Civic Futures is a Fellowship Programme run in collaboration between Koreo, Dark Matter Labs and The Young Foundation, in partnership with the Greater London Authority (GLA). From March 2021, they will work with up to 30 people from across London’s civil society and local government to facilitate a collective learning and discovery experience focused on peer connection, exploration and inquiry, systems thinking, and collaboration across London’s civil society.
How It Works
Civic Futures is a 12-month programme that requires you to commit one and a half days a month to a mixture of individual and group work with fellow civic leaders and public servants. It starts at the end of March 2021, and finishes in February 2022.
Civic Futures Fellows will be offered a series of individual coaching sessions, be invited to take part in a self and peer review, and join a range of collaborative workshop and action learning spaces with other Fellows from across civil society and local government dedicated to exploring strategies for the city’s recovery. The first round of Civic Futures was a lean and focused attempt to start a new conversation around power and collaboration between civil society and City Hall. By celebrating the power of London’s civil society, and trusting fully in the talent and expertise of some of London’s most committed civic leaders and public servants, the project created a strategic intervention with huge potential. While Civic Futures 2019 was a truly open experiment, 2020’s iteration will be focused thematically on the London Recovery Board’s missions, encouraging collaboration and experimentation around the 9 recovery missions.
Civic Futures: further info.
The Fellowship starts from the position that transformative social change has always started in and with civil society. In a world that often risks being captured by the past, we need a civic society that can be both fiercely independent in organising itself, and also truly interdependent with all those seeking to build a shared future.
In London, this civic society is already around us. It is represented by the people working tirelessly to serve their communities, by the city’s highly effective activists and organisers, its radical artists and curators, as well as by the individuals and networks exploring new ways of caring for each other and the world around them. Deeply embedded in communities across the city, this civic society has a unique role to play in bridging us to new and unknown tomorrows. After a year defined by a series of shocks that have exposed and deepened the challenges facing London’s communities, our reliance on this civic domain has only become more visible. But it has also put extreme pressure on the people, organisations and networks that do that urgent work, without whom a just recovery cannot happen. In that context, Civic Futures starts by asking how we can build shared wisdom in making the transition to a better future? How do we best bring together some of the amazing people active across London to learn from and support each other in building that future?
Interested?
For more information, download the information pack here. Or to nominate or apply please click here. The deadline for nominations is Thursday 18 February 2021, and the deadline for applications is Wednesday 23 February 2021.
