Skip to content
Status: activeType: 🏛️ networkCountry: United States Website: www.peoplepowered.org
Status active
Type 🏛️ network
Country United States
Website www.peoplepowered.org
Contact info@peoplepowered.org
(201) 431-5646
Contact form ↗
Concepts Participatory Budgeting Citizens Assembly Deliberative Democracy Democracy Tools
Last activity 2026-08-09 dod
Site live and actively publishing as of August 2026

People Powered

People Powered is a global membership hub for participatory democracy, serving as a field-building organisation for the practitioners, governments, researchers, and advocates working on citizen participation worldwide. It does not itself run participatory processes — it builds the capacity of those who do, bridging the gap between isolated local experiments and a coherent global field with shared standards, evidence, and infrastructure.

Programmes include the Climate Democracy Accelerator, the Mainstreaming Participation Accelerator, a mentorship programme connecting experienced practitioners with those starting new processes, training modules on participatory budgeting, citizens' assemblies, and legislative theatre, a digital participation resource centre, and the Democracy Stories Lab (launched July 2026, an open call for visual stories about the future of democracy). The organisation also runs the Democracy Narratives Alliance, working on how democracy is talked about — an explicit communications-strategy approach to democratic renewal that is unusual in a field dominated by process design and tool-building.

People Powered's role in the landscape is meta-level: it is the connective infrastructure for the field rather than a frontline practitioner. Its membership model (organisations join, access resources, and shape strategy collectively) makes it structurally similar to FIDE or Democracy R&D but with a broader scope — covering the full range of participatory mechanisms rather than focusing on citizens' assemblies specifically.

Key people

Folio Collective, introducing Josh Lerner as a Conversation Leader for its September 2026 event, describes him as "the founder of People Powered, the global hub for participatory democracy," who "previously founded and directed the Participatory Budgeting Project, a not-for-profit organisation that empowers people to decide together how to spend public money."2 That earlier organisation is indeed the one whose fiscal sponsorship launched what became People Powered in 2019.1 Lerner is the author of Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press) and Everyone Counts: Could Participatory Budgeting Change Democracy? (Cornell University Press), and stepped down as Co-Executive Director of People Powered in 2026 to write his next book on the future of democracy.2

See also

  1. "We began to grow the organization in 2019, launching a Global Participatory Budgeting Hub as a fiscally sponsored initiative of the Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization in the United States." About Us ✓ Verified, People Powered, accessed 16 September 2026. ↩

  2. "Josh is the founder of People Powered, the global hub for participatory democracy. He has 20 years of experience developing, researching, and supporting innovative democracy programs around the world. He previously founded and directed the Participatory Budgeting Project, a not-for-profit organisation that empowers people to decide together how to spend public money." Folio Collective's introduction to "Should we celebrate democracy today — or reimagine it for tomorrow?" ✓ Verified, accessed 16 September 2026. ↩↩

Upcoming events

History