The first three weeks

Hey, everybody, it's Harry. We have had one intense summer in Montrose, Colorado, working on the Unify Montrose deliberation pilot! Here’s a quick update on what the big group has been up to.

After two months of outreach, over 200 Montrose residents raised their hands to help, offering to spend twelve weeks working with their fellow citizens, trying to find a solution to the childcare shortage in Montrose.

And then in July, you might remember, we had a deliberation lottery where from among all those hand raisers, we selected a random but representative group of delegates to form an assembly to actually do the deliberation.

And it's been on for three weeks. We're three weeks into the deliberation. The first three weeks were in orientation. We learned about biases, like confirmation bias and experience biases, that these biases cloud the way that you make decisions, and how to take advantage of each other's differing perspectives.

Then we had this wonderful event at the Ute Indian Museum where we brought all the delegates together. They come from really different walks of life, and by the end, they're walking out laughing and having a good time, which is actually really important, because in order to deliberate well, people have to be able to trust be honest with each other. And in order to be honest, you have to trust each other. And to trust each other, you need to know each other.

So that was a wonderful event. And next week, we move on to the status quo, reviewing the status quo, what is happening in Montrose with childcare, what's working, what's not working.

And then after that, we start looking at solutions. So I will be doing this update once a week. If you have any questions at all, please write me.