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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Coalition of Everyone, archived at Wayback Machine. ↩