Screw this…Let’s try something else

In our final part of this series, we focus entirely on you, the listener, with an episode dedicated to how to translate the inspiration from the series so far into action on the ground, where you live. With help from Citizen’s author and community evangelist Jon Alexander, we unpack 5 common threads that all of our communities advocate. So if you want to take the first steps to action in your plac...

When his town was falling apart, Billy Dasein decided to take make a radical choice and go home. So what happens when we stay where we are, reach across the divides and learn to love our place? For two communities, East Marsh United in Grimsby and Cooperation Hull in the North East of England, this simple act started a journey that not only led them to a revolutionary housing model, food club and...

When it comes to designing a neighbourhood fit for the future we face, Ladywood in Birmingham may seem like an unlikely place to be rivalling billionaires plans to live on Mars, but their results might be more appealing to the majority of us who like Earth, and are partial to oxygen. Inspired by past neighbourhood solutions that have since spread nationwide - like the NHS and welfare state - Civic...

We head to Shropshire, where siblings Charlotte and Ben Hollins brought together 8000 strangers to buy their organic farm back from the jaws of big agriculture. They’ve gone on to prove a new community ownership model that recent research suggests could work better, not only for farmers but all of us too. Now they’re exploring how it can expand nationwide. If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a farm...

Lee Robb was fed-up of seeing her hometown – Carrick Fergus in Northern Ireland – divided, neglected, and still reeling from the troubles,  so she decided to buck the trend and… reach out to her fellow residents. When she did, she was surprised that people reached back, and working together they created something that put Carrick on the map for a different reason. Through their humble greengrocers...

Over a pint in Lawrence Weston, Bristol, Mark Pepper and fellow residents decided they’d had enough of the community being ignored by politicians, the council and everyone else, so knocked on 3000 doors and asked their neighbours what mattered to them. Then, as a community, they set about delivering. In just a few years they have rewritten housing policy, brought a supermarket to a food desert and...

Ever find yourself wondering ‘Does everything have to be this broken?’ Join Maryam Pasha and Matt Golding, on a journey of the possible, to visit ordinary neighbourhoods doing something extraordinary. Each episode we’ll meet the folks who’ve had enough and are starting to say: “Screw this… let’s try something else” and are proving there are better ways to approach food, energy, housing and decisio...