ABOUT THE GLOBAL ASSEMBLY
Last year a small but global group came together to run the world‘s first ever global citizens assembly. One hundred people were chosen through a sophisticated lottery style system called ‘sortition’. The final group was an accurate snapshot of the human family: 70% living on $10 or less a day, 10% with no education at all, 50% women, 18% Chinese, 13% white. They ranged from an 17 year-old Chinese student to an elderly seamstress from Brazil, a gold miner in Myanmar to a yoga teacher in Italy, a small holding farmer in Congo to a goat herder from Socotra, a tiny island off Yemen.
For the first time we got to hear the human family as it came together and learnt from each other and deliberated on the best ways forward for us as one species. This can change everything. Listening to the human family itself, not our leaders or our most powerful or influential not the loudest or the richest, but those ordinary people from all walks of life who are never heard, who have never have a seat at the table.
Byline Festival is thrilled to host a panel session|: Can the Global Assembly save the world? with the only UK assembly member, one of the architects of the assembly itself, one of the people who implemented the assembly and the academy award winning director Asif Kapadia, who has been advising us for over a year. The greatest crisis is in international governance itself, there is nothing more ordinary than to reboot an operating system when it has become outdated.
SUNDAY 1 MAY. 2:30 - 3:30PM AT BYLINE FESTIVAL
PANELISTS:
Asif Kapadia
Asif Kapadia is an Academy Award, BAFTA and Grammy winning director who has made his name directing visually striking films exploring ‘outsiders’, characters living in extreme circumstances, fighting against a corrupt or broken system. His documentary Amy, about the UK pop singer Amy Winehouse, is the highest grossing British Documentary of all time at the UK box office and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the BAFTA for Best Documentary, a Grammy for Best Music Film, and the European Film Award for Best Documentary. He has been advising the world’s first ever global Citizens Assembly for over a year. If anyone is an outsider in terms of the climate crisis, it is the hundreds of millions of ordinary people living on the front line of climate change who have been shut out of the decision-making bodies that dictate the international policies which the marginalized and ignored must suffer the consequences of.
Claire Mellier
Claire Mellier is part of the Global Assembly’s core team. In 2020, in collaboration with other partners, she launched the Global Citizens’ Assembly on the climate and ecological crisis for COP26. She is a facilitator and researcher with experience in designing and delivering participative processes which put citizens at the heart of decision making. She was part of the facilitation team at Climate Assembly UK and one of the accredited researchers who observed France’s Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat. With the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation (CAST) at Cardiff University, she did a comparative analysis of the two climate citizens’ assemblies. She is the author of a Carnegie Europe article entitled “Getting Climate Citizens’ Assemblies Right”. She also contributed to the March-April 2021 edition of the New Internationalist on Citizens’ Assemblies.
Flynn Devine
Flynn is a people power thinker and practitioner. He has experience supporting refugees in the UK, training public servants and health professionals to change their understanding of ‘help’, helping local governments around the UK redesign the way they deliver services and now deliberative democracy design in the world’s first global citizens’ assembly. At 22, Flynn is one of the youngest team members working on the Global Assembly and has worked in almost every area of the project, with first-hand experiences of the challenges in delivering such an ambitious, international project. Flynn was part of the team who designed the assembly member recruitment system, helped onboard, train, and put in place an international distributed delivery network of 150+ organisations in more than 50 countries and played a core role in the support team who ran the actual assembly.
Jamie Kelsey-Fry
Chair for the Global Assembly panel is Jamie Kelsey-Fry. He is a contributing editor to New Internationalist magazine for over ten years, the author of award winning GCSE text book ‘The Rax Active Citizenship Toolkit’ and the originator of the worldwide Cultural Wave, designed to support and amplify the Global Assembly through popular culture.
Sanjay Jagatia
Sanjay Jagatia is the only U.K. citizen chosen through the unique Global Assembly sortition process, to be one of the 100 members of the world’s first global citizens’ assembly. He is a lifelong fundraiser, community activist and campaigner. His passion is to further voluntary, charitable, community and faith based activities to help disadvantaged communities in the UK and across the world, to provide them with empowerment, equality, and fairness. He specially supports women, young people, the disadvantaged and vulnerable to be given the opportunity to gain confidence, training, empowerment skills and self-awareness skills. Over the last 25 years his fundraising activities have raised over £20 Million Pounds for activities in UK and across the world, including: capacity building for charities, NGOs, education, health, music, art, disability, children, elderly, environmental, and animal welfare.
