California's constitution was written in 1879. How did it get underway? Here's a political cartoon about the process at the time, demonstrating the racist anti-Chinese priorities of the Working Men’s Procession that shaped the constitutional convention—priorities that were built into the document at the time. We never completely recovered from that false start.
It's been 140 years,and we haven’t sat down and reimagined how we are going to run our state. We’ve made decisions that attacked problems, but the approach has been piecemeal.
Our decision process has been tripping us up because the framework underpinning it is faulty. To make better decisions, we need to fix the way we make decisions. We need a framework that works now.
WHAT FRAMEWORK HAVE WE GOT NOW? A BLOATED, INFLEXIBLE, UNDEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION EMBEDDED WITH RACISM
WHAT'S THE PATH FORWARD ?
We need to break our imaginations free of old patterns and and design something better for California. We need new tools that allow continuous improvement. We need a transformative, representative, public process, where California citizens are engaged in an authentic way.
MORE QUESTIONS ?
BACK TO THE START
WHAT'S THE PLAN FOR THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION?
WHY SHOULD THE CONVENTION DELEGATES BE SELECTED BY LOT?