Involve

Involve is a London-based charity and the UK's leading public participation organisation, founded in 2003 by Rich Wilson to advance new forms of democratic practice — citizens' assemblies, citizens' juries, deliberative dialogues, and participatory co-production — and to make the case for their permanent embeddedness in democratic governance. The organisation fills the corpus's anchor slot for the deliberative-democracy facilitation infrastructure layer in the UK: where the Sortition Foundation specialises in the participant-selection layer (stratified random recruitment), Involve specialises in the facilitation design, delivery, advocacy, and ecosystem-building layer — the point at which the quality of deliberation is determined and the public's considered views are turned into evidence for decision-makers.

Founding and structure

In September 2003, following a period of joint publications by academics working on deliberative democracy, Rich Wilson co-ordinated the launch of a new institute in London to translate that academic programme into practical work with governments and public bodies. Involve was incorporated as company number 05669443 on 9 January 2006 — a private limited company by guarantee without share capital, the legal form used for UK not-for-profit social enterprises — and registered simultaneously as charity number 1130568. Its registered address is Oxford House, Derbyshire Street, Bethnal Green, London E2 6HG; offices in Edinburgh and Belfast give the organisation a UK-wide reach.

Rich Wilson left Involve to co-found the Global Assembly and the Iswe Foundation, having established the organisation as the UK's principal deliberative democracy practitioner. Sarah Castell, who brought 17 years of public participation and deliberative decision-making work at Ipsos MORI, served as CEO from September 2021; she stepped down in June 2025, at which point Steph Draper (Director of Innovation and Practice) and Carly Walker Dawson (Director of Capacity Building and Standards) became joint interim chief executives. The organisation employs 27 people and reported total income of £2,689,956 for the year ended 31 March 2025, of which £1,491,484 came from ten government contracts.

Climate Assembly UK

The most prominent programme Involve has managed is Climate Assembly UK: the 110-member randomly selected assembly commissioned in 2019 by six House of Commons Select Committees, tasked with examining how the UK should reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Involve held the overall facilitation and management contract, working alongside the Sortition Foundation (which handled stratified participant selection from approximately 30,000 invitation letters) and mySociety (digital infrastructure). The assembly met across four weekends in spring 2020. Involve was responsible for the assembly's facilitation design, facilitator recruitment and management, and the production of a final recommendations report; ten headline findings from that report fed directly into parliamentary deliberation on net-zero policy. Climate Assembly UK remains the highest-profile national citizens' assembly the UK Parliament has commissioned.

AI and digital governance engagement

Involve has been an active practitioner specifically on AI public engagement. In Autumn 2018, Involve and DeepMind ran three half-day roundtables concentrated on public engagement, AI ethics, and automated decision-making. The roundtables brought together stakeholders from government, civil society, academia, and the technology sector to address the question of how to stimulate effective public debate about the ethics of AI in public services — particularly automated decision-making. The resulting report outlined participant findings and recommendations for how governments, industry, and civil society could bring forward the public voice in AI development and deployment decisions. This programme pre-dates the post-2022 surge of AI public engagement work and represents an early practitioner-led attempt to establish what AI-specific deliberation requires as distinct from other complex policy topics.

Involve also maintains a standing project examining what meaningful public engagement on AI and ethics looks like as a practitioner resource, and its Citizens' Assembly Tracker documents the landscape of assemblies across the UK — providing the primary publicly accessible record of deliberative processes relevant to AI and digital governance alongside other policy domains.

Ecosystem role

Involve's strategic position in the corpus is that of the UK's infrastructure organisation for deliberative democracy facilitation: it trains facilitators, advises commissioning bodies, produces methodological resources, maintains the knowledge commons of what assembly design and facilitation looks like in practice, and advocates for citizens' assemblies and deliberative processes as permanent democratic infrastructure rather than one-off advisory exercises. That infrastructure role means Involve is load-bearing for the claim that deliberative AI governance has a mature practitioner ecosystem in the UK capable of delivering it at scale. Paired with the Sortition Foundation, Involve constitutes the two-layer infrastructure that a genuinely representative deliberative process requires: selection infrastructure plus facilitation infrastructure.