A Beveridge for our time - Advocating a post-pandemic agenda for a better world.

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What Will Spring be Like? by Dr Christopher Steed is a thought-provoking and passionate book which advocates an agenda calling for comprehensive action and transformative change in response to the Covid pandemic. It is a vision of humans flourishing together and embedded in nature.  We have come to a turning-point in our value system.

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Contact us here to request a review copy

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If you are passionate about racial injustice, should you also be an advocate of environmental action? If yes, should you also be concerned that those on whom our way of life is so dependent should be properly valued?  Would you also be in favour of genuine economic value that provides worthwhiles jobs for worthwhile people?  Where does all that sit with social solidarity and the value of community we have re-discovered?  What these have in common is that they are different dimensions of genuine value and represent a crises in the human spirit.  The book brings those differences together.  Taking the ideas that are lying around, it is citizens coming together who give politicians courage to act.

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As 2020 dawned, the inequality debate, climate concerns, a demand for racial justice and the impact of artificial intelligence were already reaching breaking point. The onset of the pandemic not only revealed these pre-existing and profound cracks in our lives but began to pave the way towards re-shaping our future world. What will Spring be Like? recognises that 2020 is a moment of profound possibility. This is a time for creative thinking and unified change as we emerge from this collective experience and international trauma with a positive agenda.

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What will Spring be Like? captures this period of opportunity to re-imagine the future and build a new social model that works for more people, protects nature and has greater capacity for resilience. It seeks to bring a combination of vision and realism to the task of reconstruction with both passion and seriousness. This book assembles the wide-ranging concerns across society into a well-argued framework, asking readers ‘what sort of a world do they want to see?’ and ‘what will earth will be like for the younger generations who inherit it?’

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“Make big plans...deep into the future
Aim high in hope and work.
Have faith, remembering that a
Noble plan, once recorded, will never die
But long after we are gone
Will still be a living thing.”  [Goethe]

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The author implores leaders and intelligent thinkers to respond with empathy and imagination to this current crisis and provide page-turning, epochal leadership: “What is vital now is for high quality social analysis to combine with activists and show what a new future looks like; where every life really does matter and people flourish alongside each other and nature.”

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The book draws inspiration from the Beveridge agenda for change in the midst of the Second World War that led to effective public health care, better social conditions and which sat alongside post-war building international institutions and universal human rights.

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What will Spring be Like? is an enlightening book that will appeal to serious thinkers, academics and students alike. System change at a global level is both needed and happening before our eyes and this masterpiece takes a bold, visionary look at reshaping a better world from the chaos of this pandemic:
"The moment becomes a momentum; then a movement..."

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As a work of serious non-fiction, What will Spring be Like? closely succeeds the author’s publication, Letters From a Shuttered Country, which was also written during lockdown.

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Review Copies of What Will Spring be Like? are now available and interviews with the author can be arranged on request. Contact us here for details.

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What Will Spring be Like? is available to purchase from Amazon:

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Price: £17.99 (Paperback); £4.79 (Kindle)

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Pages: 340

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ASIN: B08F6GB5QF

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About the Author

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Dr Christopher Steed is a prolific writer, visiting professor at Winchester University, counsellor and educator who regularly contributes papers to conferences across multi-disciplinary boundaries on subjects he has taught. As an Anglican Minister and activist, he is currently developing St Mary's Eling, an eco-heritage project in a thousand year old church, as a beacon for the kind of society we want to build post-pandemic.

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Dr Steed has 12 years’ experience of policy making and management in Whitehall, and spent three years in a senior role as UK HQ Director of an international not-for-profit charity. He has also worked in senior management in the voluntary sector and for twenty-five years in the Parish. Chris is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (MBACP) and holds a Diploma in Clinical and Pastoral Counselling. He has also worked as a Pastoral counsellor and Community worker.

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As an Educator, Dr Steed has taught on the Winchester Pathway for ordinands and lay ministers and has worked at the Holocaust Education Trust, on the Imperial War Museum Education Programme, as a School Governor, and has taught theology, RE, philosophy, sociology and psychology. He holds an MSc in social theory and international relations, a PhD in theology and a doctorate in social sciences.
www.christophersteed.co.uk

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Books by the same author:

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• Letters From a Shuttered Country
• The Peaceweaver
• Let the Stones Talk
• A Question of Worth
• Smart Leadership – Wise Leadership
• We Count, We Matter
• Speech of the Suffering Soul
• A Question of Inequality, why it matters
• The Identification principle
• High Value Society

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ENDS