§6.2Co-Design With Veto

The community's power to stop the programme is real, and it is counted in numbers: proceeding to launch at any centre, the Lighthouses first, requires at least 40% of surveyed hawkers at that centre willing to engage, at least 100 signatures of support across its cluster, and a majority of the elected Hawker Council voting to proceed. At a Lighthouse, failing any threshold sends the design back to the community; failing twice, the plan seeks another centre with a similar cuisine strength, and if neither Lighthouse can open, the wind-up protocol is triggered. At a later pilot centre, failing means that centre does not open, and the plan looks for another willing one with a similar cuisine strength. A privately owned coffeeshop or food court faces one test before any of these: the board must recommend it, and the Hawker Council must not veto it (§3.8, §6.3). These thresholds are the Seed Bank's own test: it sets them for itself, and it can fail them. Two conditions sit outside it, and neither is the Seed Bank's to grant: the vote of the centre's own hawkers, and the agreement of NEA or, where it manages the centre, the Town Council (§7.7). A plan that cannot pass this bar should not exist; this one stakes its endowment on passing it honestly – which is also the strongest answer available to any future critic: the hawkers themselves voted it forward.

6.2.1Bringing the public in

Why. Hawker culture belongs to the people who cook and the people who eat. Both should shape this plan. Hawkers can stop it: the veto thresholds above give them that power. Diners hold it to account in other ways: the sunset clause (§3.8, §7.8) winds the programme up if it fails, and a later public ballot (below) gives diners a direct say. And trust in a new institution is earned in public, not announced. Every person who follows the work, names a dish or gives a dollar is someone the programme must answer to.

How. Five ways in, from the lightest to the heaviest:

• Follow it. Anyone can sign up for plain updates: what was decided, what was spent, and what the evaluator found.
• Name what you would save. Tell the Seed Bank which stall and which dish you would most hate to lose; twenty regulars together put a stall on the Regulars' List at Bronze, and more of them lift it, grade by grade. The answers feed the Endangered Dish Registry (§3.6) as one signal among several, never as a popularity vote on rescue.
• Give. Once the endowment exists (§7.6), a gift of any size is matched dollar for dollar until the $10M matching pool is used.
• Volunteer. Interpreters for dialect sessions, helpers for oral histories, hands for enrolment day and the events of §6.6.
• Decide. Later, an open public ballot on the plan's main choices, held beside the hawkers' own vote. The board commits to publish the result in full and to answer it in public. The hawkers' vetoes still decide.

None of this needs a new outreach arm. The PA is training 1,000 community facilitators from 2026, starting with the CCCs, and NEA's Vibrant Hawker Culture grants fund community projects in centres with the hawkers' association's support (the Record, A.1.2). The public sessions run through both.