January news: Job Openings, Convening Program & more!
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People Powered is hiring for a Community Manager and Intern!
We’re growing! We’re recruiting for two remote roles, based anywhere, to help strengthen participatory democracy around the world:
1️⃣ Community Manager (full-time) — build and support a strong global membership community.
2️⃣ Systems and Data Intern (full/part-time) — help improve our systems, workflows, and data.
Please share widely — and we especially encourage applications from people who are underrepresented in the global democracy field. Deadline: February 6, 2026.
See the program for the People Powered 2026 Convening!
The program for the People Powered 2026 Convening is now live, with updated details on workshops and sessions taking place in Nairobi, March 2–5.
Join civil society leaders, civil servants, researchers, and funders from around the world to share insights, build skills, and co-create solutions that make democracy work for everyone. The deadline for registration is February 2. We only have a few spaces left, so register now!
Beyond defense: New strategies for renewing democracy
Democracy is under attack, but defending the current system of democracy isn’t enough. To reverse backsliding, we also need to embrace new strategies for renewing and expanding democracy. In a new op-ed for Philea, the Philanthropy Europe Association, our co-executive director Josh Lerner outlines two emerging strategies:
Horizons: Envision and start building the desired future of democracy
Ecosystems: Build bridges, infrastructure and narratives to connect existing efforts
Read how leading philanthropies, organizations, and governments are using these strategies to build a stronger democratic future.
Climate change & corruption are linked. How can participatory policymaking tackle both?
What does it look like to tackle the climate crisis by addressing corruption at its roots? In Quintana Roo, Mexico, Ciudadanos por la Transparencia joined People Powered’s Climate Democracy Accelerator to experiment with participatory policymaking as a way to confront both challenges at once.
The result: a new Public Policy on Good Environmental Governance, co-created with more than 3,500 community members. Read how a flexible, people-powered approach helped turn an initial idea into a pioneering statewide reform.
New practical resources on school participation
Image courtesy of Center for Environmental Education.
Schools around the world are experimenting with new models of governance, deliberation, and collaboration, to engage children and youth in the decisions that will shape their present and future. But even as schools become laboratories of democracy, it remains difficult for school administrators, teachers, and organizations to find relevant guidance on student participation. To meet this need, People Powered and our members developed a suite of practical materials on school participation, including step-by-step guidance, research insights, sample materials and other helpful resources.
New Video: 3 strategies behind an effective Climate Assembly
In Plateau State, Nigeria, the climate crisis is already reshaping daily life. Shifting rainfall patterns, crop failures, and destructive floods have made livelihoods more precarious, while displacement from nearby conflicts has increased pressure on land and water.
This short video shows how communities responded. Through a Citizens’ Climate Assembly, farmers, youth, displaced people, and local leaders came together to shape solutions alongside government, with support from the People Powered Climate Democracy Accelerator and our member Fundlink International.
Learn how they put three powerful strategies into practice:
Root participation in government institutions
Cultivate an ecosystem of inclusion
Empower people to grow local action
January 22: DRH-NCDD Training: Using Civic Technology to Facilitate Meaningful Engagement (online)
January 23-24: Political Tech Summit (Berlin, Germany)
January 27–February 17: Not If, But How: Climate, Movements, and Transformative Change (online series)
February 10–12: Nets4Dem Democracy Lab (Bilbao, Spain)
March 2–5: People Powered 2026 Convening (Nairobi, Kenya)
September 21-23: International Observatory on Participatory Democracy Conference (Krakow, Poland)
October 7-10:Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy(Gaborone, Botswana)
A Stage for Change: Legislative Theatre in Action: This short article and video document how a legislative theater project brought together students in Austria, Hungary and Netherlands to develop a performance and concrete policy proposals to tackle sexual harassment in universities.
How to Bring Citizen Deliberation to Schools: This short guide (in Spanish, with a summary in English) offers 11 steps to design and run a deliberative assembly in high schools, focused on youth participation through sortition or lottery selection.
Boosting, not replacing: Online deliberation tools in a face-to-face student citizens’ assembly: An empirical study examining how online deliberation tools were used to complement a largely face-to-face deliberative process in a student assembly in France.
National Endowment for Democracy: Grants to advance democratic goals and strengthen democratic institutions (January 26)
UNDP: Call for Submissions for the Atlas of Innovation on Public Communication (January 31)
Keseb’s Democracy Innovation Lab: $10,000 grants and support for early-stage ideas that reimagine the foundations of democracy and strengthen inclusion and cross-group belonging. (February 2).
ScaleDem: Up to €100,000, mentorship, and peer learning to scale democratic innovations, for eligible organizations across Europe and beyond (March 31).
European Endowment for Democracy: Funding for local democracy organizations in the Eastern Partnership, Middle East and North Africa, the Western Balkans and Turkey. (Rolling deadline)
Apply to work at People Powered
Watch how a citizens’ assembly delivered climate impact
Get tickets for the People Powered 2026 Convening