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Thirty ideas from people under 30: The Change Agents

They are explorers and activists, artists and educators, farmers and faith leaders – even mayors. And they have trenchant suggestions on how to improve the world.

Adam Fitzmaurice: Occupy London activist

Ian Evans
Adam Fitzmaurice at Occupy London camp at St Paul's Cathedral.

  • By Monitor staff and correspondents

For a member of a protest movement supposedly disillusioned with modern democracy, Adam Fitzmaurice has a surprising answer to societal disengagement: more democracy.

“I’d like to see general assemblies set up where normal people can meet and discuss major issues,” says Mr. Fitzmaurice, 28. “I don’t want them to be another tier in the current structure, but a gathering, say, once a month. We could set them up first in towns and cities and then spread them out to the countryside – people having a direct say on what’s happening around them.”

Fitzmaurice, an American, moved to the UK in September to study music industry management at a university. He joined the Occupy London campaign when it set up camp around St Paul’s Cathedral in October and later Finsbury Park and then a disused UBS office in Hackney, where he currently stays.

“Look at us in St Paul’s. We’re a pretty small group of committed people, but we’ve forced a 180 degree turn in attitude from the Church of England, got the business secretary to put a cap on CEO pay, met the head of the Financial Services Authority, and got [Prime Minister] David Cameron talking about a Robin Hood tax. All that in just two months."

“When I was growing up in Missouri, farmers refused to sell their grain because the price was too low. They got together and only sold when they got a decent price. That’s what society can do when it works together, and I think assemblies could achieve that.”

– Ian Evans, London

Next: Ammar Aziz: Voice for Pakistani poor

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

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“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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