My life has largely intersected two worlds: the creative, and the political. For a long time tt was always clear to me that we need to bring them together.
Democracy as we know it was designed hundreds of years ago, and hasn't changed much since. It's failures today — polarization, gridlock, and short-term thinking — are the result of flaws in its centuries-old design.
Democracy Creative is a nonprofit organization I founded to more deeply understand these problems and design solutions for them.
Helping people understand how citizens' assemblies work and why they are useful is much easier with a short video. I wrote, edited, and produced this one, which we worked hard to make as simple and concise as possible.
PROJECT FOCUS: CITIZENS' ASSEMBLIES
Democracy Creative was founded to explore creative solutions to the problems facing our democracy. To us, the most promising of these to date are citizens' assemblies. Our work has been focused on developing our tool for citizens' assemblies, Assemble, and advocating for the implementation of citizens' assemblies at both the city and state level.
TERRY BOURICIUS: THE TROUBLE WITH ELECTIONS
Compared to other fields related to social change, there are relatively few people in the world thinking deeply about citizens' assemblies. We were fortunate that Terry Bouricius, a globally known theorist on the topic, happened to live in Burlington, VT, where we are based. Terry became a close collaborator, and we eventually published his book in serial on our Substack.
CITIZENS' ASSEMBLY "PUBLIC INFORMATION SESSION": TAKEAWAY ZINE
In May of 2023, we hosted a citizens' assembly "public information session" in Burlington City Hall. I designed this zine as a free giveaway for attendees.
Design is a balance of form and economics. In this case, we needed something we could print and distribute within 36 hours. We quickly printed them on our office printer and assembled them before the event.
COLLECTIVE WORKSPACE
In late 2019, I met Steve Conant, owner of The Soda Plant building in Burlington. I told him about the idea that would become Democracy Creative, and he offered us a beautiful space at a generous deal, becoming our first benefactor. To make it work, we turned our new office into a shared workspace to split the rent. We furnished the 1,750 square foot office space for free from Craigslist and donations.
Since then, our space has become a thriving community hub, host to countless events and memorable moments.
Starting in late 2023, we've begun an exciting process of turning the space into it's own entity with its own mission, rather than just a side project of Democracy Creative.
EVENTS & FLYERS
A small selection of flyers I've designed for events Democracy Creative has hosted and organized.
ZINE WITH LIZA PHILLIP
Democracy Creative has given me the opportunity to work with many amazing people. One of them is Vermont artist Liza Phillip. This a zine I designed when we collaborated at an event in Democracy Creative's space. It was designed to be printable and produceable in just a few hours.
THOUGHT CLUB
Thought Club, a weekly free-form discussion group, is one of the great events that grew out of the cross-pollination and energy of our shared office. I designed the flyers to have a consistent structure, while keeping plenty of space to express that week's topic.
