Rebekah is Involve's Head of Northern Ireland, where she leads efforts to embed participatory and deliberative democracy at the heart of government, communities, and civil society.
Since joining Involve in 2018, Rebekah has built a programme in Northern Ireland spanning citizens' assemblies, training and capacity building, research, policy advice, and advocacy. She designed and delivered the first-ever Citizens' Assembly for Northern Ireland, a landmark initiative that placed citizens' voices at the heart of social care reform for older people. Since then, she has worked with partners including the Centre for Public Health at Queen's University Belfast, Belfast City Council and Community Planning Partnership, Housing Rights, Community Foundation Northern Ireland, Community Places, Derry and Strabane Sustainability and Climate Commission and SONI on issues ranging from housing and energy infrastructure to public health and community planning.
Rebekah is increasingly working to extend deliberative democracy across the island of Ireland. In 2024, she co-founded the All-Island Better Democracy Network, connecting practitioners, researchers, and advocates working on participatory and deliberative democracy across both jurisdictions on the principle that the big questions facing the island of Ireland don't stop at the border.
She has also been at the forefront of applying deliberative approaches to some of the island's most pressing shared environmental challenges: leading Involve's work exploring a Citizens' Assembly for Lough Neagh in response to the lough's deepening ecological crisis, and delivering the Carlingford Lough Citizens' Jury a pioneering cross-border process that brought together residents from both sides of an international border to shape the future of a shared body of water.
Before Involve, Rebekah spent six years at PLACE - Northern Ireland's Built Environment Centre, developing community participation, education, and research programmes rooted in place and community. She has a strong academic background in Anthropology, including four years of doctoral research funded by the Irish Research Council exploring urban sustainability, symbolic landscapes, and contested spaces. An experienced ethnographer and former associate lecturer, she has presented her research at international conferences and conducted fieldwork across Belfast, New York City, and the US-Mexico border region.
Outside of Involve, Rebekah chairs the Northern Ireland Open Government Network, campaigns for more transparent and participatory urban planning in Belfast, and writes about democracy, politics, and connection to landscape on her Substack, Assembling Wisdom. When she's not working to make democracy better, she's out exploring the wild landscapes of Ireland with her daughter and dog.
