About Us

Background

Future challenges are rushing at us faster than we are preparing for them. Now is the time we have to start organising our communities to build the resilient society that we will need in the future. While others wait for the politics, the budgets, or the weather, we have decided to start building the services and connections that will be our social infrastructure in the storms ahead.

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There are already organisations and groups working in every community to provide essential services and develop the strength of resident connections. In the Flourish Forums we will create a space where those groups can come together with local government and academic institutions to build a shared vision of local services and Action Plans to coordinate their efforts. We are not trying to create a new organisation or entity, our sole interest is in stimulating connections between existing organisations and better understanding how best to do that.

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Using the model of universally accessible basic services pioneered by UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity, Flourish Forums aim to create local Action Plans for the coordinated delivery of basic services across food, care, digital, housing, transport, advice and education.

What are the outlines of what we know we have to build?

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1. We have to create the conditions that allow everyone to make their best contributions, and to be rewarded in social as well as material ways. 

2. We have to dial down the amount of energy and materials we use at the same time that we create a basic level of reliable safety for everyone in our communities.

3. We have to organise our democracy, our taxes, our economies to make these two objectives self actualising: 

• universal contributions

• minimal negative environmental impact

Those are big changes, and they will take time, but we can start now on the basic building blocks that that future. We can start now to create a fabric of basic universal services that are the foundations on which our future society will stand.

Universal Basic Services

At the IGP we start with a simple description of 7 services that everyone needs access to, irrespective of their circumstances and history. These are 7 services that need to be unconditionally accessible if we are going to build the productive and resilient society of the future:

• shelter 

• food

• care

• education

• transport

• digital 

• advice, structure, and participation

We call these “Universal Basic Services”. Don’t get hung up on the words, focus on the intention: free people from the fear of not being able meet their basic needs, and give everyone as much opportunity to make their contributions as we can. Safety, opportunity and participation are the goals.

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