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Unlocking our hidden entrepreneurs

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The people closest to social challenges often have the best ideas to solve them - but the least ability to act. Not because they lack ideas, but because the system was never designed to back them.

Through our Citizen First model we find and back these hidden entrepreneurs , providing a year's Real Living Wage, seed funding and specialist support, and systematically mobilising local civic institutions, businesses and organisations around them.

The result: real agency for communities - citizens turning lived experience into businesses that change lives.

Citizen First: A Proven Model

Citizen First does not simply support individual entrepreneurs: it constitutes a missing layer of civic infrastructure - a repeatable mechanism for converting lived experience into local economic and social value, at a scale and cost-effectiveness that merits continued regional investment.

The model is codified and on its third deployment; its returns have been independently assessed twice, in two places - by the same research team, using the same methodology - with the ratio improving between them. On that basis, it warrants expansion to other towns and city regions.

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Explore our Independent Evaluation

This report presents an independent evaluation of Citizen First LCR's first year, conducted by researchers at Brunel University of London and Northumbria University, using social return on investment (SROI) analysis, participatory action research and oral history.

Click the tiles below to explore the report

Download the full report here

As featured on BBC Radio

People Fixing The World with Myra Anubi

Citizens First LCR

Citizen First LCR finds and backs the Liverpool City Region's hidden entrepreneurs - people with lived experience of the health and care challenges they're solving. We provide a year's Real Living Wage salary, seed funding and specialist support, and systematically mobilise local businesses, civic bodies and public services around each entrepreneur.

Hundreds applied through our CV-less process, and over the last nine months our inaugural cohort have been supported to build innovative businesses. From robots for healthcare to apps for sleep support, from tackling the NEET crisis to addressing knife crime - even a uniquely accessible mobile hair salon. Businesses that have already secured investment, funding, commercial partnerships and revenue.

Each entrepreneur has received business experimentation training and mentoring from Public Life, expert tech support from the University of Liverpool's Virtual Engineering Centre and Civic Health Innovation Labs, and hands-on support from organisations from across the City Region - all passionate about helping LCR's hidden entrepreneurs succeed.

I believe Public Life has the potential to change the way we tackle our country's most pressing social problems.

Dave Allan

Founder, ?WhatIf! Innovation

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Where James leads brave people follow and they and their communities reap the rewards.

Karen Badenoch

Hidden entrepreneur participant and Founder of Trusted Money Confidence