Love Sheffield X Project Ignite

Brian Mosley is the powerhouse behind two exciting projects in Sheffield. Love Sheffield connects thousands of people to connect by celebrating what they love about the City and the natural world it is rooted in. Project Ignite is a community of folk committed to transform the civic life of Sheffield from the grassroots up.

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Author: Brian Mosley

If you are reading this as a friend of Citizen Network, you are someone who cares about people having real lives, real choices and a sense of belonging. That is exactly what we are trying to grow, beginning in our home city through Love Sheffield and Project Ignite. We are working from the same starting point as Citizen Network, belief in every person’s value, commitment to inclusion, and the idea that people thrive when they can contribute.

My path into this work began not with a plan, but with shock and grief. In 2016 I was driving along Penistone Road in Sheffield when I noticed that a line of street trees had been reduced to stumps. I felt physically sick and had to pull over. That moment pulled me into the tree campaign and the intense conflict that followed. In the end the felling stopped. What stayed with me, though, was not only the trees. It was the realisation that the whole affair had been about disconnection between citizens and decision makers, and between different parts of the city.

Love Sheffield began as a peaceful space online where people could share what they love about our city. No shouting, no pile ons, no party political point scoring. Just thousands of Sheffielders choosing to pay attention to kindness, creativity and the everyday courage that rarely makes headlines. Our motto is “Uniting Hearts, Igniting Change.” In my work I describe connection as the way life energy, experienced as love, brings our inner selves to engage with reality. When people feel seen, heard and trusted, something shifts. They remember they have agency and begin to act again in their streets, workplaces and families.

Through Love Sheffield I have had the privilege of walking alongside grassroots leaders who live this every day. Community organisers, recovery groups, youth projects and small neighbourhood charities all show the same pattern. Where people are invited to bring their real selves, gifts and wounds included, the room changes. Hope becomes practical and people begin to imagine different futures for their neighbourhoods.

Project Ignite grew from that ground. If Love Sheffield is the gathering place, Project Ignite is the engine room where we ask:

“How do we tilt the floor so that connection, contribution and community become the easiest path rather than the uphill one?” 

It is a city wide movement that works with neighbourhoods, anchor institutions and citizen groups to build what I call economies of meaning and belonging, starting from what already exists rather than waiting for rescue from outside.

In practical terms this means designing ways for people to have more security, more connection and more real chances to contribute. Our Basic Empowerment work explores how income support, shared assets and small neighbourhood funds can be organised so that people are not only helped to cope, but invited to shape new projects and livelihoods together. 

The aim is simple, reduce poverty not only by topping up income, but by strengthening local control, shared ownership and the habit of mutual support.

Underneath this sits an idea that I call contributive justice.

For a long time, most talk about justice has focused on what people receive and on whether procedures are fair. Yet I kept noticing another kind of ache. People were not only short of resources. They were short of chances to give.

Contributive justice asks a different, but connected, question. Instead of looking only at what people receive from society, it asks what society makes it possible for people to become through meaningful participation. It is the conviction that every human being has both the right and the need to contribute something real, however small, and that a just community will work hard to clear the obstacles that block that contribution. We need food and housing. We also need to feel useful, to see our efforts matter, to be trusted with responsibility. When people are reduced to permanent clients or service users, when they are seen only as problems to be managed, something in them withers. When they are invited to show they can help, something brightens again.

For me, Love Sheffield and Project Ignite are two practical attempts to ground this idea in one city. Love Sheffield builds the cultural soil, the stories and relationships that remind people they matter. Project Ignite then works with partners to redesign systems and local economies so that contribution is expected, enabled and shared. The values running through both are simple, kindness, compassion, creativity and agency.

This is where the connection with Citizen Network feels so natural. Citizen Network has long argued that everyone is a citizen, not a client, and that communities thrive when people have real roles, real voice and real chances to shape the places where they live. Contributive justice is another way of describing that same truth. A good society is not one where a few experts carry the load while everyone else watches. It is a society where we build the conditions for each person to offer what they can, and where we organise our institutions to welcome that contribution.

My hope is that Sheffield can serve as a living laboratory within this wider community of practice. We are trying neighbourhood level empowerment schemes, contribution based exchanges and work with anchor institutions around connected enterprise to bring people together rather than push them apart. It is all a work in progress, honest work, rooted in real streets and real relationships.

So this is my invitation. If you see threads here that speak to your own context, I would love to be in conversation. Perhaps you are already building something similar in your own city or country.

From where I stand, looking out across Sheffield, I am convinced of this, there is far more human potential in our neighbourhoods than any policy paper can capture. When that potential is welcomed, trusted and organised with care, whole cities can change. That is the journey we are on with Love Sheffield and Project Ignite.

Find out more about Love Sheffield at: http://lovesheffield.net and Project Ignite at: https://lovesheffield.substack.com/p/introducing-project-ignite

If you'd like to get in touch with Brian please send him an email.

The publisher is Citizen Network. Love Sheffield X Project Ignite © Brian Mosley 2025.