The powerful and progressive PASCAL PUMR programme has been refocused, extended, and retitled, as Citizens Enablement, following comprehensive discussions with the Leonardo Ambassadors for Corporate Learning; they believe the new title simply portrays the best that the development has to offer society, especially after COVID-19. The essence of the honed approach is still that academics can, and should, enable/empower citizens to achieve their desired aspirations, both by, and for, themselves.
Academics have always had the capabilities to enable citizens’ self-learning in order to empower them to achieve more for themselves. After the pandemic they must refocus at least some of their activities directly towards communities. Such citizens in turn, who often have great needs, must own their problems and issues, and by practical means, learn to embrace them & enact workable solutions. The innovative capabilities of both academics and citizens can be combined to solve almost any issue facing a community. PASCAL’s studies of best practice show what can be achieved across a broad range of problems. For significant changes to occur, the values and behaviour of all collaborative partners - who have often in the past come from competing sub-cultures - must be combined, using a questioning framework, so they share ideas that lead to sensible working practices, and then enact feasible outcomes.
The new title simply reflects the tight focus of the approach which might be more appealing to potential enablers and communities. In order to make the new process widely known, we have also started to publish it in a more interactive form, using WordPress. So, it can now be accessed here: http://citizenenablement.net [1]. This web-site shows how citizens can work more appropriately for themselves and also, a parallel coaching programme, to enhance academics learning how better to help them. This site also shows, in detail, the successful approach developed over the years, along with eighteen examples of best practice of community enablement & the major results so far achieved. We are also now working on an introductory video for it, which will be ready soon. While the web-site has yet to be formally published, we have already had over 18,000 hits of interest about it, many more than we ever got for PUMR despite its capabilities – so we think we may have hit the right title and topic for the work.
James Powell