How kind is your community?

A Food not Waste meal in Crystal Palace in south London. Sharing food together creates kinder communities, a new report says.

A new report from Carnegie UK Trust puts kindness at the heart of local change, as Zoe Ferguson reports

When we started out on this project six months ago it soon became clear that talking about kindness does not sit comfortably with many of us. On a personal level, we fear getting involved in difficult situations, of being asked to give too much or of being seen as needy. On a professional level, it might seem irrelevant or even frivolous in the face of austerity and other global challenges.

The more we talked to people, both in a professional and a personal context about this work, the more we have been surprised and greatly encouraged by people’s openness to take kindness seriously, to think about what it means in their own lives and in their work and to recognise its importance to many of our greatest societal challenges.

In fact, the questions this project asks about our attitudes and behaviour towards each other as well as the relationships we have with our institutions are vital, both if we are to experience fairness in wellbeing and our public services are to be sustainable.

There is a body of evidence that consistently shows that positive relationships and kindness are at the very heart of our wellbeing. This project builds on JRF research which showed that acts of kindness may be small scale but nevertheless significant and can be difficult among the challenges presented by life, particularly for those experiencing poverty and disadvantage. The evidence shows that this ‘infrastructure of kindness’ underpins community cohesion, participation and engagement.

We wanted to understand what factors might enable or inhibit forming and maintaining everyday relationships and the capacity to act in kindness. We found that there are factors relating to the relative disadvantage of where we live, distinctive histories and our own biographies which shape the nature of our neighbourhoods. But it does appear that communities can have very different infrastructures, values and atmospheres in very similar conditions and that regardless of other factors that can make a big difference.

Our work to date suggests that there might be some practical steps which could encourage kinder communities. The next stage of the project will take an approach of learning with communities and organisations involved in developing practical approaches, which explore the role of:

• noticing our connections and behaviour;
• permission to engage and boundaries for our relationships;
• the stories of our neighbourhoods and how they inform our behaviour;
• places to gather, particularly outdoors;
• the role of staff between the formal and informal;
• the interface with public services;
• sharing food together; and
• the journey from kindness and fun to community empowerment.

We are working in partnership with seven organisations over the next nine months and aim to capture experiences to:

• identify approaches that communities can take at their own hand;
• identify barriers at the interface between public, voluntary and private sectors and provide a voice back to those constituents as to what might enable rather than inhibit kinder communities.

We aim to share our learning in a final report and a conference next June.

• Kinder Communities: The Power of Everyday Relationships by Zoe Ferguson