In a couple of posts, I’ve shared my journey over the last 10 years and what I’ve learnt over that decade. It made me think, did I want to be a strategist, an activist or a manager when I was a kid? Actually, I wanted to be a priest, teacher…

In my spare time, with European Alternatives I had helped set up a network of young people to run festivals in 10 cities across Europe. I found myself travelling every month and finding a space where I could be both an activist and a creative. Over that decade, I’ve…

When I was in European Alternatives, helping run festivals, we tried to broker connections between the groups we’re working with in each city. We’re also using the keyword technique before to help us join up the dots between people’s ideas, so now it was time to use this to…

In a previous post, I shared my journey over the past 10 years, both at work and in my spare time. I thought I’d reflect on the values & principles I’ve learnt from each organisation. What I learnt from Demos’s values & principles: Start with people & places and supporting…

I was at Policy Lab once and had a visit from the French equivalent 27eme Region and I used to work with Social Innovation Lab for Kent, and it made me think about what public services can learn from design in particular teams that focus on people and change like…

When we organised festivals as European Alternatives, people really wanted to understand and visualize why the economic crisis had happened and reassess why we need the institutions that run the economy, such as banks. They wanted to know what they could do about the systematic nature of the crisis…

European democracy doesn’t feel real or practical because its institutions are not physically present in our daily life. Yet in London and other major cities many Europeans from different countries share the same national political space. …

We know that how society brings up its children is critical to how it shapes itself as a nation — its history, its symbols and its practices. But given that our generation has multiple identities and greater contact with other cultures, what can we learn from experiences of integration…

When I was running festivals, we created an approach to join up the dots between activities we’d put forward in the cities — a creative challenge given the different social contexts & cultural interpretations of the issues! What’s fascinating is how some of the cities put forward more activities…