Community Questions

Over the past 18 months, Unify America’s Chief of Democracy Leagues (Morgan Lasher), who’s a long-time Akron resident, and a local strategic community convening consultant (Sue Lacy) hosted more than 300 listening sessions and conversations with Akronites to help to shape the foundation for Unify Akron.

In early 2025, they invited a diverse group of 12 people to help guide the early days of setting the stage for Unify Akron to emerge. The group dubbed themselves the “Kitchen Table,” which you may have heard referenced at the Civic Lottery event.

The Kitchen Table served as a trusted group of advisors with different perspectives who offered guidance on strategic and operational direction, helped to form a common vision, and leveraged relationships to build an inclusive and representative initiative. The team represented organizations and priority constituencies and regularly engaged their networks to inform the coalition’s direction and plan of action.

In the early months, the group established a set of criteria for what would constitute a “good issue” for the first Civic Assembly. Those criteria were: timelieness/urgency, potential for impact, community engagement and input needed, and the answers to these two questions:  

• Does the topic actually need local, public deliberation? Some issues may be bigger than our local scope, and others may already have concrete, strategic plans in the works. We’re interested in the issues that can be addressed locally by a range of possible tactics. 

• Are leaders willing to move on recommendations from the public? If the folks charged with working on that topic locally aren’t interested in the public’s take or aren’t open to changing policy, budget, or partnerships, an Assembly would waste everyone’s time. 

As issues emerged as a result of meetings with community organizations, residents, elected officials, and the City administration, the Kitchen Table advised the Unify staff on important constituencies with which to engage, helping to create a “stakeholder map” in the community, including people with lived experience, current practitioners, and decision-makers in the field. 

Housing eventually rose to the top of the list, and both the community and City leaders seem to be eager to make progress on this challenge. (For future topics, Unify Akron will be engaging the community more broadly for input and decision-making.)

And as housing was identified as the shared priority for the community and the city, the Kitchen Table compiled a large list of individuals, agencies, and organizations whose different voices could be helpful at the Solutions Team table.

Sue and Morgan met with those individuals and the executive leadership of the relevant organizations and agencies identified by the Kitchen Table for exploratory meetings. The Solutions Team was convened based on those conversations and approved by the Accountability Team. The administration also identified three key city staff to sit at the 18-person Solutions Team table. 

See the makeup of all of the Assembly Teams here.

(Question paraphrased from this blog post received 2/27/26 via email)

First, thank you! Randomness and fairness are critical for Akron’s Civic Lottery, and we welcome questions and careful scrutiny.

The Akron lottery was built around two main goals:

Goal 1: Representation — The final group of 65 people should reflect the community. This means the group should match the city’s makeup across key demographics like age, race, gender, and political affiliation.

Goal 2: Equal Chances — Everyone who signed up should have as fair a chance as possible to be selected.

Of course, not every demographic signed up in equal numbers. Some groups had more people sign up, and other groups had fewer hand-raisers. From groups where there weren't as many hand-raisers, the Panelot system pulled those people into more panels. 

This is how Panelot makes sure each panel is representative of the community, even when every demographic group in the community doesn't sign up in equal numbers.

In the Unify Akron Civic Lottery, each participant had a chance of being selected. And every possible panel in the lottery meets the representation goals.

On average, each person had a 13% chance of selection. The minimum chance of selection was 4% and the maximum chance was 51%.

Here’s what that final panel looked like.

Here are the anonymized datasets, if you’d like to explore the data:

• The complete list of pool members (represented by unique numeric identifiers)

  • Note: We had 584 applications to the Civic Lottery. Applicants outside of the City of Akron and applicants who indicated on the form that they could not make the times of the Civic Assembly meetings were removed from the pool. 

• The list of 1000 panels that could have been chosen in the lottery, where each panel is represented by the list of pool member identifiers it contains

Was the process properly explained during the Lottery event? Probably not. The Unify Akron Team got some helpful feedback after the Civic Lottery that the process was confusing. We agree. The explanation of identifying 6 numbers and then choosing 1 of those wasn’t well explained. We acknowledge how our presentation could have been confusing and will fix that at future Civic Lottery events.

We also got some helpful critiques on our use of rubber ducks. At the Civic Lottery, we used 10 ducks (numbered 0 to 9), and the process of scrambling the ducks manually is inferior to processes like the state lottery runs (using air machines with balls).

The Unify Akron team used the ducks in an attempt to make the event more community-oriented and fun. And as the critique suggested, it is possible that the ducks might not have been thoroughly scrambled each time. We understand why our approach might have raised some questions and concerns.

The most important goal was to make sure everyone could see that the selection of the final panel, and therefore Delegates, could not have been rigged. No one got to decide who was in this Assembly and who wasn’t. It was, indeed, left to chance, which in this case, may have included the chance ways the children imperfectly mixed the ducks.

Read the full response from Panelot here.