Citizens UK

Citizens UK is a people power alliance of diverse local communities working together for the common good. Our mission is to develop leaders, strengthen civic organisations and make change.

Citizens UK has 17 chapters across the UK made up of diverse, local institutions, including schools, universities, churches, mosques, synagogues, parent groups, health trusts, charities, and unions. Our 550 member communities are deeply rooted in their local areas and connect every day to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Through the method of community organising we enable people experiencing powerlessness to develop their leadership and come together with the power and strategy to make change.

This leads to hundreds of neighbourhood improvements – from zebra crossings outside primary schools to renovated public toilets in cemeteries. And it leads to some of the biggest campaign impacts in the UK, such as winning over £1.5 billion of wages through the UK Living Wage campaign, securing a legal cap on the cost of credit to control exploitative lending, and ending the detention of children for immigration purposes.

We enable local campaigns to grow into large-scale social change projects such as the Living Wage Foundation, Parents and Communities Together (PACT), Sponsor Refugees, and Refugees for Justice, that form an integral part of our theory of change. The most prominent of these is the rapidly growing Living Wage Foundation with a network of nearly 10,000 accredited Living Wage Employers across the UK.