The Assembly Members are a group of residents from across Newham who have been brought together to provide recommendations on the key question:

How can we make sure our local neighbourhoods are vibrant communities where people can work, meet, shop, and access the everyday services they need within a 15 minute walk or cycle from home.

This Citizens’ Assembly is not a one-off. Instead, Newham Council have pledged to keep using Citizens’ Assemblies in the future, and to make these an important part of democracy in the borough, with links between each assembly.

This assembly is the second coming-together of Newham’s new Permanent Citizens’ Assembly. This time half of the participants will come from those who took part in the first assembly, and half will be new randomly selected participants.

Together, you will explore the issues, learn from a range of experts and deliberate with each other before reaching a conclusion on what you collectively think should happen.

The names of your fellow Assembly members are:

Adnan, Anmol, Anne, Beth, Daniel, Deborah, Elizabeth, Emmanuel, Eugene, Farhat, Farjana, Golddy, Hasan, Inga, Iqbal, Jahanzeb, Jana, Jayshiva, Jennifer, Joyce, Kulsoom, Lidia, Lisa, Malarselvi, Mina, Mohamoud, Molly, Nathan, Nurcan, Nurul, Pete, Ranjit Reddy, Rukshana, Sabino, Samuel, Sara, Sayed, Sheila, Somya, Stephanie, Terry, Thana, Timothy, Trwone, Uzair, Yasmin, Zack, Zara

What can assembly members share about being involved?

We know that it is really exciting to have been selected as an Assembly member for the Newham Standing Citizen Assembly. Many of you won't have participated in your communities in a way like this before!

Whilst the assembly is live we have some important asks of you throughout your time as an Assembly member.

We would ask that you:

• Don't share information about, or hint towards, any of the recommendations that the Assembly makes as part of its work. The recommendations will be shared at the end of the process via your final report (which will be drafted by Democratic Society). Please don't share anything publicly until then.

This is important as your thoughts, ideas or opinions may change as you move through the full process.

• Respect privacy of fellow assembly members - this includes not sharing pictures or screenshots of anything during the Assembly sessions as it is important for us to create a safe online space for everyone.

If you would like, you are welcome to:

• Use the hashtag #NewhamSpeaks when you are discussing anything about the process, for example, talk about being excited to be involved in the Assembly or something you have learnt about 15 minute neighbourhoods.

• Speak to friends, family, neighbours, community groups about the Assembly taking place. They might like to look at the expert's videos and find out other information about the Assembly on Newham Council's website.

How were assembly members recruited?

To recruit participants for the first Newham Citizens Assemly on Greening the Borough, letters were sent out to 10,000 households in Newham. The addresses were randomly selected through a process of sortition by our partners, Sortition Foundation. They were tasked with recruiting 50 Assembly members who are representative of the Newham population. There was no option to directly apply to be a member of the Assembly as members are selected randomly (through a process called random stratified sampling).

Over 400 Newham residents responded to the invite letters. From this group of responses, Sortition Foundation were able to select a sample of 50 people which broadly matched the demographics of the area.

For this second assembly, we selected half the participants from people who took part in the first assembly, and the other half from people who applied for but were not selected to take part in the first assembly.

We used the same demographic quotas as for the first assembly, and applied half the quotas to each of the two groups of new participants, so that each group would have a similar mix of demographics.

The demographic categories used in the selection of the Assembly members were:

• Gender;

• Age;

• Occupation;

• Geography (across 4 areas in Newham);

• Disability

• Ethnicity.

Sortition Foundation were able to broadly match the target figures for each of the categories above based on participants who were available to take part. The process of recruitment of Assembly members tried to get the selected group as close to this as possible.