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🤕 Can a government heal a nation?
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Nadine Smith Unsubscribe
8:29 AM (1 hour ago)
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Welcome to the latest Public Impact Soundbite
Dear Peter,
Last weekend, I presented at a TedxOxford event, and posed the question – can a government heal a nation?
This was a personal speech. I was invited to speak from my experiences, and it took a while to let my guard down and speak from the heart and not the notebook. I took the audience on my own personal journey as a child of an immigrant, who all of a sudden from great success, became a single and struggling parent. Later, I became a civil servant in the UK government hoping to do all I could to help people like my mother get back on track. But somehow, I lost a sense of my moral purpose. I was not listening.
In this role, I experienced first-hand the impact government can have on lives, both positive and negative, through people-focused work, trips with ministers and heartbreaking public inquiries. It always baffled me how hard people in the civil and public services work, yet I was seeing people feeling that the system was not designed for the realities of their life.
I heard leaders say they wanted to do more. I heard citizens say they expected more. What was going wrong? I believe we have more in common than we think as citizens, we just need to show that we can cooperate when trusted and empowered to do so.
In my presentation, I outlined my five-step personal journey towards understanding the role that government, public services and all of us can play to 'heal nations'. It has taken me almost three decades to begin to understand this - we don't have that time anymore. Complex problems won't go away without public cooperation.
Healing starts with listening, learning and adapting. Whether the struggling mum, the public servant or the leader of a government department, we can all do that.
Best wishes,
Nadine
Follow Nadine on Twitter: @NadineMCSmith Follow Nadine on Twitter: @NadineMCSmith
🐾 My 5 steps to healing a nation
What else we've been talking about this week:
🔍 A manifesto for better government: While CPI continues to think about how the manifesto could be best placed to help reimagine government so that it works for everyone, we figure it doesn’t hurt to keep ensuring that more changemakers read it & weigh in on the discussion.
⏩ How can local governments ‘fail forward’? We’re not sure, but we’re working on it: CPI North America’s Fail Forward program has come so far since its launch last October. In the coming months, they will conduct ‘failure foundries’ with four more local governments, and are open to more participants joining!
🌏 The FIRST EVER citizens assembly on climate change met last month: This is great news for those of us here at CPI who believe that talking to people about the big issues, and even the small ones, can have profound impact on our quality of life.
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