Through Thick and Thin
How an infrastructure for relationships could unlock the collective action we need to accelerate progress towards a world designed for and around relationships
Lots of people in lots of different spaces are doing amazing work around building better relationships, but the connections between these nodes are often weak or non-existent. Drawing on conversations with over 100 people in late 2020 and early 2021, we (led by Iona Lawrence) explore the challenges we share in prioritising relationships in the places that we live and work and the work that needs to be done to address those needs.
Our shared and uniting goal is to build a world that is designed for and around relationships: a world where relationships are the first mile, not the extra one.
Building a Relationship Collective: Our Proposal
Building on the insights unearthed in Through Thick and Thin, we submitted an expression of interest to the Bringing People Together Fund at the National Lottery Community Fund to bring to life the idea of an infrastructure for relationships. Drawing inspiration from Joe Mills and friends in the democracy centre, we decided to publish the proposal in the open so everyone can see what we’re hoping to do and more easily explore ways to collaborate.
In short, the expression of interest we submitted is for a two year project to design, test and build the necessary infrastructure to support shared learning and collaboration in the field of relationships and relationship-centred practice in the coming decades.
We are delighted to say that our application was successful and, as of Autumn 2022, we are focused on developing the infrastructure for a thriving field of relationship-centred practice. Find out more about our plans for the next two years below.
Making relationships the first mile
After a year of research into simple, ordinary, human relationships, Iona Lawrence shared her initial findings in Through Thick And Thin. In this report, she illuminated a set of shared concerns, identified through hundreds of conversations around the state of our...
Measuring relationships: What’s the problem?
Over the course of hundreds of conversations about relationships, Iona Lawrence identified a shared challenge around measurement: We don't know how to measure relationships or whether the game of measurement is futile. In this blog, we seek to kickstart a generative...
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...
Collection from Swansea – Spirit of Lockdown #5
As part of our open call to Share your Story, we received this #SpiritOfLockdown collection from the Local Area Coordinators in Swansea. These seven people tell us about their experience and their journeys of the past turbulent year.
Good Business – Heatmap in Action
We know as a business that relationships are important to us and drive much of our work. We were excited to use the Relationships Heatmap tool to help us focus on relationships, and give us space and scaffolding to structure our thinking.
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.
Enrol Yourself: Heatmap in Action
Having collaborated with The Relationships Project to create the Heatmap tool, we were excited to try out the Heatmap tool ourselves, and see whether there are any levers we could pull on further to strengthen our approach to relationships.
Active Neighbours – Wendy
“[It’s] the feel good factor of helping people – it’s that thought: ‘oh I’ve just done something good today for people.’ And it’s just seeing people smile […] sort of grateful because you’ve helped them in some way.”
Active Neighbours – Sarah
“I got involved because it was something I could do – it was only small but I could do it around work. All the small things add up. If we can just brighten up someone’s day.”
Active Neighbours – Rachel
“What I love about what I do is the honesty of people and the kindness and how grateful the people are. It’s not about flash cars, it’s not about big houses – it’s literally just about spending time with people and having a bit of fun.”
