A Citizens UK meeting

 

From the Citizens UK website: smiling citizens interacting

I’m always interested in events and ways in which people interact, so when I was invited to a Citizens UK meeting, I went along. The confusion started there, however, since the meeting was actually entitled a Weaving Trust meeting.

What is a Weaving Trust? Nothing to do with weaving, although a comparison was made during the evening, with mentions of wefts and warps, which I didn’t quite see the relevance of. The meeting was enjoyable – it’s always fun to meet new people – but I was left afterwards rather mystified about what the meeting was trying to achieve. This post is an attempt to try to understand what Citizens UK is about. 

What happened at the meeting

We (about 20 of us) had a series of 1-to-1 conversations, lasting about six minutes each, starting with general chat, as a way of getting to know each other. Then we had conversations with others about issues such as hopes and fears for our community. By the end of the evening, about two hours later, we had practised our arts of rapidly getting to know others – in fact, it must be just like speed dating, although, I hasten to add, I have no experience in that area. I will say, however, that those partners I spoke to who managed to talk about themselves for the whole six minutes would not be the ones I would choose to talk to again.

By the end of the evening, what had I learned? This event was at a local C of E church (other venues have included a college and mosque), and, perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the participants were involved with the Church in some form. That doesn’t invalidate the evening, but the mix of people was somewhat one-dimensional.

I felt we had got to know each other, but for what purpose? The Citizens UK website describes (and someone in the tea break confirmed this) that the idea of the group is to get together to eventually campaign on “issues”. But we didn’t discuss what these issues might be! From the website, I gathered, some groups in other areas have taken on issues such as misogyny and Islamophobia on the Underground, which of course would be worth campaigning about. But, typically, you don’t form a group and then think about an issue’

What interests me is exactly what happens in practice when you have an issue to discuss. For example, I observed a group of residents in our street campaigning for the local authority to provide planters for the pavement, since the houses have no front gardens. I was surprised to hear the negative comments from some residents: “people will just throw rubbish in them!” “The leaves from the trees will block out all the light”. My interest, then, was not how to campaign, but what to do about disagreement. It looks to me like any issue you care to mention will have people with an opposite view. How do we resolve that? The answer, or at least one potential answer, came almost accidentally, from an interfaith counsellor at a local university. She described how religious groups can come together by recognising difference; you can’t reconcile religions, but you can accept and learn about different practices and points of view. Now that’s an interesting angle, which might be a way forward … but only if we agree which issue we are talking about !

Even an issue such as “taking action on Islamophobia and misogyny on public transport”, which I wholly support, looked to me to be an unlikely target for our group, since pretty much everyone in our group would accept this should be eliminated – clearly, the people in this meeting weren’t the ones causing the problems! A wider group might reflect a bigger range of opinions, but I don’t imagine the kind of people who would shout racist slogans would be people who joined a Citizens UK group.

I was intrigued to learn more about the organisation. Citizens UK appears to operate on a membership model, but membership is only for institutions. How does that work? We came to this meeting as individuals, and I for one am not a member of any of the suggested groups who were invited to become members.

One further question: how is this operation funded? The website is pretty slick, with pictures of citizens happily interacting, and the event had refreshments and lots of clever people presenting it. Are they all volunteers? It turns out this operation, or at least much of it, is funded by The National Lottery Community Fund, which would explain how the group can have 16 local organisations (Cambridge is just one).

Finding out more

Looking for “Weaving Trust” I came across a report by Amanda Tatersall, based at the University of Sydney, “a globally recognised social change researcher and community organiser”. The project has for its goals three strategic aims:

1.      Develop leaders

2.      Strengthen institutions

3.      Make change

This sound alarming! It sounded to me when I read it much like early Fascist groups in Italy or Germany. Why develop leaders when we were carrying out an exercise in communication?

I’m happy to be corrected about any of the above, but I can’t help feeling that if I come away after two hours having to look up what this initiative is all about, perhaps others will have the same response.