What could be done to better support the people who are doing the work of civic renewal? We start with describing a framework and strategy for supporting this work, and then we describe a central proposal – establishing a network of Civic Colleges – along with a series of six complementary initiatives.
The overall approach
Support for the disciplines we have described should continue to sit in the civic sphere, and not be taken into government. This ensures the necessary independence and guards against the work becoming overly bureaucratised. However, we also believe that these vital disciplines should be supported in a less piecemeal and duplicative way. And we believe government itself should be far less agnostic about the health of these vital disciplines, and should support the work in a more strategic and sustained, and less scattergun, way.
To square this circle, we believe the civic sector should build the shared infrastructure to support these disciplines on the model of a commons.
This would mean building support for civic disciplines in a shared and collaborative way, so that support and materials are widely accessible, and governed together for the common good. Wherever possible, materials – role profiles, syllabuses, evaluation frameworks, case studies – would be published openly under Creative Commons licences, and people would be encouraged to improve and adapt the materials.
The state, meanwhile, should support these efforts, in particular with funding and by helping to bring the necessary institutions into being.
Government should partner with major foundations and civic bodies to develop a funding and institutional framework for the long-term development of essential civic disciplines. The state should see its role here as one of facilitator rather than leader – listening deeply to what practitioners need, and stepping in to fill gaps.
This could include playing a strategic convening role, bringing together major universities, historic civic spaces like Toynbee Hall, civil society funders like the National Lottery, and large endowed foundations to support the development of institutions and multi-year funding settlements. The state could also support the endowment of key aspects of this support infrastructure, which we cover more below.
As well as facilitating an improved funding settlement, government could encourage and in some cases require public organisations to engage with communities in a more meaningful and consistent way on policymaking, scrutiny and decision-making, and look to reform public procurement to make it more open to community organisations to win contracts, building on the Procurement Act 2023 and the 2025 National Procurement Policy Statement, along the lines of Locality’s Keep it Local principles.
Below we set out a number of more concrete recommendations in this spirit.