What’s your Spirit of Lockdown?

Share your story to inspire a better, more connected future

The stories we tell now about our response to Covid-19 will shape how we look back on this time, and how we move forward as a society.

What are the truths that will inspire our better days?
What’s the spirit you want to bottle to guide your way forward?

Share your story of lockdown and join a community of story sharers across the country in celebrating the power of relationships and inspiring a conversation about how we can build back better, stronger and more connected.

Share a written story

Share a multimedia story

Explore others’ stories

Whether you’re looking for inspiration to write your own story or simply to understand people’s experiences during the lockdown, dive into our latest submissions.

Observatory Sighting 14: Lockdown and deep-tissue damage

In this Observatory Sighting, we explore acute, long-term and easily overlooked 'deep-tissue' damage resulting from relationship upheaval during lockdown and enforced separation. As we move towards the Out Turn, we must recognise and repair this damage. We recently...

Micro Care

Are there clues in the pandemic experience for the development of more community based, relationship centred social care? What would need to change and what support would it require? Here, David considers the implications, and the potential, for transforming the approach to social care.

The magic of finding my peers of relationship-centred practitioners

In brief On the 23rd November 2022, 80 relationship-centred practitioners came together at Northumbria University to unpack the how, what and why of relationship-centred practice. We shared some of our key takeaways in this letter and, here, Fabian Pfortmüller...

Relationship Makers Blog

In this blog post, Immy reflects on our first Relationship Makers programme delivered in partnership with Power to Change. Bringing together a cohort of community businesses over the course of 8 weeks, we connected, reflected and provided one an other with some balm for the chaos that was 2020.

My journey with the Campaign to End Loneliness

In brief In this Joining the Dots blog, Laura Alcock-Ferguson, the founding Director of the Campaign to End Loneliness, reflects candidly on the highs and lows of her nine years at the helm. Laura is an activist and has worked for and led social change on...

Relationships are Everything

In brief Enrol Yourself takes a relationship-centred approach to lifelong learning, connecting adults into peer groups that help each individual multiply their learning over 6 months. Enrol Yourself train 'Hosts' who lead these peer groups. We're featuring a mini blog...

Observatory Sighting #7: Taking stock (part 1/2)

In this, our seventh Observatory Sighting, we begin to take stock of what we’ve learnt about the response to the outbreak of coronavirus.

Carnegie Trust UK – Heatmap in Action

In our work on kindness and flourishing towns, we’ve thought a lot about how we create the conditions for relationships in communities. We were interested to use the Heatmap to see how it works and what we could learn about our relationships with a much broader network of people and organisations.

Active Neighbours – Nick

“I saw that there was an NHS Responder app. I saw that, and […] I just wanted to get involved and kind of help out and do what I could – because I saw the NHS and all the lengths that everyone was going to […] And I saw quite a few community efforts on Facebook and I thought it was something I could do to help out with.”

How to care for Warm Welcome Volunteers: A guided reflection

In brief In this blog, originally written for the Warm Welcome Network, we review what we learnt about community responses to the pandemic to ask how we can sustain and maintain the momentum in community-based responses to the cost of living crisis. In the early...

Everyone is welcome

You don’t need to be an experienced storyteller to take part. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar or being the next JK Rowling – we want to hear about your experience of lockdown in your voice and in whichever format works best for you.

You might want to write your story, to video it, audio record it, draw it, tell it alone, tell it in pairs. Choose the format that works best for you and get sharing!

share a written story

share a multimedia story

Populating the map

We’re building an interactive map to showcase and celebrate stories of lockdown from across the UK. In early 2021 we’ll be inviting storytellers and local decision makers to come together to draw out lessons and shape a better, more connected society post-Covid.

You are under no obligation whatsoever to consent to your story being shared publicly – it’s entirely up to you to decide whether you’d like to share it or keep it private. Whichever format you decide to share your story – written or multimedia – please take a moment to let us know whether you’re happy for your story to be shared.