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In Seattle, community assemblies are gathering frontline community members to set their own policies around extreme weather.
For Peter Hasegawa, it all started with the heat dome. The labor organizer remembers the 2021 extreme heat event that killed more than 400 people in the state of Washington. That disaster woke up residents and union members to how deadly climate change can be. Although Seattle had passed climate action legislation in 2019, it became clear to Hasegawa and the union members he represented that even though the city was preparing to wean itself off fossil fuels, it was still ill-prepared to deal with the impacts of a warming planet.
This led Hasegawa last fall to South Seattle College, the setting for MLK Labor’s community assembly on extreme weather and worker rights. One October evening, a lecture hall filled with union workers, including teachers, firefighters, home health care workers, postal workers, and more, ready to try out the Community Assembly model. Community Assemblies are participatory spaces where people come together to learn, deliberate, and make collective decisions on programs and policies that influence the actions of government and community action. Hasegawa watched closely as the assembly unfolded.
After years of making policy for communities of color, workers, and other communities on the frontlines of climate change, lawmakers and city officials are now shifting towards making policies with constituents — particularly those who historically have been harmed by local policy. In Seattle, these Community Assemblies are part of a pilot program in partnership with the City of Seattle — one of the latest efforts in a larger trend of more inclusive governance around climate change. In that room, 50 union members came together for three assembly sessions over three weeks to test a new tool for co-governance.
Assemblies have been implemented across the U.S. and around the world, including in Hawai’i after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; in Jackson, Miss., to bring community-based perspectives into the city’s contracting process; and in the Bronx, N.Y., to advocate for stronger policies on housing, economic inequality, and health. While not government-funded or directly initiated with officials, these assemblies create opportunities for deeper collaboration between communities and policymakers.
“This is a model that has always existed — the assembly, a deep form of engagement — and it exists across the globe in different variations, demonstrating how structured public participation can inform policies and decisions that directly impact people’s lives,” said Faduma Fido, Lab Leader with Seattle partner organization People’s Economy Lab.
One thing that distinguishes Washington’s Community Assemblies is that they’re funded by government entities.MLK Labor’s assembly, along with an assembly led by the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, were funded by the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment in partnership with Seattle’s Green New Deal Oversight Board. The oversight board will use recommendations from community assemblies to inform Seattle’s Climate Action Plan update and future climate policies and priorities. With all of this in mind, it was important for the sustainability office and the oversight board to wisely choose the organizations that would lead these community assemblies. The Green New Deal legislation funded this program with $100,000 set aside to invest in participatory decision-making.
Choosing MLK Labor and the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle came after lengthy research, according to Elise Rasmussen, Climate and Environmental Justice Associate at Seattle’s sustainability office. Most importantly, both organizations prioritized communities disproportionately affected by climate change.
For MLK Labor’s Community Assembly, this included individual union members who had voiced past concerns about climate change and workers in roles that would put them in the path of extreme weather events. For the Urban League’s, which was focused on community resilience in the face of climate change, participants were chosen for their connection and lived experience to climate change and equity. This group included 25 members from Indigenous communities, as well as other communities of color, immigrants, unhoused people, elders, and youth who were engaged in efforts to fight climate change locally.
In the South Seattle College lecture hall, Hasegawa saw the type of camaraderie common in unions, but this time solidarity formed around facing climate change. “People found that they were not alone in having to deal with extreme weather,” he said, “and [workers were] not being given the tools or the protections from their managers to do what they needed to do.” Firefighters talked about having to work in extreme heat, home health care workers described elderly and vulnerable patients struggling without air conditioning, and teachers detailed sweaty days in classrooms, burst pipes, and mold.
The point, according to Fido, is to ensure that no one gets left behind in Seattle’s climate planning. Community Assemblies are a way for frontline community members to share their experiences and expertise, discuss issues and collaborate on solutions, and make their voices heard through policy recommendations. And community assemblies are gaining traction throughout the state. The Washington State Department of Social and Health Services is also funding a series of Community Assembly pilots.
Longtime organizer Rosalinda Guillen had advocated for the model locally, after working with numerous farmworker organizations and advocates from Washington State to South America. She was a community organizer with the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, helping organize the first farmworker union in the state’s history. “Every state agency needs to replace their community engagement plan with the community assembly model,” Guillen said on a 2023 panel.
Another goal of Community Assemblies is to support Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities to participate more fully in the process of policymaking. “We’re working with frontline communities to be able to build and sustain a civic muscle where they are active participants in the conversation of better policies, better investments, and more targeted programming,” said Fido.
For Camille Gipaya, the process has already had immediate, visible effects. Gipaya is a community outreach organizer at the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle. While the issues their assembly addressed were broad — food and water, land use, pollution, and redlining — she says that bringing people together has very literally changed how they show up. “We [went] to Olympia [to] talk to legislators, and we had individuals that we met at the Community Assembly that were there who were not interested in talking to politicians beforehand, but [then] they felt empowered to be more engaged,” she said.
Using this model is important to Gipaya, because it prioritizes the communal lived experiences of people who will be most affected by climate change. Instead of trying other methods to determine the best way forward, this initiative simply asks people to determine the best path themselves. “When looking at policy, it has to be more than just data and numbers,” she said. “Oftentimes, having seen [how policy has worked] in the past, we really have to connect with community members. We cannot afford to be disconnected with frontline communities.”
This story was produced in partnership with Communities of Opportunity, a growing partnership that believes every community can be a healthy, thriving community. Communities of Opportunity is a unique community-private foundation-government partnership that invests in the power of communities in King County, Washington.
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