My friend Glenn — Finding connection in a disconnected age
This time last year I learned the hard lesson that my friends and family had been trying to convince me of for my entire life: I am not invincible. Focused on the immediate pressures of setting up and running the Jo Cox Foundation in memory of my friend, I missed the warning signs. It was my neighbour Glenn who first pointed out that I didn’t look quite myself and triggered me to go to the GP.
Just weeks later I was preparing for major surgery to remove a fibroid from my womb that I had let go unnoticed for such a long time that it had grown larger than the womb itself. Non-cancerous but vicious in its own way, it had left me bloodless, extremely anaemic and robbing my organs of oxygen.
Glenn and I had met just a year earlier. I’d moved into a flat with a friend in a housing estate in Battersea in south London. Originally from Jamaica, Glenn had lived in London for decades and owned his flat for over 20 years. It was once he retired from being a tube driver a couple of months later that we really began to hit it off: my flatmate had a girlfriend on the other side of London and was away with work a lot so it was Glenn who became the constant in my day to day life.
I’d totter in and out of the flat at the crack of dawn and late at night, clip clopping down the concrete walkway in my heels waking everyone up and earning me the nickname Billy Elliot — I like to think it was affectionate but I could never be sure. Every couple of days Glenn would pop his head out to say hi and we’d hang out on the walkway having a quick catch up about our days and occasionally sharing one of his delicious but deadly rum cocktails.
I had set up the Jo Cox Foundation with Jo’s family just over a year earlier and together we were campaigning hard to raise the profile of loneliness and build stronger, closer communities to tackle it through initiatives like the Great Get Together. An issue I was so comfortable talking about in meetings with Government ministers, MPs and the amazing charities that made up the Jo Cox Loneliness Commission was one I was ironically reluctant to talk about personally. The complex struggles of running an organisation for the first time and my deteriorating health left me feeling inadequate, unable to cope and isolated.
‘YOUNG OR OLD, LONELINESS DOESN’T DISCRIMINATE’
For millions, this is a familiar story. Loneliness is the chasm that opens up when the social connections we have aren’t the quality or quantity of the connections we need or want. 14% of people feel always or often lonely with those aged 16–24 years feeling most often and most intensely so.
As Jo Cox said when she was developing her loneliness campaign that so many have picked up and driven forward since her murder: ‘young or old, loneliness doesn’t discriminate’.
Loneliness robs us of perspective and causes our closest bonds and so our safety nets to fray, leaving us cut out and cut off. In our communities it can undermine integration as people disengage. Eating away at empathy, loneliness can erode solidarity in our society supplanting it with a creeping sense of dislocation. And it can damage our economy, to the tune of £32 billion a year and costing employers alone £2.5 billion a year.
Humans are social beings, so loneliness is a challenge as old as humanity itself. But globalisation, gentrification, digitisation and automation are nebulous trends that are playing havoc on the way we connect at home, work and during leisure time. We share fewer family meals, increasingly connect online instead of face-to-face, increasingly work outside of traditional office or team environments, increasingly shop online, are less faithful and religious, and are less likely to belong to a trade union.
Research shows that while three quarters of people believe that connection with neighbours and community is of fundamental importance to local, regional and national wellbeing, an almost identical proportion do not themselves participate.
CONNECTION IN A DISCONNECTED AGE
But it isn’t all doom and gloom.
Despite the penchant of media and political voices to focus on what disconnects us, there are millions of individuals, groups, communities, charities and businesses across the UK working tirelessly to bring people together by creating spaces and places for relationships to thrive, often without realising they are. These people are building a new social infrastructure: blowing away the cobwebs of loneliness with everyday conversations and enabling people do what people do best: connect.
There is The Cares Family — a group of community networks in London, Liverpool and Manchester that brings together young professionals and older neighbours in rapidly changing urban areas to hang out, have fun and help each other. 81% of older neighbours who participate feel better connected as a result and 86% say they are better able to appreciate the world. Meanwhile 98% of the younger neighbours who participate say they have a greater connection to their community as a result and feel that they have been able to contribute to their community in a way they would otherwise have been unable to.
This work is remaking the rules of community work, defying the traditional relationships of volunteer and beneficiary and harnessing the power of truly local and reciprocal relationships to transform personal experiences of community and forging new perceptions of difference between groups that live side by side by seldom have the chance to interact.
And The Cares Family are the tip of the iceberg of people building welcoming places and spaces to connect.
There’s the Brighton Table Tennis Club which brings together young people, refugees and all members of the local community to play ping pong, Song and Smiles in Walthamstow set up by new mum Louise which brings together new parents, their babies and older people in care homes to connect through singing, the Tesco Extra store in Batley in Jo Cox’s constituency where their amazing Community Champion Simone goes above and beyond every day to create a warm and welcoming place for the whole community as well as taking Tesco out of the store and into the local area with resource and support. There’s the work led by Sam Everington in GP surgeries in Bromley by Bow in London which operates in partnership with their communities to refer people in need of a conversation to local groups and clubs. There are the millions of people who have taken part in The Great Get Together and The Big Lunch weekends in June every year. And there are millions of people like my mum and dad in rural Suffolk who are always dropping in and out of their neighbours’ doors to check in and check up on those who’ve recently lost loved ones, who have experienced relationship breakdown or those who might be struggling with the arrival of a new baby.
What connects all these stories is the belief in the power of human relationships. And it’s those relationships that unleash the power of what Jo Cox herself has now become synonymous with — the belief that we have more in common than that which divides us.
Human relationships matter and they matter enormously in times of challenge and change. Each of the moments of connection described here might feel random on their own, almost a mistake or by-product of something else. But taken together they amount to a tidal wave of connection that is louder and more powerful than the forces that are atomising communities and rendering millions of people lonely.
THE CARES TRUST
As Carnegie UK Fellow Julia Unwin has been at the helm of making the case for — we need a new contract that recognises and unleashes the power of deep human connections. Fit for the 21st century, this contract would see government policy, community support, business strategy and everyday life enable life-giving and frankly cost-saving human relationships. This work has begun at many levels including nationally with the work of Tracey Crouch MP as Minister for Loneliness who powerfully made the case for more connected communities in the strategy published last month as well as through the launch of the pioneering Building Connections Fund in June. But this is just the beginning.
Having been inspired by The Cares Family’s work to craft this new contract when I ran the Jo Cox Foundation, I’m now delighted to be a part of The Cares Family team. Together with the Founder and recently appointed Obama Foundation Fellow, Alex Smith, we are exploring what more we can do to help forge this new contract. Rooted in the community-led approach of The Cares Family and the mutual relationships the networks are forging, we are seeking to build a new body of work under the working title The Cares Trust.
The Cares Trust is rooted in the powerful action that is bringing people together to build better connected communities. We will work with groups across the country who want to join us to find ideas that work, share the evidence, create open source ideas for others to trial in their own communities and inspire people who want to do more of this work to roll up their sleeves. This work is perhaps best articulated in the inspiring work of Mike Niles, a former North London Cares volunteer who returned to his home town with his Cares Family experience and has set up a project to bring neighbours together in the community he knows and loves the best.
Led by community experience of what works and the amazing connections that result, The Cares Trust will find new ways to tell powerful stories of connections and connected communities to inspire more of it. We will work in partnership with communities to forge a new national conversation to unleash a new social contract rooted in strong relationships.
If this sounds good to you because you either do this work already or want to do more of it, we’d love to hear from you. Together we can celebrate the kinds of radical, everyday friendships like I have with Glenn, and create a new contract that will fasten the thick ties that bind people together.
