From Consumer to Citizen: Falling Back in Love with Humanity

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The Next UN: Visions for a Regenerative Future

Silke v. Brockhausen

15 episodes

2 days ago

As the UN turns 80 and the campaign for the next Secretary-General gets underway, the world faces protracted conflicts, widening inequalities, and breached planetary boundaries. Against this backdrop, the podcast asks a pressing question: How can the UN become a platform through which people, institutions, and the more-than-human world repair and transform broken systems, and create conditions where life can thrive? Each episode invites regenerative practitioners — policy shapers, Indigenous knowledge-holders, peacebuilders, culture-makers, and frontline humanitarians

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Management

Business,

Non-Profit

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From Consumer to Citizen: Falling Back in Love with Humanity - with Jon Alexander

The Next UN: Visions for a Regenerative Future

36 minutes 20 seconds

2 months ago

From Consumer to Citizen: Falling Back in Love with Humanity - with Jon Alexander

In this thought-provoking conversation, Silke von Brockhausen speaks with Jon Alexander, strategist, storyteller, and co-founder of the New Citizen Project. Jon’s award-winning book Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us has inspired a quiet revolution—reframing us not as passive consumers of systems, but as active citizens shaping the future together.

Drawing from his work with governments, NGOs, and social movements worldwide, Jon invites UN staff and international practitioners to see regeneration as falling back in love with humanity. Together, they explore what it would mean for the UN to become a participatory ecosystem—one that harnesses collective intelligence, distributes power, and cultivates belonging across our shared planetary home.

Connect with Jon on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-alexander-11b66345/

Learn more about Jon: https://jonalexander.net/

Key Themes

From Consumer to Citizen: Why shifting our collective story is essential for the future of humanity.
Safe Uncertainty in Leadership: How to hold space for not-knowing and co-create solutions.
Institutional Renewal: Lessons from Taiwan’s crowdsourced pandemic response.
Post-Crisis Regeneration: Starting with what’s strong, not what’s wrong.
Citizen Assemblies: Democracy under good conditions—and how it could inspire the UN.
Distributed Power: Reimagining the UN as a pollinator of regenerative systems.

Takeaways

Regeneration means falling back in love with humanity.
The shift from consumer to citizen is essential for our shared future.
Institutions must evolve to support collective intelligence.
Leadership is about creating safe spaces for uncertainty.
Citizen agency is the foundation for lasting recovery.
Citizen assemblies can renew democracy and legitimacy.
Crowdsourcing participation can rewrite the social contract.
The UN’s future lies in distributed, not centralized, power.
We must celebrate existing citizen initiatives.
The future is messy, beautiful, and full of possibility.

Episode Chapters

00:00 — Introduction to Regeneration and the UN
02:32 — What Regeneration Really Means
05:02 — From Consumer to Citizen: A New Narrative
08:10 — The Power of Collective Intelligence
10:51 — Creating Conditions for Participation
13:40 — The UN’s Role in Crisis Situations
16:26 — Harnessing Citizen Agency
19:05 — Why Citizen Assemblies Matter
21:41 — Reimagining Global Governance
24:28 — The Future of the UN: A Distributed Power Model