Imagine your local school offers you a stake in it for an incredibly low price.

All you need to do is spend less than the price of a textbook and you get a slice of the school.

You get invited to an annual celebration of how great it is, and you get free samples of learning in the post as a ‘thank you’ for your financial support.

You also get the groovy feeling that you’re part of something bigger than you.

What I’ve just described is precisely how the system works today. Whether you use your local state school or are fortunate to be able to pay into a private school education, you’re doing the same thing. We pay for one with taxes, and the other with cash, but in neither case do we get a tangible stake in the school itself. Our stake is entirely imaginary, a metaphor.

Now, imagine you don’t even send a kid to your local school. Would you stump up the cash? Of course, all of us do.

But why don’t we think of it as a massive honour to have a stake in our local schools? Why do we think of them, and our hospitals, police, social services and other public bodies as our servants, not our very own organisations which we have a stake?

Why do we have an “us” and a “them” on the news every night?

One reason is that public services struggle to quantify their value. Maybe to them it’s because it seems so obvious, to the point of not needing to explain their value. What if we could get away from that?

In the world of beer, they understand that nothing should be assumed.

Scottish brewery, BrewDog, has for nearly a decade done just this kind of equity release in the world of beer. 47,000 people have stumped up varying sums of cash to become part of BrewDog’s global Equity Punk community.

Those who were in at the start have seen over 2500% increase in the value of their stake.

They get invited to some of the coolest parties around, get to taste new beers, and have the inside track on new plans. It’s so popular they have to close investment cycles to cope with the numbers. Their investors get to see, taste, experience and feel part of something huge, in a way that most governments, not-for-profits or education institutions dream every constituent could.

The Port of Leith Distillery, my new ‘local’ and a phenomenal events space we’ve just started to use for VIP client getaways, has its own “Quality Control Division” comprised of individuals who’ve stumped up some cash in the early days, years before they’ll be able to taste the first barrels of whisky. The pay for the same fuzzy feeling we should all have for our local services, but they’re given tangible ‘inside tracks’ on how things are done, too. Tasting events, business updates, and access to the owners (not too much, but a little to justify the spend).

Too many public services act like servants to their people, ‘serving’ rather than working with communities. The best that can happen in the 'Good Times' is that people just don’t think too much about the services around them. They take them for granted. The worst thing that happens is that, during the 'Bad Times', we blame them for what’s not working, and they get defensive, or give us the silent treatment (“we couldn’t possibly comment on an individual case”...).

What if, instead of assuming the public know they have a stake in their local services, we all got share certificates showing just how much we’ve already invested in them, and what amazing value we’re getting in return?

Why wait until the next crisis to applaud our health workers? Why not applaud them every day we get an update on the tremendous value we’re getting in return for our investment? Or see powerful visualisations of how our local school truly does make a difference to outcomes for young people, even if we don’t send kids to it?

A change in perception is more than just marketing or storytelling. Equity for the people means we all have a stake in the world around us, for better or for worse, through the good times and the tough times. And that is what might make the world a little better tomorrow.