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Reflections on the Citizens for Culture Roadshows
One of the questions that has sat underneath Citizens for Culture from the beginning is what happens after citizens have spoken.
Because citizen voice cannot just be something we invite in at particular moments. If citizen led decision-making is going to mean something, it has to begin to shape how a system thinks, responds and makes decisions.
That is the central challenge.
We know how to ask people what they think. We know how to consult, engage and gather insight. We are getting better at creating spaces where people have the time, information and support to think deeply together.
But the real test comes afterwards.
What changes because citizens have been in the room? What happens to the relationships that have been created? Where does responsibility for acting on what has been heard sit?
The Citizens for Culture roadshows have been one part of trying to answer that.
The Assembly brought together fifty two citizens from across the West of England to answer the question:
What would culture and creativity look like in the West of England if they were for everyone?
Over eight sessions they listened, deliberated, disagreed, changed their minds and eventually created thirteen shared priorities for the region.
But I never saw those priorities as the end product.
The interesting question was always what happened when we took them back out into the region.
Would people recognise themselves in them? Would the priorities hold when they met different parts of the cultural system? And, crucially, would the people and organisations hearing them be prepared to locate themselves inside the work that needed to happen next?
That became the purpose of the roadshows.
Earlier in the summer, I hosted a post show conversation with Apphia Campbell after Black Is the Colour of My Voice at Bristol Old Vic.
We talked about Nina Simone, storytelling and the role music had played in inspiring Apphia to create the work. She talked about music as more than something sitting alongside the creative process. It was a way into the work itself. A way of thinking.
That conversation stayed with me because music had found its way into the Citizens for Culture roadshows too.
When I first began developing the format, I was listening to music and thinking about movements.
Not movements as agenda sections, but in the musical sense. Shifts in pace and energy. One thing building on another. Ideas repeating, changing and returning in a slightly different form.
And, of course, movements for change.
That became the structure of the roadshows.
The first movement was citizen voice.
Citizens told the story of the Assembly themselves. They talked about what it had been like to participate, what had stayed with them and where the difficult conversations had been.
That mattered because the priorities are not abstract policy ideas.
They came from people talking about their lives. About not knowing what cultural activity was happening near them. About not being able to afford or access it. About fragile support for artists. About disability and exclusion. About wanting to shape culture rather than simply be invited to receive it.
Starting with citizens changed the dynamic in the room.
We were not presenting a set of recommendations on their behalf. People were hearing directly from those who had made them.
Then we asked people to lean in.
Not immediately to solve anything, but to listen more closely and notice what the priorities were asking of them.
That was where something interesting started happening.
Transport began to connect to cultural access. Education to creative opportunity. Wellbeing to participation. Public space to belonging. Funding to transparency and trust.
The thirteen priorities stopped behaving like thirteen separate things.
They began to reveal the system underneath them.
That has probably been one of the most important pieces of learning from this stage of the work.
Institutions often divide problems into areas that can be owned, funded or managed separately. People do not experience their lives like that.
Citizens had already made those connections. The roadshows gave other people the opportunity to see them too.
The final movement was deliberately more demanding.
What resonates with you?
And what will you sign up to?
Because there is often a great deal of enthusiasm for citizen voice and much less clarity about what anyone is expected to do differently because of it.
That gap matters.
We ask people for their experiences, their ideas, their time and sometimes their hope. If nothing changes in response, participation risks becoming extractive.
So the final part of each roadshow was about responsibility.
Not asking everyone to solve everything, but asking people to understand where they sat in relation to the priorities and what was within their power to shift.
Sometimes that was small and immediate. A connection that could be made. Information that could be shared more clearly. A space that could be opened up.
Sometimes it exposed much larger structural questions.
But what mattered was the movement from hearing somebody else’s priorities to recognising yourself as part of what happens next.
In July, we brought the first iteration of that learning back to the Citizens’ Panel.
That return matters enormously.
Citizens did not produce recommendations and then disappear while the rest of us decided what they meant.
They looked at what people across the roadshows had said, tested our interpretation of it, challenged what was missing and helped sharpen where the work needed to go next.
The work moved out from citizens and then came back to them.
That loop is increasingly important to how I understand citizen led decision making.
It is not a straight line from consultation to recommendation to delivery.
It moves.
Citizens shape something. Institutions respond. The response comes back. Citizens challenge it. The work changes again.
And over time, something else starts to form around that movement.
Relationships become stronger. New connections appear. People begin to understand where power sits and what they can influence. Citizens develop routes into decisions that did not exist before.
That is part of the work too.
Perhaps even part of the infrastructure.
As the roadshow series comes to a close, that is what I am most interested in.
Not simply whether people agreed with the thirteen priorities, although overwhelmingly they did.
But what has been built around them.
The Assembly created a shared voice.
The roadshows allowed that voice to travel through the region, meet different parts of the system and gather new relationships, commitments and understanding as it went.
The Citizens’ Panel gives the work somewhere to return.
And the next phase is about whether all of that begins to change the way the system itself works.
Because the shift we are trying to make is not from consultation to better consultation.
It is from citizen voice being something we occasionally listen to, to citizens becoming part of how we think, learn and make decisions.
That does not happen because we ran an Assembly.
And it does not happen because we ran a successful series of roadshows.
It happens in what we do next.
In the relationships we keep.
In the decisions that change.
In whether people stay connected.
In whether institutions are prepared to share responsibility as well as listen.
So as we move into the next phase of Citizens for Culture, the ask is simple.
If citizen voice has helped us see the system differently, what are each of us now prepared to change because of it?
Because the work does not finish when citizens speak.
That is where it starts.
I think this is now cleaner. The argument only really appears twice: once at the beginning to frame the piece, and again at the end as the conclusion. The middle is allowed to show how the roadshows tested it rather than repeatedly explaining it.
