Mark Cridge, Chief Executive
We’ve learned to live with a lot of things in 2021. Against a backdrop of a never-ending pandemic, hard won rights are under threat; protest is being criminalised; and action to combat the climate crises benefits from lots of fine words but little real change in behaviour.
At mySociety we see our work as being more important than ever: helping people be active as citizens, holding power to account, and understanding how decisions are made on our behalf by our elected representatives. In this annual review for 2021 we’ll celebrate the really powerful and exciting work we’ve been able to put together over the year, the amazing staff and volunteer team that allows us to do this, and the millions of people who benefit from using our services.
Given the scale of the challenges we are all facing together, we’ve realised that we need to make some significant changes to how we operate in the future.
We recently set out some thinking about the shifts we need to make in how we work, and why we think that, as a society, we need to repower democracy.
Repowering democracy means finding better ways to collectively tackle societal level problems; creating supportive spaces for our leaders to make the difficult decisions that will be needed in years to come. It means improving the legitimacy and effectiveness of representative democracy so that it’s better able to embrace participatory democracy — creating the conditions for citizen and community power to thrive and flourish. There is a lot to be done.
So, enjoy hearing about what we’ve been up to in 2021, and we look forward to seeing how we can repower democracy with you in 2022.
Catherine Brown,
