The Citizen Professional: Working with Families and Communities on Problems People Care About

This paper gives an overview of the idea of the citizen professional and the author’s development in this way of working with communities. Citizen professionals engage deeply and democratically with fellow community members in co-creating solutions to public problems. They see the traditional professional expert and provider/consumer models as inadequate for the complex problems we face in health care, human services, government, and education. Citizen professionals aim to restore the civic nature of the professions and revive the ethic of "we the people" tackling the problems of our time. The paper also describes the principles and main strategies of the Families and Democracy Model, and illustrates the model with several community projects. The central tenet of this approach is that the greatest untapped resources for improving the health and wellbeing of families and communities is the energy and experience of people who have faced challenging issues in their own lives.