Status: inactiveType: 📢 advocacyCountry: Australia Website: Archive ↗

Status	inactive
Type	📢 advocacy
Country	Australia
Website	Archive ↗
Concepts	Citizens Assembly Deliberative Democracy Consensus Mapping Direct Democracy

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.

Key people

• Willow Berzin — founder. Built CoE over six years as a grassroots deliberative democracy practice before winding it up intentionally. Subsequently founded the Bioregional Institute, continuing related work on regenerative community governance. Appeared at a DOD meetup in 2022.¹

After six years of operation, CoE held a final AGM and wound up — "composted" in their language.

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

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1. "Renewing democratic culture for citizen, community, and policy-led change." Coalition of Everyone, archived at Wayback Machine. ↩

History

• 2019-01-01 Co-founded by Willow Berzin, Suse Porter and Dr Sonia Randhawa, inspired by Extinction Rebellion Melbourne's first meeting
  Sourcing: High

  I met my two other co-founders Suse Porter and Dr Sonia Randhawa early last year, and have been working closely with them since.

  ↗ View source
• 2020-02-04 Ran four mock Citizens' Assemblies at Melbourne's Sustainable Living Festival
  Sourcing: High

  Through the Sustainable Living Festival, the Coalition of Everyone held four mock Citizens’ Assemblies on the topics of; fashion, fire, regenerative agriculture and water.

  ↗ View source