As Mayor of Lincoln she faced changes on both a local and national level, but now Rosanne, or “Rosie” to her Twitter followers, Kirk is stepping back from local politics.
“We’ve had a historic year, we knew about the platinum jubilee, but we didn’t know that the queen was going to pass.” She said.
“Being involved in such a historic year and having to proclaim the King 3 times- I would never have known that was going to happen.
We also experienced the closing of RAF Scampton, so We’ve had quite a lot of emotional, historic events throughout our year.”
Rosie introduced new social media accounts, which she believes have been a success.
“I think social media is really important for the younger generations,” she said.
“Facebook is slightly older, so I wanted to do the whole range. TikToks for the young, Instagram for the young, and Facebook for more mature people so I have a whole age range to show what the Mayor of Lincoln does.
I think a lot of my followers have learned what the Mayor has done, and it’s promoted Lincoln, not just to Lincoln, but to the whole world.”
When she became mayor last year, Rosie said that: “Students are essential to our city”.
One year later, she said that it was “incredible to walk through the main doors of the Cathedral and be there, celebrating with the graduates”.
“They really appreciated the mayor being there and they learned more about the mayor, and that’s good for history and heritage.”
Though she has faced many changes, such as the end of the Lincoln Christmas Market, she said she wouldn’t change a thing.
Her advice to the new mayor is to: “pace themselves. It’s a great journey, it’s quite tiring, you do lots of speeches and you have to prepare, so I would say he needs to prepare and pace himself otherwise he’d just get exhausted.”