The Norfolk Citizenship Initiative

Seminar, 13 June 2011
Tim O’Riordan
Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia
Sheriff of Norwich, 2009-2010

At present some one in five of young adults in the UK are not in employment. This proportion rises to over two in five for those with poor educational backgrounds and deprived family histories. There is a real danger that some of this potentially “lost generation” could go into repetitive crime, or depression, or abuse of their health. In all cases there are very real personal, family and social costs in store. On top of all this, young people face possibly heavy treatment from the benefits culture seeking to get them somehow into work.

The Norfolk Citizenship Initiative is a pilot project to give young adults the opportunity to spend a year in a combination of volunteering, mentoring, work experience and social enterprise in order to give them the experience and skills and confidence to become citizens of an emerging sustainability age. The first cohort of 19 young adults is proving the value of the Initiative.

The real test is to ensure that participants are not required to leave benefit before their experience has ended and to find ways to finance this scheme on a much more secure footing. The seminar will discuss the relationships between social contracts, capability building, and social bond financing as possible new ways of securing a sustainable livelihood for the coming generation.

More information on the Norfolk Citizenship Initiave can be found here.