The Big Society

There are 93,000 square miles in the UK

We tend to only hear about two of them, the square miles of the City and Westminster, and have felt badly let down by both of them in recent years. “Your Square Mile” is about enabling citizens to make changes in as many of the other 92,998 square miles as possible.

There are an estimated 900,000+ community groups in the UK and 238,000 Social Entrepreneurs. We want to enable citizens to find and join these organisations easily, using their own needs and passions as a start-point, and to feel able to start their own neighbourhood groups. We want to link these groups, social enterprises and communities to each other to share ideas and resources, complementing the role of existing umbrella organisations.

We want to create a platform to enable and empower all kinds of citizens and social entrepreneurs to achieve things their way: be an “ i-phone for their apps.”

We are therefore going to create the U.K’s biggest mutual: to which all citizens will be able to belong.

Over the summer and autumn, we will engage in a public co-designing process to gather ideas and best practice, to raise awareness and solicit feedback on our proposals. Concurrently, we will work with commercial and non-commercial partners to develop a benefits package for membership and a delivery platform that will be as inclusive and easy to use as possible (including PC’s, mobiles, public kiosks and other technologies as well as printed materials, community centres and face-to-face meetings.)

By December 2010 we will have launched Phase 1 of the mutual providing national tools, advice and practical benefits such as highly affordable liability insurance for all kinds of local volunteering and events.