00:00And tell me a little bit about Citizens in Power.
00:04So we're working with Trinity Community Arts in Bristol and St Paul's Carnival to help
00:12to create a citizens' assembly for culture, and that's going to happen in autumn 2025.
00:19So LaToya McAllister-Jones, who runs St Paul's Carnival, and Emma Harvey, who runs Trinity,
00:24they thought a lot about who makes the decisions about culture, who basically gets to make
00:30the decisions about what's funded, what's supported, what is it?
00:35And I think they felt quite strongly that a lot of the time those decisions get made
00:40by organisations or politicians or funders.
00:46And as two people who run community arts organisations, they felt really strongly that actually their
00:52communities that they represent weren't necessarily represented in those decision-making processes.
00:57So that's where they came up with the idea of this citizens' assembly for culture.
01:02So a citizens' assembly then, so it's all about bringing people from different communities,
01:07different parts of the region together to discuss about what's important to them.
01:13Tell me, what is the benefit of a citizens' assembly?
01:17So essentially, you're getting decision-making from a very diverse group of people.
01:22So if you think about most of the ways that we make decisions these days, think about
01:26politics, but you also think about organisations, think about the governance of organisations,
01:32or think about funders, and actually the kinds of people who are making the decisions often
01:37come from quite a narrow sort of demographic, which means that the decisions need to take
01:41account of all of that difference.
01:43And so I think really, to answer your question simply, the benefit is that you just get a
01:48lot of input to the decision-making process, which means that the decisions that come out
01:53actually better reflect the wider community.
01:56So Bristol's obviously a massively diverse city.
02:01Why do you think a citizens' assembly is the way forward in representing Bristol as a multicultural,
02:09multidiversity?
02:11Well, I think because they have part of the process of bringing an assembly together is
02:17what's called a civic lottery or a public lottery.
02:20And it's quite a sophisticated process of essentially selecting a very diverse and wide
02:26range of people.
02:28And in a city like Bristol, but equally thinking about then areas like North Somerset and South
02:33Gloucestershire, which again have completely different kind of demographics, how do you
02:38actually encourage people from all walks of life to get involved in the decision-making
02:43process?
02:44And I'm only aware that citizens' assemblies and juries are really one of the only processes
02:49that gets that kind of diversity into the conversation, that gets that kind of difference
02:54into the decision-making process.
Comments