people and really pisses them off, it makes me a lot of friends, is like government moves slow on purpose. I think both our federal government, our state governments, our local governments are designed to move at a speed in which it was very difficult for them to be captured.
And I think that’s wise and good. And I think it’s one of the reasons why our democracy, with its many, many flaws, has persisted for so long. So I’ll caveat that up front, right?
I think the local level is the place where we are most well positioned to make meaningful changes, right? The local level is the level of government that is the most accessible to people, right? You can meet your elected officials, you can meet the people that work for city government.
In many cases, you probably have kids on a soccer team with someone that works in city planning, or you maybe go to church with someone from the city’s finance department, right? These are people that are in the community. They’re not sort of faceless bureaucrats, like people talk about in DC.
They’re not these career, I mean, maybe in many cases, they’re career politicians, but they aren’t the sort of like jet setting DC class or whatever, right? It’s just everyday folks that live around you. So they’re accessible.
B, there is an incentive because of that closeness for them to get along with the community that they’re working in. Right? Being in sort of a intention is not helpful for them.
And they know that. I think the third thing I would say is, it is also the level of government at which change is still possible, right? Changing the federal government is very challenging.
And also never really seems to go that well when it happens, right? I think the current administration rode in on a wave of like, yeah, we’re going to change. We’re going to change government, we’re going to create this doge and start cutting things.
And it led to a lot of harm. And a lot of people lost their jobs. And it wasn’t necessarily the right way to go about reforming government, I would say.
But at the local level, tweaks to how local government works can have pretty outsized impacts. And it’s not that hard to do. It’s still challenging.
So challenging to get right. But it sort of has this unique value proposition at the local level. I think that the sort of fundamental tension, I think, in many ways at the heart of political life in this country has always been about this balance between representative and direct democracy, right?
We are a very unique government, a unique democracy that tries to balance direct and representative democracy and federalism all at once. That’s a challenge. And I think at the local level is the place where those two things can best be held in tension.
It is really hard with federal policy, if you think about an interstate or highway transportation bill, right? Or like these big infrastructure packages. It is really hard to have a direct democracy around a multi-billion dollar infrastructure plan.
That’s just hard. It’s a big country. There’s many, many, many millions of people to please in many places across the country.
It’s really hard to directly involve people in the creation of that bill. That said, I just went like two days ago to a pretty meaningful input session around a highway being built like within eyeshot. If I turned around, I would be able to see it from my house.
And that is a place where we actually can have something closer to a direct democracy, right? We can have people really meaningfully weighing in on that. We can have people voting on local budgets in a direct way that at the federal level would be much more logistically challenging and impossible, really.
We can have like citizen assemblies where people are having really direct control over policy making. It’s just kind of hard to do that in this really big, unwieldy country that we have at the federal level. So that’s to say that it shouldn’t be tried.
But I think that sort of direct democracy where people can engage, see the product of their engagement, get a sort of little dopamine hit when they do that. And that makes them want to do it again. We can sort of build that kind of a virtuous cycle here in our local communities.
And that happens to just be the level at which there has been the least investment in building that kind of civic infrastructure, right? This may be surprising to people, but there’s like over $30 billion that goes into the democracy space in this country every year. That goes into support.
Yeah, with a B, $32 billion. There’s this really interesting dashboard that the Democracy Funders Network has invested in that shows where all that money comes from, where it all goes. And it mostly goes to organizations that are working at the national level on big, huge projects.
And with a fraction of that money, we could really reimagine what it means to have civic life in communities. And then from the bottom up, if people got involved in their communities, saw progress, built new relationships, got connected to other people, maybe then we can start to restitch faith and trust in this country more broadly. But I think it really has to start locally.
Wow, that’s amazing. Actually, with the time remaining, I’m curious, I want to hear more about civic assembly. And maybe just, what was your first encounter with civic assembly as a method and as an approach? And what made it something that you wanted to encounter or wanted to engage with?
Yeah, so we sort of first encountered assemblies about five years ago, four years ago. And it was kind of fortuitous timing, we were sort of approached by some folks in our local government by a couple council members who are like, it’s when we’ve lasted redistricting in 2021. There are a lot of issues with that process.
That process is managed by the city charter. And after that redistricting process, we were like, oh, there’s actually a lot in the city charter that needs to be reviewed. And we’re interested in doing a charter review.
The last one we did in 1998 was done by the Chamber of Commerce. And we’re interested if you all obviously didn’t exist then, but you all might be able to lead an interesting public review of our charter on your own. And that kind of happened at the same time that we started becoming aware of citizen assemblies, which are sort of experiencing this bit of a sort of phenomenon around a lot of interest in them in the United States.
And so we were really interested in them because we’re like, oh, well, we’ve been doing these sort of deliberative processes. We’ve been running these citywide public engagement efforts. But city charter is like a really dorky document.
Very few people know that it exists. It’s very technical. It’s pretty boring.
But it has pretty massive ramifications. And so traditional engagement processes with sort of some citywide engagement, input gathering process or citywide deliberation process, actually maybe is a little bit not well suited for doing a city charter review, right? Because it’s a topic that people don’t know about.
And if you get a bunch of opinions on a topic that is really hard to understand that people don’t instinctively know about, that people can’t really connect to their daily lives, and changes to the document have really massive ramifications for how your community is governed. That’s kind of a dangerous combination, actually. And so when we were sort of hearing about citizen assemblies, right, it’s still a sort of a process in which you’re engaging the public to inform this sort of narrow, small group of people that is representative of your community, making really informed decisions about something, right?
They come together, they learn about a topic, they learn about the trade offs, they hear from experts, and then they deliberate and they come to some sort of consensus, ideally. We’re like, oh, well, that actually could be really great for city charter, right? That’s interesting, because we would be like, fully immersing these folks in this document, in understanding the trade offs of it, we would have enough time to really help them reckon with the decision that they would be making.
And so we sort of made this bet of like, okay, well, if we’re gonna do this charter review, let’s try and do a citizen assembly. And that took about three years from that point to when we actually really kicked off planning, which is in the sort of summer of last year of 2025. And then our assembly happened this past March of 2026.
And what was the scale, just sort of like how many people, and how much time did they spend together?
Yeah, so we had 36 members that got selected. How they are selected is through a sortition process. So it is a lottery. We sent out 10,000 mailers to 10,000 randomly selected residential addresses in Bay County, apartments, homes, everything in between that’s a residential address that had a chance of getting one.
Those invitations had a sort of link or description of how to apply. When you apply, you give us your demographic information. And say that you can make the sessions. We use that demographic information to randomly select a group of 36 people that would be fully representative of our community across eight or nine demographics.
So age, income, housing status, political registration, race, gender, education level, all of these different sort of things sort of go together into this little algorithm. And it’s that’s out as many different combinations of 36 people, or whatever number you set it to, we set up to 36, as possible with a group of people. And so we had 203, I think, possible groups of 36 people.
We then randomly selected one of those and invited those folks to apply. They came together over basically the month of March. In retrospect, we tried to do it in too short a period of time, but that’s always good to learn a lesson.
And so they came together over about 40 hours in the month of March. We use this sort of public engagement process to narrow down what parts of the city charter we should be focusing on. So they had two remits, two topics that they were focusing on.
And they learned about those two topics. They learned about the city charter, they learned about the structure of government, they met with folks in government who would be impacted most directly by this, by these decisions. They deliberated, they voted on their own voting protocol.
So they decided they had to have a 75% threshold for something to advance. And 75% of the group, and then they deliberated and formalized proposals and adopted them out of the assembly. So we had three proposals that ended up being adopted by the assembly for the two remits.
And those were adopted by an over 84% margin of the assembly. And those are actually going to be on the ballot for the public to vote on this November.
Oh, wow. And what was your experience in terms of coming from maybe not having heard of it, but working in the space and then having experience? How do you feel about it as a tool? Its strengths, its weaknesses?
Yeah, I think I will confess that I went in actually a little bit skeptical. Not a little bit skeptical. I went in skeptical.
Yeah. It’s an expensive process, right? It’s demanding of staff time. So it was very expensive on our end. Our assembly ended up costing us about $280,000. There’s just a lot of money to make a decision. It is as plainly as that. Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot of money to make a decision.
It was expensive on staff time. We paid all the people that were participating, right? They gave 40 hours. It’s a lot of time. We paid them each $1,200. We want to make sure it’s fair. So we provided transportation stipends for folks that needed it. We provided childcare stipends and we wanted to make sure that families had the opportunity to participate, right? People with kids need childcare if they’re going to participate. And we fed people and it’s a space and we had stipends for experts that came in to give testimony.
It’s an expensive process. And because of the expense to decision-making ratio, I was like, we’ll see how this goes. I was, I think, in some ways vindicated in my suspicion. It was indeed an expensive process to make a decision.
But I came out of it, I think, way more understanding of why these assemblies are gaining so much because I think that they work really well.
What did you see it do?
I think first off, the room was the least cynical space I’ve ever been in. These truly were 36 random people. I feel it almost sounds like pejorative when I say that, but yeah, it was like randos, like total randos. We set a cap of one person — only one person on the assembly could have ever been to one of our events or donated to us. So it was a totally new group of people for us. Many of which weren’t super knowledgeable about local government, had never been asked to participate in a process like this, or had never participated in a process like this. And so they weren’t bringing all this baggage to it.
Right. And all of that baggage that a lot of people have from interacting with government is deserved, right? People are like pissed because they didn’t get something their way. A decision-making process felt flawed or biased. But none of these folks had that really. They had their concerns and their suspicions about government.
But that was interesting, having a truly diverse — like in every sense of that word. Right. I think people throw that around pretty casually, but it was like, no, this was like everything from super hardline conservative to super hardline progressive. We had a 16-year-old, we had people in their eighties. We had people that had been in Lexington a long time. We had people that hadn’t, that were brand new to Lexington. We had people that hadn’t left their house since the pandemic. We had social butterflies. We had everything across the board. Right.
And seeing that kind of a group of people come together and do something productively is awe inspiring. You’re like, oh my gosh, they genuinely want this to go well. And they feel this sense of ownership and a stake in the outcome.
And also, it turns out when you give people all the tools to make a decision, they can make really smart decisions. The topics that we were on were council compensation — how much should our council members make? — and how frequently should our city charter be reviewed. And watching people change their minds, coming in being like, I think council members should not even make what they’re making, to being like, oh, we should pay them more. And at the same time watching people that came in like, we need to raise council compensation, flip to not thinking we need to at the end. Watching people change their minds in opposite directions, given the same set of information, is beautiful. It reaffirms your faith in humanity.
And yeah, it was incredible. And they did it. They produced one more recommendation than we asked them to. And yeah, it was great.
One last question before we end. What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you?
Yeah, the joy comes from working on my own place. It’s like the joy and the struggle. It can be really frustrating to work on your own place. Yeah, you just never leave work. You’re always sort of in it. But then to make the place that you live better — it’s a pretty unique and special feeling.
I grew up, I was like a cub scout and boy scout when I was a kid. And I remember getting it drilled into me at campsites, like leave things better than you found it. Right. And I feel like that is the human experience, right? It should be the human experience, is like, leave the place that you’re in, the world that you’re in, the community that you’re in, better than you found it. Even if it’s just in a little way.
And the fact that I get to wake up and think about that every day, and be surrounded by people that also really care about this place, is pretty meaningful. So that’s the joy. It’s also hard, but it’s also beautiful.
It’s really great. I’m so grateful to you for your time. And it’s been a pleasure talking to you. So thank you so much for accepting the invitation and sharing everything.
Yeah. Happy to do it. Thanks for having me.
