A new bottom-up political system to fix disenfranchisement
A couple years ago, my bestie and I wrote a short book for NanoWrimo (We took 2 months and didn't reach the desired word count but we DID finish the story!).
On one of my writing days, I proposed a new political system into the story's universe and I've been dreaming of it ever since. I really want it to become real.
The basis of it is that everyone has a local representative who they pretty much have direct access to. Any political concerns/wishes for your city, county, state, or federal government should first come to this local representative, though you could skip over them if they're a bad rep or if you just want to go more direct.
So each representative would oversee about 1,000 people.
Let's use my city as an example. There are 70,000 people, so we would have 70 reps across the city. There would be regular community meetings within individual districts (to meet with your neighbors and your individual rep. Good reps might include snacks and entertainment.). Then there would be multi-district regions in the city, let's say 10 of them. Each of these regions would have regular meetings too, where the reps (7 of them) would form a district-council.
Each district council would elect a representative who would then serve on a city-wide council, so the city-council would have ~10 reps. Voters would still directly-elect state reps & federal reps, I think.
So that's the basic structural idea.
And then if you have a political issue at any level, you can go speak to your immediate rep, or raise the issue at the community meeting, or organize politically within your small district. It is then your rep's job to bring this to the region-council, and it is the region-council's job to bring this to the city council and your state representatives. These reps could also serve as sources of news, essentially as curators for their communities. This system could also be used to conduct surveys of residents for a more direct-democracy on some issues.
Additionally, the representatives would be full-time. They would represent their communities politically and also do actual labor to support their neighborhoods. This labor could be things like directly filling potholes, or helping build mutual aid networks within the immediate community (and crossing over to other districts too!). Disabled reps could forgo (most of) their salary, focus their work on the political aspect, and hire someone to do the other labor full-time.
This idea is about its general approach, NOT about the specific details of its implementation. Many of the details could change. The general idea is that everybody has a rep who is super accessible, who represents their immediate community, who serves their immediate community in a practical and political sense, and that the local community can organize and have political positions bubble-up through this bottom-up representation model.