Jury Recruitment Process
Following best practice guidelines set by previous Citizens’ Juries and Citizens’ Assemblies, the recruitment process for the Kendal Climate Change Citizens’ Jury was agreed by the project oversight panel. The oversight panel agreed that the profile of the 20 people selected should intentionally reflect local diversity in terms of gender, age, geography, deprivation and attitude to climate change.
With the agreement of the oversight panel, Shared Futures worked with the Sortition Foundation to design the recruitment process. The Sortition Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that promotes the use of stratified, random selection in decision-making.
Various sources were used to obtain the representative data, including ONS 2011 Census for age, gender and ethnicity, IoD 2019 for indices of deprivation and IPSOS Mori 2019 for attitudes to climate change,
In June, 4,000 households across Kendal received a recruitment letter explaining the Citizens’ Jury and inviting those who are interested to either complete a very simple online form or use a freephone number to register their interest. The Sortition Foundation randomly selected the 4,000 addresses from the Royal Mail’s address database.
250 people applied to join the jury, a better than typical response rate for such processes. 20 people were recruited.