Coalition of Everyone
The Coalition of Everyone (CoE) was founded by Willow Berzin with the aim of making participatory and deliberative democracy part of everyday civic life — not just formal government processes. It ran citizens' assemblies, participatory workshops, and community engagement processes across Australia.
Their stated vision: a world where people are welcomed to engage actively with political and economic systems, from small-scale community budgeting to large-scale randomly selected assemblies setting policy.
After six years of operation, CoE held a final AGM and wound up — "composted" in their language. Willow Berzin went on to found the Bioregional Institute, continuing related work on regenerative community governance.
Significance
CoE represented an attempt to operationalise deliberative democracy at the grassroots level — outside the formal government commissioning model used by organisations like MosaicLab and newDemocracy. Its winding-up is itself a data point: the sustainability challenge of doing this work without a reliable institutional client base.
See also
- Citizens' Assembly
- Consensus Mapping
- Direct Democracy
- Designing Open Democracy 2020 Primer — Willow Berzin from CoE appeared at this DOD meetup