All right, so we're gonna go ahead and get started with the first item on our Bend City Council work session.

Um I think we got a couple people to pull over online for our next presentation.

And I'll open this up with Yeah, nice to see you, Lynn.

Nice to see you, Josh.

I'll let them introduce themselves here in a moment, but just want to set the stage for this item.

Uh the concept of citizen assemblies was something that was brought to us, I think, via counselor Broadman uh last year and Claudia, and I'm gonna blank on Claudia's last name.

Swalice from uh is from Spain, and we did a no sorry.

Um we did an informational session about a year ago, and uh some counselors attended, but for for those that aren't familiar with the concept, there was a city club recently that talked about citizen assemblies as well.

So I think you'll hear a little bit of of uh some background and what they are.

Um, really what we are talking about today, though, is a potential arrangement or agreement between the City of Bend and the Central Oregon Civic Action Project.

Um and there's an MOU that's attached to your packet, so you can see the terms outlined in that MOU.

I would say one of the main pieces of that is an agreement that we would receive a recommendation from a citizen assembly that that's what we're basically committing to in the MOU and some other things as well.

Um so I want to make sure you're comfortable with that.

So I'll circle back after the presentation, and so we want to have a discussion on this path forward in partnership with um Central Oregon Civic Action Project or C have a COCAP COCAF is what the acronym is.

Um just would I think want to make sure council is comfortable with the approach that's being taken.

So I'm gonna turn it over to Josh and to Lynn, and they'll walk you through that presentation and we'll circle back with questions.

Well, thank you very much.

Um as you can tell uh by my propensity to use acronyms.

Uh I am a retired military officer, spent 25 years in the Air Force, uh retired colonel, and uh also a proud resident of Central Oregon here in Bend, and thanks for the kind introduction.

And it's good to see so many familiar faces that we've already spoken with about this topic, but it's also a great opportunity for my colleague Lynn Davis, who's a co-director of Healthy Democracy, one of our core partners and I, to give you just a little bit more insight and detail about what this is about, what progress we've made to date and what our plans are for the future.

Um so as we stated, I'm the sort of the head of the Central Oregon Civic Action Project, or COCAP, where our vision is helping shape a more civically engaged and vibrant community where everyone is empowered to help determine our shared future together.

And our mission and sort of the way we look at doing that is by opening doors, building bridges, and co-creating spaces for deliberative decision making for all members of the community, even those who may not be here in Bend, as you can tell by the name.

Our ambitions are big to work throughout the uh Central Oregon region.

What we're gonna be talking about tonight, as you can see.

I don't know if our if our slides are available to pull up on the screen, but we will have to do the yeah, maybe Lynn, if you can share those slides, that would be helpful.

Um, but I'll keep on going in the meantime.

We'll get them back eventually.

Um and if we don't, I can always, I think we've got to do that.

I can I can share them while you're talking about it.

Yeah, but I'm gonna hire that.

Um our overall objectives, and we'll talk about this again toward the end of the presentation, are to help bridge social divides, to help restore faith in our institutions here locally and regionally, and also to help achieve better governance outcomes uh alongside all of our elected and administrative officials here.

You know, I think we are extraordinarily fortunate, and I'm finding out more every day about the rich tradition of civic engagement here in Central Oregon and Bend from service organizations to nonprofits to the peaceful demonstration I drove past in the park on the way out here.

People are involved, and that is tremendous.

And we've seen it through uh the committee members who join your council uh and and any number of other people who are involved.

But just like anywhere, typically those are people with special interests, they're key stakeholders, they're people who have the time and the resources to get involved, and that leaves probably the majority of our community and those outside of Bend and in the county who don't have those opportunities and perhaps don't feel as if they're heard, don't feel as if they have a seat at the table.

And that's what we want to do is provide them that seat at the table.

There we go.

What great timing, our little tagline under our under our logo.

Uh, and we'll be talking specifically about today one aspect of what a civic engagement hub can do, which is holding a civic assembly.

In this case, it'll be on youth homelessness.

I'll give a little bit more detail later on how we've arrived at that topic and and where we're headed.

But in spite of that rich tradition, we kind of need it right now because as many of you know, Bend and Central Oregon are sort of emblematic of a lot of the divisions that exist within our country right now, whether those are political divides, socioeconomic divides, the strains that exist under rapid growth and being a great place to live means that we have more and more people arriving and the difficulty of handling that influx.

Um we have been very fortunate that we are now well into negotiations with the city with our your colleagues at the county and in other jurisdictions around the area to uh formulate memorandums of memoranda of agreement to move forward on a civic assembly, and also then we have our core foundational uh partners who you saw in the previous slide, Democracy Next, where Claudia Schwales is the founder and director, which is an internationally renowned uh think tank and action um organization focused on citizens and civic assemblies, OSU Cascades and the Center for the American Conversation are another core partner, and then of course Healthy Democracy, which is based out of Portland and Eugene, who have been some of the key and lead practitioners of deliberative democracy in the United States and particularly on the West Coast over the past 10 to 15 years.

So without any more of me talking right now, because I'm not the expert on civic assemblies.

I'm gonna hand it over to Lynn to provide a bit more background information.

Thanks.

Thanks so much, Josh.

We're gonna be there in person and thank you, count members.

Uh great to meet you virtually uh and be here.

Uh we're thrilled to uh be potentially, hopefully working on I should say definitely working on a project in um upcoming in Central Oregon for the first time.

The first uh lottery selected assembly to happen in Central Oregon.

I just wanted to start with a little bit.

We're up, I should say we're a nonprofit uh as Josh said, based on the West Side of the Cascades, but working all over.

Um problem statement, and then uh just very brief background if you uh haven't heard of civic assemblies on what they are, and then back to Josh again for some details about this particular project.

So the core sort of problem statement is that we don't see ourselves, many of us in our democracy right now, and we don't see public decision making as something that we can all do, and that's a universal all across the board, every walk of life.

Next slide, please.

And we also need to see a sense, we need a sense of public ownership in policy decisions, we think, not just involvement, but ownership.

And that only comes through time and sort of uh uh a deeper sense, a deeper kind of involvement than we're used to.

A democracy where we are all policy makers of some kind, not all the time, not in replacement of existing bodies that do wonderful work, but in some piece at some point in our lives.

Next slide.