Citizens Advice

Free
Available online soon

One of our favourite parts of the shop is a shelf we have dedicated to Citizen's Advice. Citizens Advice Bureaux deliver advice services from over 3,300 community locations in England and Wales, run by 338 registered charities.

As the UK’s largest advice provider they deal with a huge range of issues spanning debt and employment to housing and immigration plus everything in between.

During 2012/13 they helped 2.1 million people to solve 6.6 million problems.

We think they are pretty amazing, not only as the largest provider of advice for citizens but also as a public and social institution.

In the shop we have the Live Advice guide which shows in realtime the kinds of issues that citizens need advice about on a day to day basis. In terms of a civic gauge of real world issues, this is it. If you haven't seen this, we suggest looking immediately!

A theme of the Civic Shop is looking at the distribution of knowledge and the role a social institution can have in that. Citizens Advice have a wealth of content on their website, full of useful and necessary civic advice, that the brilliant designer Sam Dunne used to create Citizens Greeting Cards. Whether someone you know is off work poorly, or has a new job, or a new rented home, these cards give them information on all their rights as citizens.

The cards aren't for sale, they are gifts, but we are asking people to come up with other ideas about how civic knowledge can be distributed in more accessible and interesting and publicly discoverable ways.