“It’s nice that they care, isn’t it?”

“It’s nice that they care, isn’t it?” 😊

“Do you think they’re all doing community service?” 🤣

Just a couple of the comments I overheard today, when I joined about 30 other volunteers to clean and re-paint railings along the sea wall in the town where I live.

Set against the backdrop of derelict hotels, it would be easy to argue that this was the equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic … and yet … it felt like we made a difference.

Broken Windows Theory is the idea that an environment communicates norms to people - that we look around us for clues on how to behave. If a broken window is quickly repaired, that sends one message - but if it is ignored, it becomes more likely that another window will get broken [and then another, and so on]. The theory has its critics, and it certainly isn’t a magic bullet - but there’s something powerful in the idea of communicating “this is how we behave round here.”

And so today, without actually saying it, 30 people said “we care about this place” - a message that was witnessed by the hundreds [thousands?] of people who walked along the seafront in that time.

I am increasingly thinking that the most important response to everything happening in the world is re-connection - with People, and also with Place … both of which happened today.

This isn’t to say that painting railings is ‘enough’ - but it is something …