People, Place, Proactivity: Why I Love The Cares Family

Recently, a friend asked me, “What does The Cares Family mean to you, really?” It was a thoughtful question, and there are many answers. I could riff for days on the issues: why loneliness is a personal crisis, a public health crisis and a political crisis; how society is built on power and powerlessness concentrated through pockets of relationships and, on the other hand, isolation; how disconnection from people from different generations, backgrounds and experiences is a gateway into social injustice, racial injustice, educational inequity, underemployment, homelessness and so many of our social ills; how, as one person once said, The Cares Family seeks to soften the harsher impacts of modern capitalism, and to do so at the human level. But I suppose the simplest and fullest answer to my friend’s question is that I feel a deep sense of belonging to, pride in and, in the end, love for the organisation that I’ve spent the past 12 years of my life building — and even more so to the philosophy that underpins it.

PHILOSOPHY

That philosophy is rooted in the notion that The Cares Family isn’t — never was, and never will be — a service. At the grassroots, it is a collection of local people coming together to build trust, solidarity and ultimately power through the type of meaningful relationships that can help us all to navigate a rapidly changing world. That is the heart of this movement and is a principle reflected in the thousands and thousands of emotive interactions that take place every year in our five local charities and our national programmes too.

But as well as a big heart, The Cares Family also has a practical head. At the organisational level, we have always sought to be entrepreneurial and innovative. We are ambitious for our model because we believe it will be more needed, and can make a bigger impact, as the world continues to transform around us. To make sure we are set up to do that, we have sought to be motivated, open-minded and pragmatic: adaptable, nimble, dynamic, working with all partners who can support our mission no matter their politics or worldview and sometimes because of those differences. And we are business-minded, believing in the power of surpluses, investment, and finding a biting point of comfort and discomfort to grow our ideas and impact.

Both of these things matter to me equally: the heart and the head. And what I’ve realised is that some of these instincts — of community and how connection moves at the speed of trust; of a dynamic growth mindset; and of those two fundamental elements working in tandem and occasionally in tension — are equally important to The Cares Family institutionally. That’s why, as I move on from the organisation that continues to mean so much to me, we have codified our values again under the core principles of People, Place and Proactivity.

Two stories from our work over the past 12 years illustrate this head and heart concept — the importance not only of people and place, but of proactivity (and bravery) too.

TRUST

When Liverpool Cares introduced Sophia and Eileen, our team noticed a special connection. Sophia was a 19-year-old student who’d just moved to the city and who was excited about the world she was entering but apprehensive about the transition she was going through. Meanwhile, Eileen was an 86-year-old retiree who had lived in Liverpool her whole life, whose eyesight had slowly deteriorated to almost complete blindness.

Sophia and Eileen didn’t know they needed each other. But when Sophia spotted an album of Eileen’s decades-old wedding photos on a shelf in her new friend’s home, and carefully described back to Eileen the images that she herself was seeing for the first time, it opened up a time and precious relationships for Eileen that otherwise had existed only in her own memory.

Eileen and Sophia shared something vital in that moment — not just a sense of being visible and useful to one another, but of a thread of humanity that exists and is sustained over time. Tens of thousands of older and younger people have shared similarly precious moments over the past 12 years. How those moments lead to a collective sense of belonging is the reason The Cares Family exists, and it’s why our neighbours are the beating heart in our work.

NEIGHBOURLINESS

Secondly, there are our staff teams — the people identified time and again in evaluations as the glue in The Cares Family’s model, the people who have always brought neighbours together with care, empathy and love, and who, reflecting our core principles, are also practical, flexible, determined and brave in how they do so.

In 2019, just before we adapted to meet the challenges of the pandemic, a colleague demonstrated how our teams are so special. In a routine check-in call with an older neighbour one weekday afternoon, she sensed something was wrong. She consulted our policies which, for reasons of respect and safeguarding, suggested that she avoid turning up at the older neighbour’s home unannounced. But she wasn’t satisfied.

What would a neighbour do?, my colleague asked herself. Thirty minutes later, our colleague was at the door of the older person who had collapsed with a heart attack. She immediately called paramedics, who said that her quick thinking had saved her friend’s life. In an age of fear, our colleague was brave and bold enough to do the neighbourly thing, to choose the human reaction, rather than just take a systematic response — and it mattered.

PLACE

It still matters today. As The Cares Family has updated its strategy to go deeper in our local communities and also to spur a ripple of connection nationally — while earning a profile around the world as well — we are continuing to think about the vitality of proactivity, people and our places.

In the opening session of our Multiplier programme, in each of the last three years, I have spoken about my own place — the place where I grew up during the 1980s: Camden Town. It was a vibrant community, full of the music and the diversity and cultures of people arriving from all over the world. It was then as it is now a place of restless pace and change. But I also had another place as I grew up: a tiny village in northeast Lincolnshire; the place where my grandparents were born, baptised, married, celebrated the weddings of their daughters and mourned the loss of their son, and where they were ultimately buried themselves. The only thing that ever seemed to change in this village was the addition of a new headstone in the churchyard from time to time.

It was this dual-place upbringing that showed me that intergenerational connection is enriching, beautiful and magic; that social liberalism and social conservatism can and should co-exist with mutual respect and empathy in our individual relationships and in our national discourse at large; that this country is diminished by a relative lack of those relationships and the nurturing of belonging across difference; and that, by bringing people together to share time, laughter, experiences and learning, we can build an age of empathy in times of change.

LOVE

So while our founding story of my friendship with Fred still articulates why The Cares Family is important and how the idea first arose, and while I have so valued so many life-changing relationships with older and younger people and other community builders I’ve met over the last 12 years, it has always been my grandparents that I think most deeply about as we have built The Cares Family, mindful of the lessons I learned from them and from my schoolmates in Camden Town alike.

It’s this combination of a deeply-held desire to see richness in difference, a fidelity to people and their places, and a willingness to be proactive — all held simultaneously — that makes The Cares Family what it is: a community that builds connection between people who may not normally interact, within the constraints of the society and economy that we have created, and which works hard to deepen that connection for the benefit of individuals, communities and society at large. Those are the threads that mean so much to me, really, and why I will always love and be grateful for The Cares Family, and to everyone who makes it so meaningful.