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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And one of the main pillars of this podcast is that our current democracy is not a democracy, it's a kleptocracy, and it is not fit for purpose. If that purpose is the continuation of complex life on Earth, which I am assuming we are all on board with, as a potential idea; when we do the visualisations within Accidental Gods, looking towards a flourishing future seven generations down the line, everybody without exception imagines a world in which people have agency, connection, compassion for each other; where they live in a world of kindness and decency and integrity and generosity of spirit. I am imagining you want that too and that we all know this is not where the current system is heading. The sociopaths who have stolen control show no signs of shifting to anything that even begins to embrace this. So it is way past time that ordinary people, across all walks of life, embraced the tools of participatory democracy and begin to craft a new system that is fit for purpose. A new House of the People, which will finally accrue power to those with wisdom and enact governance of, for and by the people and the rest of the planet. The whole of the beyond human world, of which we are an integral part.
Manda: To do this, we need people who are intimately acquainted with these tools, who live and breathe them, find joy and creativity in them, and who know how to share them in ways ordinary people can get their heads around. Our House UK is a collective that exists to do exactly this, and in today's episode, we are talking with Katy Rubin and Oli Whittington, two of its core team, to find out what it does and how and why, and crucially, where it could take us if we all jump on board.
Manda: So to bring you up to speed, Katy Rubin is a legislative theatre practitioner and strategist based in the UK. She is founder of the People Act Hub for Creative civic Practice, and she works in partnership with local and national governments, advocacy organisations and community groups to co-create equitable and innovative public policy through participatory processes that are joyful, creative and inclusive. As we said, she's a member of the Our House UK collective, and she's also a senior fellow with People Powered, a global hub for participatory democracy, and a senior Atlantic Fellow at the LSE, as well as a former executive director of Theatre of the Oppressed in New York. Her legislative theatre work with Greater Manchester Combined Authority was awarded the International Observatory of Participatory Democracies 2022 Award for Best Practice in Citizen Participation. Go Katy!
Manda: And Oli Whittington is the initiator and co-lead of Our House. Drawing on his background in participatory design and democracy Oli's work has focussed on unpacking and addressing the concentration of power, including leading democratic innovation at Nesta, Shift Design's participation practice. And as a participatory designer in Arup's Urban Innovation Studio. And now, as we said, he is co-lead of Our House UK and together with Katie and the others of the team, he's working around all four nations of the UK to help bring the tools of participatory democracy to communities of place, purpose and passion. The team are helping to facilitate people's assemblies with a view to creating national charters for each of the four nations, and then bringing people together in an assembly of assemblies to decide whether we want a united charter for the whole of the UK, or to keep the four separate charters and then begin to enact them across each nation. To me, creating a governance system that is fit for purpose is absolutely essential to our moving forward through the pinch point of the great transition. If we cannot find coherent, constructive, compassionate, courageous ways to work together, we are sunk. And while there may be courageous, compassionate people within the current system, the overall system as a whole is not any of these. But we can bring them together. Every single time we ask people what they want, it's kindness, decency, equality; all of the things that weld us as a species. So I dearly hope that by the end of this you will want to become involved. And if you listen to this podcast as it goes out on the 16th of July in 2025, you should know that there's an online event on the 18th. So that's on Friday. Which is an open invitation to everyone, everywhere who wants to start building an open democracy. There is a link in the show notes, so please do sign up. And in the hope that you'll do that and in the acknowledgement that there was a cat snoring behind me as we recorded this, so there may be a faint buzz on the recording, which is River and I wasn't going to wake him up; let's head into our conversation. People of the podcast, please do welcome Katy Rubin and Oli Whittington of Our House UK.
Manda: Oli Whittington and Katy Rubin, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. So we have two of you from Our House. Katy, how are you and where are you on this amazing sunny afternoon?
Katy: Hi. I'm so happy to be here, Manda. I am in Manchester right now, which is also sunny, which in Manchester is always...
Manda: Pretty unusual.
Katy: Yeah. And I am a transplant to Manchester, originally from New York City, but loving being a mancunian these days, so I'm doing great.
Manda: Fantastic. But your home city recently at least got through the Democratic primaries; someone who sounds like they actually get it.
Katy: It's incredibly exciting what's going on in New York right now. And we've all been needing some good news over there. So it's really amazing for sure.
Manda: Do you still get to vote as an expat?
Katy: I do, and I'm as involved as I can be in local elections from over here.
Manda: Brilliant. Excellent. Thank you katy. So, Oli, how are you and where are you this afternoon?
Oli: I'm doing well thanks, Manda. Yeah, I'm in sunny Grimsby, where I'm going to be for the next week or so, collaborating with some friends and partners at East Marsh United in the East Marsh of Grimsby.
Manda: Okay, we'll need a link to that for the show notes, but we'll get that later. All right. So Our House. We've been talking about this, it's a long time since Oli and I had our first meeting, and you're doing some extremely exciting stuff. So I'm just going to read a little bit from the document that you sent me, because it lights up all of my fires, and I think it will do the same for the listeners. So here we go. There's a beautiful quote to begin with, which is: "democracy may not exist, but we'll miss it when it's gone", which is from Astra Taylor, who's an author, filmmaker, activist and musician. And that in itself feels to me like it ought to be given its own space, because I think we live in a kleptocracy, not a democracy. It's not fit for purpose, but it's better than some of the alternatives. And you say: "democracy is under threat, as mainstream parties fail to respond to the growing crisis we face, political extremists are filling the void, offering easy solutions to complex problems in exchange for absolute power. When people feel powerless over decisions that impact their lives, they become willing to surrender what little influence they have to those who merely acknowledge the need for systems change". And in the next paragraph, I'm not going to read it all, but the bottom sentence: "In 2024 in the UK, 19 million people chose not to vote. Even for those who did vote, 57.8% of voters did not vote for the person who ultimately became their MP, while the Labour Party won a super majority government with 20% of the electorate. And nobody can pretend that that is even remotely useful. And it's certainly not a way to bring power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power, which is my bottom line of where we need to be. And Our House seems to be working solidly towards the power to wisdom, wisdom to power. So, Oli, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to be involved in Our House and how it arose, and what its aims are?
Oli: Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Manda. So starting with me then, I guess. So my background is in participatory design, so I started out in the world of architecture, engineering and urban planning and using tools and designs and games to think about how we translate complex technical questions, like, how does a building look or work, to how does a city run and operate? How does the infrastructure in that city work? And translating those into questions that anyone who's impacted by it, which is normally anyone living in a place, can participate and start to shape those things. And that's really the core of my practice. And I've moved around and done that in different spaces. So I led Democratic innovation for a few years at Nesta, thinking about how do we institutionalise these practices of participation, like citizens assemblies and participatory budgeting, into institutions? So how democracies and governments work. And then, you know, that world is incredibly slow, hierarchical and problematic. So I moved back to the kind of community led design space, working with those who are most impacted by social issues, say, mental health challenges or employment challenges, and working with those communities most impacted to shape the changes, whether that be policy or spaces that will impact and change the shape of those things.
Oli: So my work has kind of always oscillated between those two worlds. Of how do we change institutions to become more participatory and embed people's views and perspectives in how they work. And then working with and in partnership with communities and people to shape and drive that change themselves. And so how I arrived at Our House was with that, I guess, experience that I've lived, that communities are the place where the greatest capacity and ambition for change lives. And so while institutions, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally prevent that change from materialising, we've got to think about ways in which institutions, democracy, government can change so that people and communities can be driving the change that's needed in the world. And that is across, you know, every issue. And and that's really where the conversation began with myself and Katy just over a year ago, and a few others in the team that I can introduce as well. As who they are and how they got here.
Manda: So before we move to Katy, we just need to unpick a little. First of all, can you tell us what Nesta is? But then I think the concept of participatory budgeting has come up once or twice in the podcast, but not recently. And I think it's a useful way in for people to get a sense of what it is that we're talking about. Possibly Katy could do this? Katy would you like to tell us what participatory budgeting is? Okay. So, Katy, would you tell us first of all how you got involved in Our House and then unpick participatory budgeting for us, and then we'll see where we get to in terms of the broader picture.
Katy: Absolutely. So I am also a participatory democracy practitioner, which for me again means, as you've said, there's lots and lots of wisdom and really the wisdom is where the people who are closest to the problem, that's where it lies, right? People who are experiencing day to day, whatever that issue is. You know, I think about problems, but we can think about questions too. It's not just problems. It's any kind of opportunity for designing, for shifting, for creating our cities, our countries, our environments, our communities. And I do that through a practice called legislative theatre. And legislative theatre lives in an ecosystem of participatory democracy tools or mechanisms. And participatory budgeting, as you've mentioned, is one of those. So I can tell you briefly what participatory budgeting is, which might give us kind of a sense of inspiration about...
Manda: Maybe tell us a bit more about legislative theatre and then go into participatory budgeting, because the legislative Theatre is a podcast in its own right, but let's go and explore that, it's so exciting.
Katy: Absolutely. I agree. It's very exciting to me as well. I love joyfulness and fun in democracy, and that's what legislative theatre is all about. It's about how can we make both the processes of democracy and the kind of gatherings of discussion and deliberation in community, both creative and irresistible, so that we want to keep showing up, so that it's so much fun. So in legislative theatre, a community that's having some kind of problem or question; I work on all kinds of issues: Housing, climate, how our democratic systems work as we're really thinking about here. To come together to tell their stories about that problem and create a play that really frames the policy question in the human day to day lived experienc. So that we're getting to the kind of emotional understanding across lots of different stakeholders, when we're sharing that play, of how that problem really lives in the world. And then the play is only the beginning. So it's not just a narrative change process. The play asks a question, and the public, who in a legislative theatre process are called 'spect actors' or people who watch and take action, are then invited to analyse the problem and actually enter the scene to improvise or test new alternatives. So what would happen if we added a new rule or a new resource in the form of this character or sign or symbol, and people perform that so that we can learn from those improvisations. How would that work? What barriers would still come up? So it's really a hands on policy development and negotiation process, which then in the last part of these legislative theatre events, leads to everyone in the room going from citizen to actor, in the sense of people who take action, to policy maker, where everyone drafts policy proposals. And then a team of kind of more traditional policy makers, as well as activists and advocates, help the audience process those, narrow them down, further deliberate, vote and make commitments to action.
Manda: And before we get into participatory budgeting, can you tell us some examples of places where this this process has cycled through and actual real world changes have happened?
Katy: Absolutely. I'm actually just home this morning from a process with national government yesterday on inclusive and diverse pathways to sport and active lives with Sport England across the whole country. So that's been incredible, with para athletes, with the athletes who are facing financial barriers, all kinds of interesting kind of questions and problems. But more usually I work with local authorities. So Greater Manchester Combined Authority where I'm based, Medway Council in the south, various councils of London, Haringey Council, Glasgow City Council. And the first process in Belfast, Northern Ireland, just happened, also, on preventing homelessness for women experiencing domestic abuse. So lots and lots of questions and I'll give you a few real world kind of outcomes or stories. Okay, so just one quick story. Yeah. So in Medway, in the south of England last year, there was a play created by people experiencing homelessness, commissioned by the council who knew they have and they had a really serious rough sleeping and homelessness problem. And one of the problems in that play, which is actually a problem across England, is that if you're rough sleeping, if you're sleeping in the street, you have to get verified by the council to confirm that you've been sleeping in the street and therefore are eligible for temporary accommodation. And the way you get verified is that you tell the council you're sleeping in front of the McDonald's on Main Street, and they can seek you out any night in a month and if you're not in front of the McDonald's on Main Street, you don't then move forward to get emergency accommodation.
Manda: What? So if the police have moved you from McDonald's on Main Street, and you can't be there.
Katy: Or you're a woman and you don't feel safe, or it's raining, or there was a fight, or you went to the toilet. Anything.
Manda: That's actually insane.
Katy: It's insane. And it's due to national legislation about funding, of course. So they want to know that the council verified the person, so that's why they're paying for the person. So this was a really big problem then for folks there, because they, the actors and their friends and community were actually not getting moved forward and getting off the street. And they said, there's got to be another way, because in Medway there were all these charities who give out soup and socks every night and see people. And so the audience saw all of that in the play. And there was actually a really funny moment that the actors made that was like a panto where they said, listen, I'm just going to go in this doorway, the woman said, because it's not safe. But if you all see the council, just say "she's behind you!". And so they came out and we all started shouting, "she's behind you!", but the council is not allowed to listen to anyone else in the current policy, so they walked away and crossed her off their list. So that again, the play articulated to us in our guts really, that not just both the nitty gritty of why that problem is not working and the kind of emotional and human impact. And then the audience came up and suggested that there should be a weekly council with these charities and the council together, getting to sit down and say, we've seen where everyone is, we know where they are. You can move right on, quicker than the month that it's taking you to send two people out into the street, and Medway went ahead and made that happen within a few months, and has moved forward that process so much that the national government found out about it and is now trying to change their national policy.
Manda: Ay! Something good happened. I look at our politics now and it seems all bad, so I'm so happy that something slightly intelligent, I mean, this is highly intelligent, but it took you guys going there and creating a play for really basic joining up of dots to happen.
Katy: Absolutely.
Manda: And I don't think the council people are bad people, it's just that they're locked in a system that doesn't allow them to think flexibly.
Katy: That's right.
Manda: Whoa, that's so cool. Katy, this is amazing. Okay, why don't we move back to Oli, who can tell us about Participatory Budgeting and then we'll see how this applies to Our House. Oli.
Oli: Yeah. So participatory budgeting is another one of these participatory democracy tools. So there's a whole toolkit out there of different ways of doing democracy and decision making, and this one is all about giving people power to, depending on the process, nominate an issue to try and solve, to then think through what are the kind of aspects of that issue that they want to solve. And there would be an allocated pot of public money. So say the one I was working on in Helsinki is €8 million and people get to generate ideas. Sometimes they have a theme like climate action, sometimes it's around specific localised issues that people work through. So then people generate ideas for either city level ways to spend that money, or very, very localised borough kind of level spending. And that can happen within a housing estate, it can happen at the city, it can happen at the national level as well. Where it originated in Brazil was much more at the kind of regional scale. So yeah, people come up with ideas, they generate ideas, and then there's voting on which ideas should the money go towards. And then there's citizen stewardship over those projects as they get delivered, as civil servants work through the costs of things, and the ideas change to fit through that budget, and people hold those civil servants and politicians to account with the spending of that money.
Manda: So really basic questions before we move into Our House, a number of things. As I understood, certainly the way it was in Brazil and in Iceland, in each of those cases at the time when I was looking at this, which was 6 or 7 years ago, the local people voted for an increase in whatever was the local taxation, in order to be able to fund things that they could see were really valuable to them. So like, we need a new bus route, say, and it doesn't exist, but we are prepared to pay a couple of quid more in our council tax, provided it goes to the bus route. Is that still a thing? Because that seems to go against, everybody thinks that when you have participatory budgeting, everybody will look at their council tax and go, okay, it just needs to be half what it was. And that's not what happens, because once you see that it costs this much to, I don't know, keep the local swimming pool open and the kids really need the swimming pool in the summer holidays. Then you go, okay, I'll pay another fiver on my council tax so that the swimming pool can stay open, provided that is what it is doing and it's not just going to line somebody's pockets. So that'd be question one; is that still a thing? And the second question is how do we, the citizens, hold the politicians and particularly the bureaucrats to account when we elect once every four years? And it's a very blunt instrument for holding people to account. So can you talk to that a little bit and then we'll go back to what Our House is doing.
Manda: Yeah. So that's definitely a part of budgeting still. And it depends on how the budgeting works. So often it is about protecting a budget and then people get to come up with ideas within that budget. But you can go beyond that, you know, how does taxation work? How much money do we need to raise? And I think what you're surfacing there is also one of these core, I would say, beliefs, but it's the knowledge that we have as participatory practitioners, that people are caring and compromising, collaborative and creative people. That, you know, when you give people surveys to respond to public parking, and councils have a relationship where they see no one wants to pay for parking anywhere, or, you know, residents labelled as these kind of individual agents are selfish beings, that just want their parking space and want to pay as little tax as possible, is such a unparticipatory way of working with things. It's offering people binary choices that are both bad. And so there's this deeper practice that we have, that people are good at solving these problems. And actually they'll do things that probably would surprise all economic models. They would give more of their money away because they believe in collective things that are better for everyone. And then in terms of the accountability piece, Katy, maybe you, because I just think legislative theatre does this very well in how we hold people to account.
Manda: Thank you. Okay, Katy, how do we hold people to account?
Katy: Sure. It's a massive question in participatory democracy, but one that I'm really passionate about. And the way that I think about it, is that a process has to in its very design, and this is something we're thinking about in Our House all the time, has to acknowledge and overturn the traditional power dynamics. Or at least acknowledge and challenge the traditional power dynamics of democracy or of any kind of decision making. So in legislative theatre, we actually put policymakers on the spot at the end and say 'what are you going to do in the next 6 to 8 weeks? And we're going to follow up and tell everyone who did that thing'. And now we also use these digital democracy tools where we can track over 12 months progress, so you can log in and see did this proposal happen 25%, 50%, 75% or 100%? And if not, we're going to need to organise in another way and take back our power, right? We're going to need to lobby. We're going to need to demonstrate, we're going to need to name and shame. Our power doesn't begin and end with one event or one participatory budgeting or citizens assembly process.
Katy: And I think one of the things that we see, that Oli and I see, and lots of folks working in this space of democratic innovations and participatory democracy, is that any one of these tools is not enough on its own. And on one budget or on one issue it's great, we love it, I'm there, we should do it more. But it's not enough on its own. So, you know, I'm a big fan of legislative theatre, but it's also not enough on its own. Because sometimes we need to have that budget there that we say, okay, here's the million pounds, boom! Whatever it is. And sometimes we need to have those experts coming in, like a citizens assembly where we get that expert input on an issue, and then we get to sit around and deliberate in a very organised way. And if all of those are joined up, those different processes, they give the stat that really helps to overturn those traditional power dynamics, because we the citizens, we the residents, (and we say citizens in the in the most expansive sense, right? Everyone. Not about a passport holder).
Manda: Sure. Yeah. In the UK has a different meaning.
Katy: Absolutely.
Manda: We think it means everyone.
Katy: Everyone, everyone, yes. I'm very sensitive as an American to the word citizen these days. But I love it. I'm happy we are reclaiming it. So that we have all these tools at our disposal, we already have so much more power and weight for that accountability, to say we know what to turn to next if this thing doesn't happen the way you said it would, or the way we all said it would.
Manda: So we are going to get to what Our House is doing, but we're kind of getting to it anyway. I have a real question on that, because I'm watching, by some numbers 12 million people marched on the 14th of June at the time when Trump was holding his little mini military parade. And I know in the UK if we go way back to the Iraq war, 1 million people marched, which was the most that had ever happened in the UK, and they were soundly ignored by a government that knew that, frankly, nothing we could do would work. Palestinian Action is a peaceful group and has just been labelled the equivalent with ISIS. Elderly Quakers in their 80s who've done nothing but peaceful stuff all their lives, are now potentially, if they charge them under a particular section of the act, looking at 14 years in prison for sitting there with a little poster saying 'I support Palestinian Action'. We have governments that, even the ones who are not explicitly aiming for white supremacist, patriarchal theocracies, run under the lines of the Inquisition, which is project 2025; we have a supposedly socialist government in this country, which I realise Labour isn't really anymore, but behaving in a way that Viktor Orbán would approve of heartily. And they don't care. And as far as I can tell, they are busy eroding any power that we have. And yet what I'm hearing you say is that at a local level, when we have actual human beings, we can exert power. So talk me through how that actually works, because this feels really important. This is the core of how we, the people, begin to emerge in ways that accrue power to those with wisdom.
Katy: So I'll say all of these participatory democracy processes, there's so many examples where definitely at the local level, people have demanded that an issue be put to a participatory process. So, you know, Extinction Rebellion really pushed a lot of climate assemblies that are multiplying in the UK and leading to lots and lots of local and regional climate action.
Manda: Are they? Okay. Tell me more.
Katy: Yeah. That was the Extinction Rebellion revamp manifesto a few years ago, and I was part of leading a citizen's assembly in Southwark that came out of that demand. And Extinction Rebellion sat on the advisory committee to the Citizens Assembly along with the council.
Manda: OK. So the UK Parliament, not the UK government, at the point when XR was really at its height in 2018, convened a citizen's assembly. And I was really excited, and then I saw the list of people who were speaking to it, and it was a very narrow bandwidth of opinion. So they didn't, for instance, have Jen Bendell. And I'm not necessarily onboard with everything he says, but he could have been there at one end of the spectrum. And they chose not to. And we got a citizens assembly that, amongst other things, recommended that people don't drive SUVs anymore and that doesn't cut it; that so badly doesn't cut it. So citizens assemblies are only able, unless you've got someone on the assembly going, hang on guys, I know more than the experts are giving me, please listen to me. Which clearly they didn't. It's limited by who gets to talk to the assembly. And it seems to me a little bit like if what you do is convene a group of people who read the Daily Mail, you're going to get Daily Mail opinions, and that's not necessarily their fault. It's a bit like computers: garbage in, garbage out. And the sense making of any collective group of people depends on the inputs of the sense that is offered to them. So in Southwark, how did did you get a broader range of opinion and who curated that? Because that feels quite key.
Oli: These are really important challenges to citizens assemblies that certainly we feel. And I think in the best case scenarios and in that citizen assembly as a part of and many others happening, there's now, because of some of those failures, a very, very clear look that the advisory panel needs to be very inter sector, inter stakeholder in terms of activists, council, environmental leaders, business leaders. And young people. And they help advise on who the experts are. And that there should be really a wide range of those experts and that the facilitation of it needs to really make sure it promotes all the different voices in the room. That said, I think and this is where Our House is coming from; we don't think that citizens assemblies are the only answer. And although I really love doing legislative theatre, I also don't think it's the only answer. So in legislative theatre, for example, it gets to some of the challenges that you're talking about because the people who are directly impacted by the problem and historically facing oppression and inequality, are the ones framing the problem. So in this sense giving the evidence, right. That's a different model. So this is where I think we need, as as I said before, an ecosystem where all of our citizens need an encyclopaedia of democratic tools. And, you know, again, hinting forward to what we're talking about with Our House. And maybe a sense of shared values that can unite us through using those tools at different moments where we can say, okay, we know which tool we want to use at this moment, because now we really are facing an issue that's about historic marginalisation. And so citizens assemblies are not going to cut it in this case. But here we really need the evidence. And so now we're going to move into that kind of assembly model. And now we know what we want to do. So we'd better open up that budget and say, you know, again, here's the £5 million; we're ready with our information about how it should be spent.
Manda: Fantastic. Okay. And Oli wants to speak. Oli, we're coming back to you, because now you need to tell us what Our House is doing. We got halfway through the podcast and we haven't got to that yet, because this is so exciting. This is the core of how we get people. So tell us about Our House, what you're doing, how you're doing it. What suite of democratic participatory tools you're using and will work to where it's going. Over to you.
Oli: Yeah. Thanks, Manda. So I think just to build on what Katy is saying, because I think it's really arriving at this point of how we individually and the team got to Our House. And to give you just a bit of a background, the team brings together that toolkit through our expertise in participatory democracy. So myself from a participatory design lens, Katie from Legislative Theatre, we have Mara Livermore who runs citizens assemblies and citizens juries at local, regional and national levels. Salma Perveen, who's done a lot of work around equity led research and design and community engagement and organising practices. Aneira Roose-McClew, who's a part of Trust the People as well, and does training on people's assemblies and how people can build those skills, and running and organising people's assemblies at the local level. And as a collective of practitioners that do this work day in and day out, we see that the stuff that comes out of this, these processes, is stuff that is able to both address the challenges we face, but also galvanise collective action towards change. So they're all powerful tools. And in some way, you know, I think we could do another episode talking about all the ills and benefits of each one and how the methods work. But in some ways as well, that doesn't really matter.
Manda: Because the results is what matters.
Oli: Well, yeah, the results, but also the factors of changing how democracy and decision making works is the important thing here. Because ultimately all of these assemblies, they might produce things that you agree with less or more, but they are legitimate processes for people to come together and reach conclusions. Yet our political system squashes and compresses that at the moment. And that was really the brief that we started with for ourselves. You know, how do we mainstream these ideas and get people thinking and holding these ideas as credible ways to do democracy differently together? And how do we build that into the consciousness of everyone. And not us building it for them, but them building it for themselves through seeing and experiencing it. Because, you know, beyond the three of us here and maybe a good chunk of your listeners as well, there's not that wide knowledge of citizens assemblies or participatory budgeting or legislative theatre or participatory design or, you know, the list goes on. But what there is a wide knowledge of, and how you started with the introduction, is that more than twice the number of people didn't vote than did vote for the Labour Party in the last election. And there are these many, 20 million people, who are not engaged in a democratic system, when people are experiencing or facing collapse of social, economic, environmental systems. If a democracy is working at that point, everyone should be, you know, we should be at 90 to 100% participation, because everyone cares, right? That people's lives are getting worse and nothing has got better for decades.
Oli: So how do we jump between that knowledge and feelings that politics isn't for me, and democracy isn't for me and never has been. I don't trust politicians or the political system; and move away from either not engaging it, or just rolling the dice with one last vote for anything else that isn't any of the above. And research earlier this year, talking about various different issues from conflicts in the Middle East to affordable housing, to health care; and 'none of them' was nearly twice as big as any other political party in who you would trust to solve these issues. And then if you add 'don't know' to that, it's 3 to 4 times as big as the next biggest party. So there's this huge disengagement and distrust in our political system. Yet there is very rarely a collective belief in an alternative system. Or that alternative system is very much being imagined by authoritarians at the moment, and how that system can work so that absolute power can just reign over all of us. And as Jon Alexander speaks of the citizen story, it's the return of the citizen and consumer story, it's a return to the subject story, where we are subject to some almighty leader that we should bow down to. So that's the framing of where we arrived with our house. And our belief is that the process we get to the future is the future that we get. So we think if we're going to build this participatory movement for political systems change, then we should do that in a participatory way, and doing that at the local level, so that people can see and experience all the options of doing democracy differently.
Manda: Yes. So okay, let's move to Katy. You're going to tell us about how how this is unfolding. Because my belief is that once people have experienced democracy working in a way that's genuinely democratic, instead of the kleptocracy we have just now, it must completely change their worldview, I'm assuming. And must take us to a place where they go, screw this, the old system; we have a system that works, and this is where we're going. And once we get that at scale, the old system is gone. I mean, this is where you're all coming from. Let's see how it's happening. Katy, tell us.
Katy: Absolutely. So the process that we're using, as Oli said, needs to be participatory and grassroots and can model this future democracy that we want to build. And we're really looking to a future democracy, that's really important, not just some small reforms to an existing system. Although along the way we're happy with reforms, but right now this project is an imagination project and that's why it's new. Just as you're saying, this is an imagination project that then can turn into a reality of a new democratic process. And so the project is we're using the process of people's charters. People's charters as a tool, starting at the local level. So hundreds of localities of local communities, authorities, cities, building their own people's charters using participatory tools like games and policy. We have an amazing game designer working with us, Matthieu, who works on all kinds of climate policy, using games. And we're using a game, a kind of board game, a multiplayer game, to design a charter for that local area that again thinks about both values and processes. What is the value of our future democracy, and what are the tools we want to have at our disposal? And who do we want to be doing that with? And then those local charters which we've already started building, right, Oli mentioned he's in Grimsby. There's one happening right this week with Grimsby. We've been working in Rathlin in Northern Ireland on a local charter process. Lots and lots of these starting to bubble up. And schools. And then all of those will feed in to national charters that will come together as the four nations of the UK demands for a new democracy, that has been created from these hundreds of charters, thousands and thousands of people. And all of that is meant to say, okay, these are our demands, our visions for our future democracy. We arrived at them in a participatory and joyful way, and they are both creating a space for us to imagine what that looks like, and a sense of urgency and demand for it to become reality. So we are both working on the local level with these communities, while also building a network and alliance of political and civic civil society leaders, who can then take those charters, integrate them, you know, as they will, into their processes. But at the same time, we're not only relying on them for accountability. That grassroots movement is where this is starting from. And I think it's really important for us that, again, some of these participatory processes now, the ones that I'm working on in my regular life that I mentioned, they're an invitation from top down. So from a council or from a government.
Katy: And that's great. They should be doing that. But we see that in the history of change you need bottom up power in real numbers, all those numbers that aren't voting, right. And so there's really three strands; this movement of local people's charters building up to national people's charters; a narrative change piece where everyone in the UK can see this happening and understand, and that's happening through art and theatre. That's why I'm on board because I'm just, all about the fun. But I think that the fun and the imagination is key here. And it's often left out of our democracy and even of our participatory democracy. Again, I'll give three reasons why I think fun and imagination are really key in this project and maybe in our future democracy as a whole. One is that we need to create spaces where we can really, really think creatively and really think about what is not just a tiny tweak on something that isn't working right now. And creating a space of laughter and play allows us to think outside of our normal boxes. But we also need spaces where we can overturn those power dynamics and fun and laughter and games create a new power relationship.
Katy: And that power relationship is going to be relevant in building people's charters, whether we invite MPs or local councillors to be part of the process, which we will. But also even the power dynamics that exist in a community that mean that men speak and women don't speak, or older people speak and children don't speak or white people speak, and people of colour don't speak as much. These are the power dynamics that we also need to confront and face up to in our decision making processes. And the last reason why fun and imagination are key to this process is again, what I said before, that we want to make our democracy irresistible. We want to make it so fun that people keep showing up. And so we've not just demanded and let it go. We've not just designed and let it go. We've not just spread the word and let it go. We're invested. We're going to see this through until we arrive at that new vision that we have outlined through those charters. That is the basic project of Our House.
Katy: I have so many questions. Oli, we'll come to you in a minute. So spinning around in my head, or in my framing, so I'm quite invested in Stephen Porges Polyvagal. You can't get to ventral vagal, which is the place where fun, creativity, rest, digest all of these things happen if you haven't helped to create a safe space where the dorsal vagal and sympathetic systems can stand down. But once you've got there, you have massive creativity. And these things are essential. And the current system is designed to keep people maximally stressed out, so they can't be creative, by design or not, that's the way it works. So I'm really curious about how you create that level of safety that allows actual fun to happen. And you're dealing with women who've been abused or people who are homeless and trying to live on the streets, this is not a naturally safe place to be. How do you do that? And how do you maintain it? Because that's the kind of serotonin mesh of engagement and community, which is what we all crave. And yet our culture is addicted to the dopamine drip of social media and isolation. Can you, just before we go to Oli to explore this in more depth, just give me a little bit of how do we create the fun and how do we create sustained fun?
Katy: It's a great question. I think about it from a slightly different angle. So in in this process, in working on these people's charters, we're a movement and a group of a collective of participatory democracy fans and practitioners. But really, people on the ground in each of those localities are already doing a lot of work, right? So in the places where we've started working with people's charters, it's groups that have already formed, have already created their dynamics of agreements and safety, and have their sense of urgency and goals already embedded in their working. So I think about safety and kind of enabling fun in two ways. Absolutely we need, first of all, I think about in participatory democracy processes, sometimes I think about logistics is justice. Like we need to have food, we need it to be great food, we need to have good space. We need to care for people's child care. We need their transport, sometimes we need stipends. You know, we need all the things that make people able to show up and hopefully in a welcoming room. So all of those kinds of things. And we think about that as practitioners as part of this process.
Katy: But also the other thing that I think creates a space for fun is actually a shared purpose, and there's a kind of safety in a shared purpose. Or the flip side of safety that we sometimes talk about is a bravery. So we came together out of a sense of shared purpose. And so in these people's charters that are popping up in local communities all over the UK, those groups are already working with a shared purpose and they're just saying, you know what? We can formalise this and make it public and make it our own and take ownership of it through a co-created charter that we can slap up on every doorway, put in the newspaper, tell the news about. And building on the Chartist movement that people in the UK study in school, that had real concrete impact and reshaping our democracy, came from bottom up. We're saying it's time for a new movement. But again, these local communities are already doing that work. So we also don't need and it's not our role to create a whole new safe environment out of scratch, because they have that already. And they're just saying, oh, could we use some elements of these games and this legislative theatre process and this assembly process and this participatory budgeting process to co-create this charter about the things we're already talking about?
Manda: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. At some point, I want to come back to you to talk about values. But in the meantime, before we get there, let's go to Oli and talk about the actual process. Because what I would like to know is how is it working on the ground now? Where are you aiming for? And then I want to get to in an ideal world, how are we going to make sure the next election doesn't elect a reform government, which is basically where we're heading. So you were in Rathlin, Ireland. You just come back from that when? When we last spoke. You're in Grimsby now. What are the charter? Tell us about the process of building these charters.
Oli: Yeah and I just want to reinforce what Katy said there, that we're not building community, because community exists in every place, despite our political system that has completely eroded it. And not just in the last ten, 20 years, for decades. You know, in Grimsby here, a former fishing town, there's not just the eradication of investment and money into these areas, it's the complete eradication of power and agency that communities are able to create. But despite that, everywhere, even in these places that have been most impacted by aggressive policies and national level policies, these communities, of course, exist because it's in human nature. And East Marsh United, which we're partnering with here in Grimsby to create the East Marsh Peoples Charter, started with the very simple thing of just litter picking one day. Billy Dasein who's the founder of the organisation, just brought some of his neighbours together about a local council meeting and just the state of the streets and people just were fed up with the system and started to do things differently. But, you know, there's community groups and people organising at local levels all around the UK, across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. And this is, of course, an open invitation to anyone listening that is doing any organising, whether it's about climate change in your local area, whether it's about homelessness or mental health support, whether it's about migrant rights, whether it's about the cost of living, whether it's just about there being too much litter on the street.
Manda: Or the quality of water. We have local groups that trained with Trust, The People that are just about the fact that the local water company is dumping sewage into the rivers, and what used to be drinkable is not even swimmable or even touchable now. So yes, there's so much stuff.
Oli: Right. And despite all of those hours of effort and energy and love and passion for these places, things around us keep getting worse, because, again, of our Political system and political decisions. Everything is a political decision, ultimately. So how can we imagine a system that actually doesn't work against but for and with us? When we started this process, it's been a learning journey for us in terms of thinking about, as Katy shared, we're all passionate about participatory democracy and bring all of these different elements. But when we're invited to East Marsh, people hadn't heard of legislative theatre or people's assemblies and thinking about what does power and democracy mean to people today, to unpack those questions. Think about the story of the Chartists and how it's relevant to them. Think about the story of power and how that's changed, and what are the things that are important to people so that we can start to, yeah, galvanise and mobilise people. Or local people can galvanise and mobilise and inspire each other about the power that they can build through this work. So yeah, the process is really about having been a part of these community sessions, just to make it super tangible. In East Marsh they have things like talking Tuesdays on Tuesdays, which is the day when we're recording. And that's one of those commorado's open living room type things where anyone can show up, and it's just a space to chat.
Manda: They have a peace choir on Tuesday nights, which I think, and this is just my view, that singing is going to be a huge part of how we come together to reimagine power, because no matter how good or bad you are at singing, being in a room together and singing is an amazing way to connect. But then beyond all those lovely, fun, caring things that are, as Katy says, serious elements in how we connect and do democracy together, there's getting to the real, tangible stuff about how would this system change? So what are the demands that we can create? And that's a work in progress and emerging in different places. You know, some things like equal access to power; so thinking about not just equal access to voting, but people able to hold power through local and national citizens assemblies. There's some people in the community in Grimsby that want no political parties at the local level because they think it just ruins local action from national parties. There's demands about people impacted by issues to have power and decision making. Making democracy fun. You know, all of these things that come through the process and emerge through the process, as tangible demands that we can both start to live today and demand for our democracy to evolve tomorrow.
Manda: Beautiful. Thank you. So, Katy, you were wanting to come in there. While we're coming in on this, two things that I'm really interested in are: what are the values that are emerging? And narrative shift seems to me huge. But you were wanting to say something, so go ahead and say it and then let's explore those.
Katy: Yeah, yeah. And I can talk to those. So I was going to say, in doing all the work that Oli is talking about, the process of building a people's charter is actually really simple. And we're using just kind of again, we mentioned games, right. So people can both imagine our worse democracy and then our best democracy, by thinking about values and people or communities and processes that should be involved. And so people think about it from an issue, like mental health or potholes or whatever it is, and then say, if we were going to work on that issue in this dream democracy way, how would that translate to the charter we need for our whole community or for our whole country? So that is the process, a really accessible, hands on, again joyful process, which can integrate some other elements of other participatory mechanisms. But really starting with we sit down together, we can play a game, it's something that everyone can do. Teenagers, kids, everybody together, intergenerational. And it can happen in a few hours. In a few hours, we can draft a people's charter that then that community puts out to the rest of their neighbours at local festivals, at fairs and says, tell us what you think. Are we all okay with this? Does everyone in Grimsby sign on? Until we've ratified that charter and it became the charter for that whole area. So that's the process of that. And people have been articulating those values that they want to see in our future democracy through those games and those workshops and conversations. And those values have been, you know, fun and equity, they've been community led, grassroots led, they've been listening. I think that was a key value. They've been care. Oli, help me out, what were some of the other ones we've heard?
Oli: Yeah, I've actually got some from a charter writing process in a school in north London we did yesterday, and I'll just read you all the ones that are in front of me, because I think they're all beautiful: love, kindness, respect and love (again), positivity, reliability, understanding, equality. Yeah, that's it.
Manda: And that came from a school.
Oli: And that came from a school. And it's also a good point to reflect on how much respect love and kindness is in our current political system. You know, if we want to design a democracy, we're not designing it for the sake of it, we're designing it to embody some values that we all believe in and the world that we want to be in. And to address challenges that we face together. So how do we address these challenges with love and kindness? What combination of who is having power and how they're doing it do we need to bring together? And that's essentially the game that we play to start to build all of these different possibilities. And then come together through that experience of acting, of designing, of deliberating, bringing all of those things together so that people can come up with these tangible demands for change. So it's entirely participatory. The values are what people feel closest in their hearts. And again, this, you know, you mentioned before as well, how does this prevent a reform government? It doesn't necessarily. It's a participatory process. And we're not saying that we are working against Reform or Labour or Tories. We're saying that this political system is...
Manda: Not fit for purpose.
Oli: It's not fit for purpose. It's irrelevant. When we started the workshop yesterday with young people, complicated, chaotic, not for me, were the words that came when we introduced ourselves, how we feel about democracy today. And actually what is at the heart of that is people want love and kindness back.
Katy: Yeah. And it's possibly 10,000 years since our culture had that at the heart of what we're doing. Okay. Gosh, several ways I could take this. So I am totally on board with this system is not fit for purpose. Nonetheless, we need to make a transition from the existing system to one that is fit for purpose. Power to those with wisdom, wisdom to those with power, values that we can all agree on. For what it's worth, the ones that I've settled on are integrity, compassion, and generosity of spirit, which I think encompasses everything that your people said. And I always think in threes. But it's all down to being heart open and heart led and not being led by the dark triad. And for those who are not familiar, dark triad is sadism, psychopathy and narcissism, which is currently what motivates the hierarchical system that we have. If I've understood your website correctly, you're going around the country now and you're collecting people's charters, which will be locally ratified. And I have a question of are we doing that by getting into the WhatsApp groups of local streets as well as taking it out to local markets? I'm assuming yes. And then ultimately local town level and school level will get together to become council level and then get together to become one for each of the four nations of the UK, which is Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland of the UK. And potentially one for each of those that might become a United Kingdom one, or might remain Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England as separate. And that you have a timetable for that. Does one or other of you want to speak to the timetable and where you are within the timetable?
Oli: Yeah. So we've been in this phase of discovery and development and thinking about how we do this for the last few months, and now we're ramping up to support communities. And I guess a really important thing is that we're not necessarily collecting or driving this. This can only be driven at the local level by the people who are in those street WhatsApp groups and care about this stuff and want to create the change. And for them to use the tools if they want to, to hold these conversations in whatever way feels appropriate for them to develop these charters. So yeah, we plan to do that over the next year. We want to reach 100 communities, but it's an open invite and an open invite for anyone who wants to participate and then bring that together next year in this assembly of assemblies. So at the national level and by national I do mean four nation level, where people can bring together these local charters, think about what is connected across all of them, what are the things that we really need to demand of our system? How do we join the dots between these community groups that are already living the democracy that we need tomorrow, today? How do we work better in that way, to build resilience in whatever future comes our way? And then translating those into a set of local charters, which will then kick off that campaign for political systems change as well. There's going to be some stuff that we can do in our local area together, and then there's going to be some stuff we're going to need to demand of people to change, which feels impossible. And I think that's why it's important to bring in this story of the chartists. Democracy has always spoken about this thing, this amazing system that is hundreds of years old that we need to protect. It's got all this pomp around it and it's got this big British...
Manda: And it's not fit for purpose.
Oli: Exactly. But I think if we journey back to the mid 1800s when you had to be a wealthy landowner, an aristocrat, to both vote and to stand in parliament and make political decisions.
Manda: And a bloke, you could only be a man. Remember that. And white. Yes.
Oli: Yes. And to think of the courage of the Chartists that had barely any rights. Public education was minimal if existing at all. And, you know, the conditions that you could think of are perhaps quite similar today of raising rents, stagnating wages, crumbling public services, food prices increasing. And those people knew that they were beyond the point of campaigning for better working hours in our factory, or campaigning for better air quality in our cities so that we're not, you know, dying from choking on the soot. They knew that the real way to create sustained change was to build political power, to campaign through a people's charter. At that stage, unfortunately, the suffrage was focussed on men, so that part remained, but they did say this bold thing; votes for all men and to have MPs paid for their time, so that you didn't have to be an aristocrat to stand in Parliament. To have constituencies of equal size, so that democracy worked by the unit of people not of the amount of wealth you had. You know, secret ballots, all of these things that are kind of foundational parts of how our democracy works today. And they imagined that in a system where you couldn't meet and organise and you couldn't have any political influence at all. You know, at least we have the vote right now, which might not feel like enough. And it isn't. But at least we have something.
Manda: And we have the internet. We can talk to each other over space and time in ways that is completely impossible. So we could organise really well.
Oli: Totally. Yeah. And so I think that's an important story to ground ourselves in and to think that, you know, change that feels impossible has happened in the past through our political system and we can do it again.
Manda: Right. And for me, I don't like leading with apocalypses coming, but apocalypse is coming. I mean, the Chartists were not facing biophysical collapse. We have hard physical limits that we cannot breach and are currently accelerating towards breaching them. And our current system is doing nothing to step on the brakes. And almost everybody knows this. And I think what you are giving, what seems to me radical here, is that you are at scale showing people that another way is possible. And we've been taught for too long that it isn't. So, Katy, I really want to explore how we shift the narrative at scale. Because we have a legacy media, particularly, that is owned by billionaires who have a really strong vested interest in not changing the system. So I'd like to talk about that, and then I want to come back to either of you for an exploration of it's, let's say 2027; in an ideal world, can you imagine a transfer towards an actual fit for purpose system and how it might unfold just to give people an imaginal space? But Katy, go to you.
Katy: Well, I think the question of how we shift the narrative at scale is exactly leading to, as you're putting, the question of what this looks like in 2027 and beyond. So for us, I'll say what's exciting to me about this project and why we're all combining forces, you know, all these folks working on democracy in different spaces saying, wait a minute, what if we come together and think again. Not just about issues, not just about one place, not just about processes, but about a whole new system. What I would love to see is the sense of a collective of mass demand, a mass movement that has built so that everyone you talk to says, I know that we could have a new democracy, and I have been a part of making a people's charter. And I have seen my neighbour on television talking about their People's Charter, and I have read my other neighbour in the newspaper and I'm here in Grimsby, but I see that in Rathlin in Northern Ireland they have created a people's charter too. So I know that I'm part of a massive collective movement. And they're creating them in Cardiff and they're creating them in Glasgow and all over the place. So the narrative is amplifying the work of citizens so that we can say, it's not just my local demand, my little few people want something. It echoes what people are both doing and wanting and dreaming and imagining and demanding across the entire UK. If the narrative piece does its job at the end of 2026 or in the beginning of 2027, we will have the language of, just like we have the language of Instagram demand at our fingertips now, right? Or whatever, you know, that does a great job of creating a national or international or mass led demand. We have a national language and visual and lived experience. Not just language, not just visual, but lived.
Manda: We've done this. We know what it feels like.
Katy: We've done this. And we see other people doing it. And we say, all of us now know that we can have a new democracy, and know what we want it to look like in its values and its mechanisms and tools. So that's what we have. And we see that it's happening everywhere. And so we are not going to rest until we get there. And that is the energy, the commitment, is across political boundaries, across all those different demographics that usually we're working really in silos to address one thing at a time. So I think if we get to that place, that is the idea. That this has been such a mass movement; people have seen each other doing it, they've heard about each other doing it. They know that we can create our own House, right, of the citizens, and it's going to be what we want it to look like and we have said that's what it is.
Manda: Parallel policy. Yes. Have you guys read my novel? Because that's exactly what happened at the end of it.
Katy: I need to read your novel, people are always talking about how wonderful it is.
Manda: Well, no, I'm not pushing it, I'm just saying that that's exactly what happened by the end of it. Because that's where I got to was that you could stand the Chartist party. And if enough people understood what it was and it was not completely slaughtered by the legacy media, it might win on a basis of As soon as we get in, we are creating a whole new, different polity. But you could also create a parallel polity because technically we have democracy by consent, and the day we take our consent away from Westminster and point it at something that's maybe in Leeds, because that's the geographic centre of the country, and it's doing everything differently and it's doing everything in parallel. This is what Audrey Tang did in Taiwan; you do it openly with the .G0v, people can see it working, the one in Westminster becomes obsolete in a couple of weeks.
Manda: And to build on that Audrey Tang reference, because we're also looking for that moment that happened as well in the Sunflower Movement, of the speaker Wang, that recognised the Sunflower Movement and the protesters and legitimised their perspective. Because politicians and civil society leaders around the country, national and local, know that the political system is going to change. In the next 5 or 10 years, there are going to be serious and significant changes to the political system, and it is being imagined by people who do not believe in democracy. You've seen that in America and the destruction of democratic institutions. But in some ways, those institutions have been destroyed because they haven't evolved and they haven't changed.
Manda: And they were not fit for purpose.
Oli: They were not fit for purpose. You can't argue with the authoritarians that are trying to destroy them for their arguments for their destruction, because it's true. And so what we need to do is build that public and collective imagining of a different democracy. Because when you speak to everyone about their values, when you speak to everyone about the way they want the world to work, it isn't authoritarian, it's with love and respect and care. So we also acknowledge, this work probably would never work and materialise if it was five years ago or ten years ago, because our political system hasn't faced the same strain that it does now. And so that's why we're looking for that moment and building this alliance of in system champions, because we're from the outside but not against. You know, the people who are, for all the faults of politicians and political parties, are also people who've got into this space because they care about the country, they care about the public, they care about the ideas of society working better. And I think that that's the right moment for them to invite in the people, the real democracy, into this space to lead to sustained change.
Manda: Magic. That feels quite a good place to end on. But Katy, if you have any anything else that you'd like to add, because there's always going to be something, but do you want to say something as we draw to a close?
Katy: I would just say, and maybe this is coming across already, but in the face of everything that's going on, we're feeling incredibly excited about this opportunity.
Manda: The cracks are where the light gets in. And the system is actually crumbling in front of us.
Katy: Exactly. And in the crumbling, people have so much creativity, they have so much desire, they have so much energy and that exists already. And this movement, this Our House movement is just saying, how can we build on that? How can we reflect it outwards? How can we help it turn into something that takes us into a new democratic future?
Manda: So how can people find you if they want to get involved? If they want to create something in their local area, anywhere in the UK? Or frankly, if you want to start something somewhere else in the world, then go for it. What's the best way for people to connect with Our House?
Oli: Yeah, so I would go to our website, our House UK, and you can take various actions, including just signing up to the newsletter and keeping track of things. But this will be a space and a resource for people to connect, to get the game where they are locally and run those processes locally, and start to build and imagine these different democratic futures. So it's an entirely open space, and the aspiration for it is to to not be a boundary that you're in or you're out. It's porous. You know, this is you. You are holding whatever community you're holding and you're doing this amazing work. And this is about how do we connect the dots together and start to articulate and build this space that we need, that truly supports us.
Katy: And the most tangible action that people can take is to actually start running their own people's charter, right? And being part of that movement. And so, as Oli said, those resources will be available. There's ways to sign up on the website to say, I want to have a people's charter in my community or in my city. And then can I get help or can I get those tools and that will add up to this mass movement. So that is a really, really concrete and accessible way that people can be part of this movement.
Katy: Fantastic, brilliant. That's an extremely good place to end. So Katy Rubin and Oli Whittington, thank you so much for all that you're doing and for coming on to Accidental Gods. This genuinely feels really exciting.
Katy: Thank you for having us. It's great to chat.
Oli: Thank you, Manda. Yeah, amazing.
Manda: And there we go. That's it for this week. Enormous thanks to Katy and Oli and everyone at the team at Our House, for all that you are and do. This genuinely feels like such an exciting, inspiring, essential project. If we can't shift our governance systems, it's going to be really hard to shift anything else. And when we do shift our governance systems, then everything else is entrained within that. How we organise ourselves, how we come together to fix the problems that face us at local, national and international levels. This defines who we are as a culture, the values that underpin it. The basic asks that are our non-negotiable baselines. These are what spell out the nature of our culture. And if, when, we can create a culture that is predicated on compassion, integrity, generosity of spirit; however we frame these, then capitalism is over by tomorrow. And we do need this. And this is one of the ways I can see that we can bridge towards a new system. So if you're listening to this on the 16th, please go to the show notes and sign up for the event on the 18th. Meet with other people. Find out the ways that you can begin to create the move towards people's charters in your areas. I would like to think this is something we can do across the communities of passion and purpose, as well as of place, but at the moment, until we get our coordi-nation sorted, per Primavera De Phillippi, we are in communities of place insofar as we vote. Our representatives are representatives of the local area. So this is something that needs to happen on a local basis.
Manda: And it can. It's already happening around the UK. There's the movement ecology map in the show notes. But it's also happening around the world, everywhere across the world, from Iceland to New Zealand there are people who are already actively involved in participatory budgeting, participatory design, participatory democracy; people who are using these tools. So if you're not in the UK and this interests you, please do some googling, find out what is happening local to you and go and get involved. This is how we change the future, and the future is still ours to build. So there we go. That's your work for this week. We will be back next week with another conversation.
Manda: And in the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot, to Alan Lowells of Airtight Studios for the production, to Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech and all of the conversations that keep us moving forward to a more self led reality. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to get involved in how we can make change really happen at a local level, then please do send them this link. And while you're here, if you've got this far, five stars under review on the podcast app of your choice or a subscribe and review on YouTube really does make a difference to the algorithms. And we really appreciate it. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.