Citizen First works because it brings together the two halves of community-led change that have never been properly connected. On one side: citizens with the lived experience, business ideas and entrepreneurial spirit to solve problems in their own communities. On the other: the businesses and institutions with the resources, networks and reach to back them.
Citizen First is the missing activation layer that connects them. The model has five elements, refined across three deployments:
1. Inclusive opportunity - a CV-less, open-call recruitment process that reaches deep into communities.
2. Financial stability - a year's Real Living Wage salary plus seed funding, removing the barriers to participation.
3. Meaningful support - small, tight-knit cohorts with a dedicated full-time business advisor.
4. Specialist expertise - training, tools and expert mentoring in business experimentation, alongside tech development support.
5. A powerful local network - local institutions, public, private and civic, systematically mobilised around each entrepreneur, embedding their enterprise in the wider system from day one.
These elements are designed to compound rather than simply add: the salary enables full-time commitment; full-time commitment makes entrepreneurs credible, durable partners for local institutions; institutional engagement makes the ventures investable; and the accumulated relationships change what the place itself is able to do. As the independent evaluation puts it, "it is this causal chain – not any single element – that defines the model."
The Liverpool City Region programme is the model's third deployment: developed through small-scale trials with housing associations in five English regions, forged into a year-long open programme in Essex in 2023, and refined again for the Liverpool City Region. Across those deployments, entrepreneurs have built businesses tackling challenges from healthcare and sleep support to financial resilience, youth unemployment and accessible design.
The model's returns have been independently assessed twice, most recently by Brunel University of London and Northumbria University: £10.43 of social and economic value for every £1 invested, in the first year alone – with the ratio improving between deployments.
"What was missing was never the demand – it was the means to meet it. Citizen First provided that means: a missing layer of civic infrastructure."
Independent evaluation, Brunel University of London and Northumbria University, 2026
Three deployments have refined the model. Independent evaluation has validated it. We're now working with partners to bring Citizen First to more places.
Bring Citizen First to your community
