Summary
This is an un-usual case study in this series, as it relates only to the generation of this current proposal and, in particular, how its primary author, a senior citizen ten year’s retired as an academic, was motivated during the Covid 19 Pandemic lock-down to develop the work based on his time as a senior Pro-Vice Chancellor at Salford University, where he developed their Academic Enterprise dimension and his work for the PASCAL International Observatory on Live-Long-Learning, where he was Academic Director of their PUMR programme. All this work was focused towards helping Citizen’s become more Enabled and Empowered. Peter Palme, a Leonardo Ambassador became the principal enabler of this senior citizen and then other enablers followed to enable this proposal to be developed to its present form and in James Powell’s mind become another fine example of Citizens Enablement
The Case
In 2012 James completed his final commissioned paper for the Leadership Foundation in Higher Education entitled ‘Leadership for improved Academic Enterprise’ (Powell and Clark,2012) which is highlighted as Case Study 16. It was a global study of the leadership, governance and management of senior academic entrepreneurs in their development of higher academic enterprise, or what others refer to as University Reach-out or the ‘third mission’ and its major focus was towards James’ work in supporting the development of Citizens Enablement. James then retired, and was enjoying a different sort of life, reading, gardening, doing up his old house, Tai-Chi and swimming.
Almost a decade past, he was extremely relaxed, but agreed to take part in an interactive digital interaction with fellow Leonardo Ambassadors set up by Peter Palme to explore future possibilities for these Corporate Learning Awards. It was a most interesting meeting and James happened to mention his work at Salford, aimed at Citizens, which he styled as PASCAL Universities for a Modern Renaissance (PUMR); his hope had been to encourage academics to turn some of their activities towards helping citizens find their own Renaissance. Unfortunately, the idea only interested a few universities and had simply ceased to operate as a practice run by PASCAL, however, those that had used his PUMR welcomed the approach and got much from it for their universities.
During the digital Leonardo discussions, Peter Palme, another Leonardo Ambassador, thought the ideas behind PUMR were magical, as he called them, and that they should be developed into something more meaningful but styled under the title ‘Citizens Enablement’. So the present proposal was borne. Peter also indicated his wish for James to develop the work under his name but that he would personally help it’s development and in particular create a blog, showing what Peter called the magic points for this kind of Citizen Enablement. This present proposal developed from the deep and meaningful discussion between these two Leonardo Ambassadors. As James already reported, for many years, he had been attempting to develop an approach which truly enables University Academics, with the right interest, to develop a better way of empowering disenfranchised and often poor citizens, so they could control their lives in a more fulfilling way, for their benefit and those of others in their communities.
Since Lock-down started, the two of them have been developing this proposal which tries to reveal, what both began to call, the development of a magic playbook for Citizens Enablement. While far from being magical, we hope you will have seen by now that the approach does try to lay down a few ‘home truths’, to those who wish to develop a more appropriate way of supporting citizens in an important new journey, which should also hopefully enable their own personal wealth to increase as well as their well-being and contentment.
As their efforts continued, which were mainly powered by the strong interest of Peter and his asking James important questions to develop the ideas, the present paper grew in size, range and quality. When it reach a certain level other Leonardo Ambassadors took an interest and became involved in pushing the ideas forward. So, for instance, Dr Charles Savage thought the proposal to be both powerful, necessary and timely and suggested several early developments for the development of a workable system, for world-wide adoption. James, Peter and Charles therefore formed a core team of people wishing to enable the development of a globally relevant process which would promote the deepest learning of all citizens. Charles also added the extra dimension of making sure that everything suggested in the proposal would lead to truly sustainable developments.
Other colleagues and friends read the work and made suggestions as to how it might be improved. Ian Hall for instance, made many suggestions concerning how the leadership of the original processes might be improved and then handed over to the citizens to undertake their own leadership. Ian Cooper helped hone the detail paperwork and convinced the team to produce cut down versions to summarise the ideas to try to impart the essence of the work in 10 words and then 100 words – the sort of work busy people might well read. He also encouraged the development of three tables summarising what motivated people to become involved in the work in the first place and then what they all believed they had actually achieved. When these tables proved to be too long for Ian he summarised them further producing simple ‘Wordle’ diagram summaries and single fifteen word sentences indicating the essence of the completed successful cases. All this added to the richness, yet understanding, of the developing work.
At this stage Professors Michael Osborne and Mel Ainscow became involved enabling other thoughts of how the project might be developed. Mel and James had good links in Manchester and Mel, Michael and James were Professors in Glasgow. Together they suggested a new focused proposal was developed which they hope might be of interest to both Manchester and Glasgow. It is focused on Vulnerable Young Citizen Enablement. Refined proposals of 800 words and 5,000 were produced and are presently being explored with Manchester and Glasgow.
The refining proposals were again shown to Leonardo Ambassadors who again gave support and advice. Wim Veen is now writing two further case studies of his own around the health and care support areas and Leif Edvinsson suggested us exploring how senior citizens might use their time and energy to support the developing programmes. This led to a new section in the main proposal section which highlights both a focused programme for the Vulnerable Young and how the Silver Potential can be exploited in what Leif calls the ‘Silver Brain Squad’.
Major Learning points for Citizen Enablement
This current human-centred approach benefits from a clear emphasis was on how we can truly help citizens, within the ‘systems’ being designed and explored being tested to the full. Considerable research effort was expended on gaining a deep understanding of the nature of the human roles’ everyone has; how their roles could be supported; how their needs were met; the context in which they operate. This understanding of and collaboration with practitioners led to major learning points for the projects and for successful and award winning solutions to improve communities.
The Citizen Enablers
The Key Enabler in this proposal was clearly Peter Palme whose amazing patience and efforts have enabled the written proposal to reach this stage and now the early development of an interactive digital form of it using WordPress. What is fascinating is how many other enablers have come on board to enable James to allow the core team to develop the proposal to its present form; see people mentioned above. As of the 8th September the audience to the Citizen Enablement site was:
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