Overview

The CUNY Climate Assembly Project on Waste at Hunter College (CCAP) is a deliberative democracy initiative that empowers Hunter students to shape sustainable waste strategies on campus and beyond.

From April - June 2026, a broadly representative group of 30-45 students will convene for five full days and four 2-hour workshops. Students will learn from a diverse range of experts, weigh the opportunities and challenges of various waste management solutions, and collectively generate evidence-based recommendations for the campus community. Students and faculty not in the assembly will engage through classroom curriculum, public forums, and other events and programs. In Fall 2026 and Spring 2027, 9-12 post-assembly fellows will work with campus leadership to review any subsequent learning, planning, adaptation, and/or implementation of the recommendations.

The partnership between the CUNY Graduate (Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean) and Hunter College ( The Office of the Provost, Sustainability Council, and The Center for Sustainable Cities) was made possible by the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. See the Hunter press release or the initial GC press release for more information.

CCAP is the first university-convened climate assembly in the US. As the nation's largest urban public university, CUNY is an ideal locale for such an ambitious democratic initiative. CCAP will serve as a model, reimagining universities as true schools for democracy, equipping the next generation of civic leaders with skills in civic problem-solving, and expanding how New Yorkers practice democracy beyond elections.

What is a Climate Assembly?

Climate Assemblies gather everyday people to learn, deliberate, and develop policy solutions to a challenging climate issue.

Also called citizens’ assemblies, civic assemblies, or policy juries, these forums democratize policymaking by expanding who participates and how they collaboratively problem-solve.

Drawing on a long and diverse lineage of democratic decision-making practices, participants are selected through a civic lottery to ensure the assembly represents their communities' unique demographic and political diversity. Unlike a political poll or town hall, the assembly spends significant time (30-115 meeting hours) learning with a diverse range of experts, collaborating through facilitated deliberations, and developing recommendations on a complex climate issue. These recommendations inform policy and implementation strategies taken up by local governing bodies and community stakeholders.

Participants are paid and provided with services like interpretation and child care to remove barriers to participation. Small group facilitators aid in bridging partisan divides and ensuring all voices are heard, and public forums and engagements outside the assembly allow the broader public to learn and weigh in on the topic at hand.

What advantages do climate assemblies afford over traditional policy pathways?

• Lead to better policy outcomes. Deliberations grounded in expert analysis and lived experience create informed decisions based on evidence rather than opinions.
• Create space and provide a framework to tackle complex problems that require long-term solutions that extend beyond electoral cycles. 

• Provide legitimacy to make hard decisions with tough trade-offs. This proves especially true for climate policies that require substantial adaptation, compromise, or sacrifice.

• Build public awareness and momentum for cross-sector action on issues that need an ecosystem of actors to drive systems-level change. 

• Helps to depolarize civic discourse while building discursive capacity for engaging in tough conversations across ideological divides.

• Increase trust in civic institutions by engaging in collaborative governance with the people they serve.
• Revitalize people's political agency by creating pathways for a general public to effect change on complex system-level issues.