The thing is, as customers of Patagonia, we’re still left in a place where our only real kind of agency is whether we buy or don’t buy, or buy from them rather than from someone else. The only participation on offer is the act of buying, or maybe donating money to one of the environmental charities it recommends. That’s the extent of our power. And

unlocking energy and ideas that started to bubble up from everywhere as power was pushed out to the local level, where the relationships between people and place actually happened.

The ambition for CIVIC SQUARE is somewhere between Impact Hub, library, community centre and Roman forum: a place where local people will come together on an ongoing basis to invent and reinvent the place they live; where they will be equipped to own and lead their own community, rather than be told what to do.

One indicator of the emergence of the Citizen Story is the sheer number of new ways to participate that have been conceived in the late 20th and early 21st Century, as well as the old that have been reinvigorated – open innovation challenge prizes, volunteering programmes, mutual aid, participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, crowdfunding, to

while it is essential to cultivate safety, certainty is actually something that should be actively avoided. Certainty is actually a rather rigid state in which creativity and agency cannot exist. ‘If we can become less certain, we are more likely to become receptive to other possibilities, other meanings,’ Mason writes.104 The key is to cultivate

What difference would it make for Patagonia to fully embrace the Citizen Story? Rather than selling products that make people- as-Consumers the gentlest possible destroyers, the company would be equipping people-as-Citizens to be the human embodiment of the beautiful nourishing presence of the Earth that was its founding inspiration. That would be

We are made to feel naive, looked upon as idealists and pointless dreamers. We are stopped in our tracks.

Embracing the Citizen Story not only gives us the chance of a future; the process itself can be joyful, healing and fulfilling.

get asked a lot in Birmingham, do you really believe that system change can happen, and well my answer is yes. When we talk about ‘the system,’ to me that is a set of entrenched powers and structures that exists, these systems exist to sustain themselves, and those who run them or benefit most from them wouldn’t benefit from them ever changing, why