Guide to Popular Assemblies
From a guide from Humanity Project
The Humanity Project exists to build something new: assembly culture. It’s a way for us to listen to each other, make decisions together, and take action on the things that shape our lives.
They propose this needs to happen. They suggest that something’s broken. Democracy isn’t working for people. The media divides. The people in power don’t listen. They want to change that, making democracy fit to deal with the problems we face in the UK today.
They want to create an assembly culture across the UK. For those that wonder what popular assemblies are, they offer a guide. but in short, assembly culture is simple: real conversations, real listening, and real decisions made by the people they affect. It’s the freedom to be heard and the responsibility to listen. It’s about turning division into dialogue and ideas into action. We don’t need to wait for permission from anyone. We can start now, in our streets and the neighbourhoods where we live, deciding on what we need together. They explain:
Around the world, we equate democracy with elections. However, democracy means much more than that: rule by the people. Yet, according to most people around the world, elections just lead to rule by a powerful few, while we get side-lined (Lerner, 2024). This is supported by research (Guerrero, 2023) that indicates that elections often produce:
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Ignorance and Capture – Ordinary people rarely have the time or resources to fully grasp the complex issues at stake in elections. This makes it easier for powerful groups — such as corporations and lobbyists — to capture politics and shape outcomes in their favour.
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Information and Distortion – Even when people want to make informed choices, the information environment is flooded with spin, half-truths, and deliberate distortions. Politicians, the media, and vested interests all compete to frame reality in ways that benefit them, leaving voters struggling to separate fact from manipulation.
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Division – Elections often pit groups against one another, encouraging “us vs. them” thinking rather than fostering dialogue or common ground. This divisive dynamic undermines cooperation and makes it harder to solve shared problems.
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Short-Termism and Elitism – Because elections revolve around short cycles and are dominated by the wealthy and well-connected, leaders prioritise quick wins and elite interests over the long-term needs of ordinary people. The result is a political system that side-lines the majority while entrenching the power of a few.
What’s more, elected governments are increasingly reshaping and exploiting elections to further push for rule by a small elite who then rule over the rest of us (Lerner, 2024). So, it is hardly surprising that most people in countries that have elections worldwide say that their political system “needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed” (Pew Research Centre, 2021). To build a real democracy that actually works for us, we must urgently put our voices back at the centre.
Participatory Democracy
Making decisions collectively is the most ordinary thing in the world: take, for example, a group of friends deciding what to film to see in the cinema. The formal term for this practice is participatory democracy. We can also use it to refer to a form of government where we ‘directly’ have a say in political decisions and policies that affect our lives, rather than through elected politicians (called ‘Representative Democracy’).
Unsurprisingly, people have made decisions this way for most of human history. Even records of the earliest known urban communities in Mesopotamia (now called Iraq) (4,000 BC) suggest that they ruled themselves in this way (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021).
There are other well-known examples of highly developed structures of participatory government amongst many that exist in the history books. Despite this ancient and varied history, participatory democracy has been eclipsed by representative democracy over the past few centuries across most of the world and so the word ‘democracy’ has come to mean ‘holding elections’.
Popular Assemblies (also known as ‘Peoples’ Assemblies’) are one type of participatory democracy. They are also a type of deliberative democracy, which is a way of making decisions through collective dialogue. Popular Assemblies are similar to citizens assemblies but differ in two fundamental ways: how participants are chosen, and who tends to sponsor them:
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Popular assemblies work with whoever turns up, whereas citizens assemblies bring together a sample of the population using a process called ‘sortition’ to randomly select a representative group.
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Popular assemblies tend to be political spaces that the community has created or ‘claimed’ in which they can define their own terms of engagement. On the other hand, citizens assemblies tend to be mostly organised by governments (they’re the only bodies with enough money and interest to commission the very expensive process). Citizens are then invited into the space to contribute within terms set by government (Mellier & Wilson, 2023). So, purely by their existence, popular assemblies challenge traditional political culture where citizens tend to be locked out of decision-making or just invited on specific terms and conditions.
Deliberation is a key part of popular (and citizens) assemblies. It is an approach to coming to decisions through considered collective dialogue. Deliberation enables everyone at an assembly to ‘discuss the issues and options and to develop their thinking together before coming to a view on the question or issue, taking into account the values that inform other participants’ opinions’ (Involve, 2025).
Crucially, popular assemblies are structured to produce a specific outcome (that could be a decision, action, set of demands, etc.). And while the design varies widely they tend to follow a basic structure; Problem, Learning, Deliberation, Feedback, Decision, Organise.
Assemblies are much more than a way of making decisions. They can create a space for people involved to build trust, agency, connection, shared interests, and drive change on the issues that matter most.. This is a direct challenge to the way that the politics of division makes each of us feel powerless, isolated and self-interested. Crucially, the development of these capacities sets up the community to begin to self-organise to make material changes to their lives.
However, to get these benefits, organisers of popular assemblies must pay careful attention to a few things: strategy, outreach, design, and facilitation. These are explored in detail in the Guide, written first and foremost for organisers – people who want to bring assemblies to life in their communities. You don’t need any prior experience. Whether you’re part of a local group, a campaign, or just a few neighbours coming together, this Guide is designed to help you.
Download the Guide here.
See also the UK version here.
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From a guide from Humanity Project, 04/08/2026