Citizen Leadership Gallery

 SCLD and the User and Carer Forum are working together on a new Citizen Leadership project.  

   We are going to create a Citizen Leadership Gallery! The Gallery will be an accessible website which will be packed with good examples of Citizen Leadership in the form of videos, audio recordings, pictures and stories. We hope that everyone will enjoy using the Gallery and that it will be useful for people who use services and carers as well as people who work in services.

More about Citizen Leadership...

Citizen Leadership is the idea that anyone can be a leader. Sometimes people who use services do not feel very powerful. Sometimes they might feel that no one wants to listen to them and that they will never be able to change anything. That's not true! Everyone can be a leader. We all have the power to make a positive change.

Citizen Leadership is an idea that comes from a group of service users and carers called the User and Carer Forum. They are a group of people from a variety of backgrounds, including autism spectrum disorder, caring, criminal justice, drug and alcohol addiction, dementia, homelessness, learning disability, mental health issues, physical disability, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community and Black and Minority Ethnic Communities. The User and Carer Forum were involved in producing the Scottish Government's 21st Century Social Work Review, which was called 'Changing Lives.' Their wide range of experiences shows that Citizen Leadership is something which all sorts of people and organisations can be involved in.

Citizen Leadership is based on 8 principles:

• Potential
• Development
• Early Involvement
• Person Centred
• Information
• Equality
• Control through Partnership
• Wider Benefit

If you would like to know more about these principles, you can see a report called 'Principles and Standards of Citizen Leadership.' 

More about the Citizen Leadership Gallery...

We are still in the early stages of the project. That means that we need to hear from you! Do you or your organisation do something which sounds like Citizen Leadership? We would love to hear from you! Please get in touch with Andy or George at SCLD for an informal chat. Even if you're not quite sure if what you're doing is Citizen Leadership, we'd love to find out more about your work.

• You can call us on 0141 559 5720
• You can e-mail us at andy.m@scld.co.uk or george.g@scld.co.uk
• You can write to us at: 6th floor, Merchant Exchange, 20 Bell Street, Glasgow G1 1LG

Images provided are by kind permission of Clare Mills