How to activate citizen agency
If communities have half the answer, what is the other half?
You’ll often hear politicians say that communities are best placed to figure out their own solutions to problems. It’s a worthy sentiment, but it’s difficult to put into practice. After all, being affected by a problem — seeing it play out where you live, or experiencing it yourself — can give you a deep understanding of the issue, and an incentive to do something. But that’s not enough to make a difference. To do that, the soft stuff of knowhow and motivation must combine with other ingredients, so that it hardens into a sustainable venture.
In this post, I’ll get specific about this process of activating, or ‘hardening’, the agency of citizens. I’ll focus on the part of the process that tends to be missing from the conversation — the ‘ingredients’ that can be mixed with community knowhow and motivation to deliver real world impact. I’ll keep this practical by using a case study of one activation method, the Citizen First model developed by Public Life that is currently running in Liverpool. I’ll use this to show how activation methods work. Then I’ll describe a more ambitious vision in which we have a whole suite of these methods, running permanently at the interface between institutions and citizens.
The image I want to convey is of these methods functioning as an ‘activation layer’, a bit like the catalyst you get in a two-part resin. The layer would serve to ‘heat up’ the interface between institutions and citizens, so that more ideas ‘harden’ into sustainable ventures and innovations. I believe this would help to restore a sense of possibility and agency to public life, and would also make public institutions less sclerotic — both outcomes that feel increasingly urgent.
Finally, at the end of the post, I’ll suggest ways we could fund a layer like this. The goal is that in time the activation layer becomes a standing part of our governing settlement — a 21st century equivalent to the defining public institutions we built in the 20th century.
This post is one in a series from Kinship Works in which we’re making civic alternatives to bureaucracy more legible. The previous post described a transformation practice that can be used to metamorphose bureaucratic services into something more human. Drop us a line if you’d like to partner with us on a future installment in the series.
Part 1: The opportunity and the challenge
These days, people talk a lot about ‘lived experience’ and they’re right to do so. When a person is affected by a problem, or sees a problem blight their community — social isolation, substance abuse, poor transport connections, and so on — this gives them some powerful ingredients for change. For example, they have:
Skin in the game and a motivation to do something;
A rich understanding of the issue and how it plays out in their local context;
A sense of authenticity that inspires trust — if they speak about the issue, people will listen.
The trouble is, these ingredients are not everything that’s needed to tackle a social problem. People also need, and often lack:
Time: People are busy and/or don’t have headspace to pursue an idea for making their community better;
Confidence: People might not feel it’s their role to suggest new ideas — a sense that it’s ‘not for me’;
Trust: People often don’t think public institutions are there for them, or they might actively resent them;
Connections: People might have low social capital and a lack of social networks to navigate public institutions;
Knowledge: People might get stuck on the practical tasks — registering a business, applying for funding, hiring staff;
Finance: People might struggle to access capital, and not have friends and family who can help them (e.g. parents who can let them live rent free while they pursue an idea).
There are also things missing in the way public institutions are designed and run. People working in public institutions — doctors, teachers, lecturers, prison wardens, commissioners — are also busy, and have little time to receive new ideas for tackling a communities’ problems. Plus, most public sector roles focus on the work in front of them — teachers teach classes, doctors treat patients — so there’s nowhere for new ideas to dock into; it’s no-one’s job to receive and spread them.
This all dampens whatever initial enthusiasm citizens might feel to solve a problem. Indeed these forces are so strong and persistent that even very driven and socially-motivated people often get worn down by ‘the system’. They might try repeatedly to start a social enterprise, or to suggest a service improvement, before giving up. Or they might succeed, but get stuck at a small scale, doing their best to keep an initiative alive for years with a growing sense of resentment.
In a moment, I’ll describe a reliable method for addressing this problem. But first I want to explain why our failure to activate the agency of citizens is an increasingly urgent issue.
Part 2: Why bother activating community agency?
Put simply, public institutions are vehicles for realising our collective ambitions. Institutions like universities, hospitals, and Job Centres are social technologies; we identify barriers to human flourishing, and then we use public institutions to collaborate to remove them.
Lately we’ve come to think of this process as being static, or at best as a kind of transaction. Some people have even taken to calling government a ‘vending machine’; we pay in taxes, press democracy’s buttons, and get solutions out.
This model of government has some merit. In essence, it has served us well for technical problems like sanitising drinking water, or diagnosing and curing acute communicable diseases. These kinds of problems can, in a sense, be solved ‘for’ us. They require little by way of contextual knowledge, and solutions can be developed in a lab, or trained on a course, and can then be rolled out, so it’s not a stretch to say we can ‘order’ solutions from the vending machine of government. We pay taxes and the government hires professionals to sanitise drinking water, teach arithmetic, and write prescriptions.
In the last two decades, this model has reached its limit for a couple of reasons. The first is that the work public institutions do has changed, shifting away from technical tasks to more complex domains — challenges like tackling obesity and conditions like diabetes, or caring for elderly people, or addressing anxiety and depression. We cannot make headway on this work without the active participation of citizens. Successful outcomes in these areas also depend heavily on contextual-knowledge, and, since the work is largely behavioural, on factors like authenticity and persuasiveness.
Second, the costs of citizens having little agency have accumulated a bit like a vitamin deficiency, making public life progressively less healthy. We now think of governance as something we outsource to a thing called ‘the government’, which we blame when it struggles. Since most of us are not active in public life, we’re not exposed to the many trade-offs that are inevitable when governing a society. Over time, we have therefore become ever more frustrated with politicians not satisfying our individual preferences, creating embers of grievance which are then stoked by populists.
The good news is that, because all of this has been obvious for a while now, people have been working on a response, refining a whole set of ways we can support more active versions of citizenship. This goes beyond the passive idea of citizens being ‘consulted’, which is pretty much the sum of citizen engagement in old-school policy-making. Instead, citizens are involved in coming up with ideas, working through trade-offs, and even in delivery. These methods include:
Creative design practices, like the 100 Day Challenge;
Co-production and user-centred design;
Collective intelligence;
Participatory decision-making and budgeting;
Deliberative methods, including ways to crowdsource and co-develop legislation (e.g. Polis); and
Practices to cultivate imagination.
Beyond these techniques — which are still mainly about citizens shaping what institutions do — we have approaches that go further, creating space for citizens to conceive and lead socially impactful ventures themselves.[1] This includes the sector we call social enterprise, associated techniques like venture-building, and the field of impact investment. And then, at the thick end of these practices, we have a deployable method like Citizen First.
The point I’m making is that the lack of civic agency is a big problem, but we also have a big opportunity to fix this. We have lots of methods available to make our relationship with government less like banging on the glass of a vending machine, and more like a shared project we are engaged in. At their best, these methods engage citizens in ways that help us gain traction on complex problems (we might say they turn citizenship itself into a discovery mechanism — people live their lives, encounter problems, and help to solve the problem not just for themselves, but for others too). Plus, these methods allow us to experience a sense of collective efficacy — the thrill of doing something good with our fellow citizens. So, if we used them at scale, might we even start to make public life more positive again?
That, anyway, is the vision. But now let’s get more practical. I’ll use Citizen First as a case study to describe how the best of these methods work. Then I’ll ask how we could fund a permanent layer of these methods.
Part 3: How to activate agency
Citizen First is a reliable method for activating citizens. It creates a space that contains many of the ingredients that enthusiastic communities are often missing, so that people’s ideas can ‘harden’ into successful ventures. The method is well-codified and evidenced, so it can be taken to a place and deployed in a way that funders know will generate a significant social return.
In its earliest days, the model was developed in a series of small-scale trials in five English regions; in each trial, people working for Housing Associations were paid for 16 weeks to pursue an idea for social impact. The lessons were then forged into a more ambitious, year-long programme that was run in Essex in 2023; this time, it was open to the public who put forward their own ideas. This method was independently evaluated by researchers at the University of Essex who found it delivered a social return of £6.26 for every £1 invested, in the first year alone. Since then, the model has been refined again and is now running at a larger scale in the Liverpool City Region.
What exactly does Citizen First do to achieve these results, and how? In simple terms, it has five stages:
The programme issues an open invitation for people to share ideas for making their community better. This upends people’s expectations, turning on its head the idea that people are just passive recipients of services from public institutions.
The programme uses a carefully-designed process to select 8–10 people with an especially brilliant idea or nascent project, typically motivated by personal experience. The recruitment process casts the net wide by not asking for CVs, drawing in as much talent as possible. As programme manager, Sue Trish, put it: “You can come with a raw idea and a raw ‘you’, and that’s okay.”
The programme pays the 8–10 people to quit their jobs for a year to pursue their initiative full-time. This provides much-needed headspace. Crucially, it also means Citizen First takes on the risk of building a new venture, rather than asking people to bear this themselves. This is also why Citizen First doesn’t chase volume — rather than putting as many people through the programme as possible, the programme backs its cohort all the way. The goal is to have a transformative impact on a small group of people, in the knowledge that this will send ripples out through the community and local institutions.
A supportive cohort is formed; they learn from each other and build a shared sense of mission. This is not an ‘Apprentice’-style experience, with people vying for the boss’s attention. Instead, all members of the programme fight hard, but what they are fighting isn’t each other, but a social problem, with their personal experience as motivation.
Each group is plugged into institutions that act as vehicles to realise their ambitions. This spans the private sector (e.g. by helping people to raise finance) and the public sector (e.g. by leveraging the expertise and equipment of a local University; in the current programme, the University of Liverpool). This changes people’s relationship to elite institutions, which often seem off limits. It also prompts local institutions to put their shoulders behind the community; in the Liverpool programme, more than 50 organisations in the city region — civic bodies, businesses, universities, investors — have stepped in to support the work.
These stages, together, create something powerful: a space that offers headspace, confidence, hope, and the institutional connections needed to scale a venture, things that are often inaccessible for even the most civically-minded members of a community. The community itself brings the other ‘ingredients’: knowhow, intrinsic motivation, and authenticity. Once this all mixes together, people’s ideas soon harden into action.
What impact does this have? To get a flavour, here are some stories of people from the three phases of the model:
Laura was involved in the earliest prototype programme. Her grandmother, Sheila, had refused to install ‘ugly’ grab rails in her home and then fell, triggering a deterioration in her health. When she researched the issue, Laura discovered that falls cost the NHS £2.3 billion a year, but older people often refuse clinical aids. She designed Invisible Creations — stylish products like flower pots, toilet roll holders and mirrors that double as discreet support rails. Now stocked in B&Q, the latest range was co-designed with the Royal College of Art. More than 12,000 units have been sold, benefitting 25,000 people.
Faye worked as a travel agent in Liverpool, where she often saw neurodivergent customers ask for help, such as advice on venues with low sensory stimulation. From her own family’s experience, she knew the neurodivergent community has a deep knowledge of suitable venues, “but no one has ever asked them”. With Citizen First as part of the Liverpool City Region cohort, she built Sensified Spaces, a TripAdvisor for the neurodiverse, securing pilots with venues with a combined annual football of 40 million people, including John Lennon Airport and Liverpool One, in her first six months.
Karen spent much of her life living in poverty, and as Britain entered a cost of living crisis in the 2010s, she noticed an interesting pattern. The low income people she knew locally were brilliant at money management, full of tricks to track spending, and cut bills for food or energy. But now more people were struggling and many lacked knowhow. In her local community, as part of the Essex programme, she created Trusted Money Confidence, a peer-to-peer money confidence programme. Its ten pilot participants made changes worth £45,000 in just six weeks, and it has since run across two towns, with the total changes now made by local people worth over £220,000.
Today, the latest programme in Liverpool is six months in and the signs are promising. The project was 20 times oversubscribed and managed to reach deep into the community — 90 percent of applicants had experience of economic disadvantage. A third of the entrepreneurs recruited have already secured follow-on funding to scale their venture.
Perhaps the biggest effect of the programme, however, is cultural. It doesn’t take any special insight to see that our public life is steeped in a sense of fatalism and anger. The atmosphere created by Citizen First, by contrast, is one of hope and possibility; the room at the selection dates I attended was buzzing with energy — and even people who were not selected found the experience life-affirming. The model creates a pocket of public life that is alive with agency, so different to the passive and hopeless discourse we have got used to.
Citizen First is only one example. Stand it alongside the other methods I named above, and we see that a more dynamic public life is possible. We know how to activate agency. The challenge is how we scale and institutionalise these methods. So let’s finish with a few words on that.
Part 4: Building and funding an activation layer
Let’s imagine we created a national network of Citizen Firsts across Britain. Perhaps we could picture the method being run once a year in every town with a population over 100,000, which is around 70 places. Rather than being a bureaucratic programme, aligned with administrative boundaries, it could be organic, going where the energy is. Each local Citizen First deploys the proven method, but partners with institutions that resonate in that area. Maybe one is led by a much-loved football club, another by an employer with a proud local history, another by a philanthropist who grew up in the town.
Let’s go further, and picture our network of Citizen Firsts as one of many methods, including, for example, the widespread use of creative design practices (e.g. the 100 Day Challenge), and experiments in methods like participatory budgeting.
What kind of impact might this all deliver? Certainly it would generate a flow of citizen-led ventures — businesses, social enterprises, service improvements — and innovations developed and shaped by citizens. But I wonder if the more powerful impact would come from second order effects. The learning generated by these innovations, the challenge they would provide to public services to innovate, the ideas that people could copy. A whole class of civic leaders would also be created (the scale I described above would create 630 such leaders every year). Imagine the roles they might go on to play in public life.
Think also how the activation layer would create a certain kind of space. An arena in which people could build lives of meaning, not by making money, or by becoming public servants, but by innovating and scaling ventures to make their communities better. Imagine the flow of positive stories these ventures would generate. It feels plausible to me that, in time, this could start to shift the mood of public life.
How could the activation layer be funded? 70 permanent Citizen Firsts would cost around £30m a year, which is less than 4% of the budget of a single large NHS Trust or University, so the challenge is not so much the amount of money. The challenge is more to locate the money in a system that is still largely siloed, centralised, and focused on funding remedial solutions. After all, what we are describing is essentially a form of civic infrastructure, and infrastructure is inherently hard to fund.
In the spirit of floating ideas, here is a three-part framework that I think could work, and that puts responsibility on the right parts of the system.
First, there is a clear case for place-based institutions funding a model like Citizen First in their local area. This includes:
Local anchor institutions. In the Liverpool City Region, Citizen First is co-funded by the Mayor, Liverpool University, a business called Fusion 21, and local Housing Associations. This makes sense; the Mayor can play a leadership role, and the model helps local institutions to deepen their links to the area. So perhaps Metro Mayors and Combined Authorities could take the lead on building the activation layer in their regions. They could convene the key institutions — Universities, sport clubs, FTSE 250 businesses — to broker funding deals. This is helped by Integrated Settlements, which give Mayors more flexibility over how they spend money.
Neighbourhoods collaborating. The UK government is investing heavily in places, most directly through Pride in Place but also via a shift to neighbourhood healthcare. I wrote recently about the infrastructure that this work needs, especially now that Pride in Place areas are required to transition to a community-led model over three years; this gives us a deadline to build up community confidence and capacity. Could Pride in Place neighbourhoods come together and fund shared initiatives like Citizen First across a geographical area? This could be a good use of the capacity-building phase of Pride in Place, and of the money allocated for this phase.
Place-based philanthropy. With public spending so tight, there is a growing role for progressive philanthropy. Some of the best philanthropic work internationally is place-based (e.g. see Australia’s PLACE initiative, a partnership between the government and major foundations). Meanwhile, in the UK there is a burgeoning movement for place-based philanthropy (e.g. see Jason (now Lord) Stockwood’s support for Our Future in Grimsby; or the increasingly community-oriented investment strategy of foundations like This Day; or historic foundations like Barrow Cadbury, with their deep roots in Birmingham). There is a clear case for philanthropists investing in the place they grew up, and what better way to do that than by helping to activate the community?
Second, the social impact sector can support the pipeline of ventures created by the network and wider activation layer. This aspect of the model is self-explanatory, but has exciting potential thanks to the recent establishment of the Office for the Impact Economy. Could OIE play a leadership role, helping to develop the activation layer and the financing mechanisms needed to keep it healthy?
Third, although I think the above organisations could — and should — start now, I also think some infrastructural funding and national leadership could be a game-changer. The issue is partly coordination — it takes a lot of manual effort to broker deals between so many players. But there are also operational reasons to push for scale; with the right shared infrastructure, each local initiative would be more cost-effective. Plus there would be huge value in political leadership describing a national vision of the activation layer.
So why not amplify this work with a national agenda? This could come alive if it was all part of a national story — a way, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman via Richard Rorty, of ‘achieving our country’.
In practice this would mean central government funding the infrastructural aspects of the layer (the deployable protocols, maybe an intelligence function, and investing in the relevant disciplines and skills). It would also mean central government setting out a vision — an exciting ambition for local and regional actors, and ultimately citizens themselves, to be part of.
Why should government bother? Partly I think this could be a central plank of the government’s public service reform agenda. In nerdy terms, what we’re talking about here is a discovery and diffusion mechanism (in a way, the activation layer plays a similar role to choice and competition under New Labour). Beyond this, I think this work could be key to Labour’s political strategy to counter the ‘Britain is broken’ narrative. Alongside initiatives like Pride in Place — it would be a way not just to tell a positive story about Britain, but to actually help people experience the power of community for themselves.
Conclusion
I’ve described how we can turn a common political refrain — the idea that communities are well-placed to come up with answers — into a practical policy agenda. I’ve described a case study of one particular activation method. And, finally, I’ve explored how a national network of these methods could form a kind of activation layer, ‘heating up’ the interface between public institutions and citizens so that more ideas ‘harden’ into real-world ventures and service innovations.
I believe this capability would be worth building for a few reasons. I think it would generate a much-needed flow of positive examples, reminding people that social progress is possible — and letting people experience this for themselves. I think it would make public institutions more dynamic, generating a flow of innovations that could be integrated, funded, commissioned, learned from, and copied. Finally, it would train up a whole class of civic leaders. Together, and alongside other initiatives, I think this could start to bring back a sense of possibility to public life.
As ever, these are ideas shared in a spirit of provoking debate, and of throwing out some ambitious and positive proposals into a rather grim climate for progressive policy-making.
As I wrote at the outset, this post is part of a series we’re producing at Kinship Works in which we try to make human and civic alternatives to bureaucracy more legible. You can read the previous post in the series here. In the next post, we’re going to describe a way of reimagining schools and other local institutions, seeing them not just as sites for the delivery of public services, but as habitats for a thriving civic life. Drop us a line if you’d like to partner on a future installment in the series.
Footnotes
In centralized states like Britain, we’ve also seen a trend toward devolution, pushing the work of developing solutions closer to problems. Lately, these wider methods and the rise of local politics has also started to cohere into a revival of a communitarian progressive tradition.