A few weeks ago, we were delighted to welcome author and democratic practitioner Jon Alexander to deliver a workshop, with Liverpool residents, on the topic of citizenship and citizen power.

As one attendee asked at the beginning of the event: “you can be a good neighbour, engage with your community … but other than becoming some sort of warrior, is there a more concrete way to make a difference?”

Well, over the course of the short event, a number of city centre and waterfront residents discussed this, and other aspects of citizen power, with the aim of identifying issues we could explore on a much larger stage as part of Engage’s upcoming 2022 seminar series.

A highlight of some of the residents’ questions:

• Can we work on a problem together, come up with a solution, and present that to the council, as a thing we want them to do?
• Could we have a mobile, touring event? Visiting citizens where they are?
• How can we make the best use of existing groups that have a citizen power function – like churches, and community groups?
• Could we use tools like Polis to build a consensus, a common vision for Liverpool citizens?

You can read the full notes from the session here.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this event. We were happy to see, in our anonymous post-event survey, 93% of attendees say they learned something they didn’t know before, 87% met someone they didn’t know before, and 80% would come to an event like this again. Success!