‘Instead of all following the same exact checklist,’ she says ‘I encourage people to figure out the special things they can contribute…. One way to do that is to draw a climate action Venn diagram with three circles. One circle is “What are you good at?,” the next is “What part of the climate problem do you want to help solve?,” and the third is “W

‘There’s a crack, a crack in everything,’ sang Leonard Cohen. ‘That’s where the light gets in.’ The Consumer Story has cracked, and is collapsing. That’s a good thing. Now we need to get to work, showing up as Citizens in the places where we live and, crucially, in our places of work.

Our society is collapsing because the story we use to make sense of ourselves is collapsing. In order to step into a new story, we first need to learn to see the air we breathe, this story that shapes our world and behaviour, for what it is.

Democratic innovations that are currently taking shape slowly and hesitantly – like liquid democracy (which equips people to allocate their voice to those they trust on an issue-by-issue basis, rather than the relatively blunt nature of electoral representation) or quadratic voting (which enables the quick and simple aggregation of the preferences

the focus on data, transactions, return on investment. I’ll buy my way to a better world, to a clearer conscience, to heaven – that’s the dynamic, the assumption. What is eclipsed by the calculations, however, is the complex context that gives rise to any of these charitable ‘causes.’ History, trauma, economic exploitation, relationships – all thes

For each of us to contribute to the pool of collective wisdom, it is critical that the question we instead answer is: ‘What is in our collective interest? What is best for the nation as a whole?’ When we aggregate our multiple perspectives in answer to this question, we stand a good chance of getting to a better answer than any of us would alone. W

When privatisation came together with deregulation (epitomised by Thatcher’s sweeping overnight deregulation of financial markets in the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986), the very idea of the state was remade to fit the Consumer Story. What could be provided for consumers by businesses would be, with government getting out of the way as much as possible. From i

The Citizen Story is about the empowerment of us all to co-in-vent and nurture our own futures.

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.