Author: Pete Askew
The campaign, its origins & the big challenge
I lived for my first 23 years in York, then West Africa, then Leicester, before moving to Manchester in 2000 where I married a wonderful Mancunian woman. Since then, Manchester has become my adopted home, and the place where we’re raising our kids.
Manchester – and the surrounding area – has a lot to offer. It’s a great place for music, sport, shopping, restaurants and comedy. This city was also chosen to have the National Football Museum and has an emerging arty neighbourhood called the Northern Quarter. To the east, where I live is the National Cycling Centre, a great Squash Centre and the Etihad Stadium, home to Manchester City Football Club.
Outside of central Manchester there is the newly-developed Media City (home to BBC and ITV), the iconic Salford Lads Club and, of course, Old Trafford (home of Manchester’s other big football club, Manchester United).
I love Manchester and the surrounding area. However, despite Manchester having a reputation for being friendlier than London, and other places, Manchester does still have its problems.
It has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the whole country, a fairly high crime rate (although this has improved in the years I’ve been around to witness a real change) and just on Friday when I was at work, working for a homeless charity my mobile phone was stolen from under where I was working.
The number of people referred to my work for food parcels because they have got into financial problems is massive – 43 in January alone. The number of street homeless in Manchester itself is estimated at around 180 at the time of writing, and we are in a time where the Government – both central and local – has very little reserves to tackle the massive problems.
There is another problem, one very common to most of us, and something that’s hard to face. We have all got so very, very busy. We’re busy people. We don’t seem to have time to stop and chat. I commute to work and back up to 2 ½ hours per day and so I’m not very sociable at this point, often asleep or in my own zone with headphones on.
I don’t have a lot of time or energy left at the end of a busy day to do something you’d write about in the papers. After doing structured youth work for about 13 years, my current job is more demanding than even before and my own kids need a lot of time so I can no longer do night after night of youth and community work at my stage in life.
I do have this nagging feeling that something needs to change both in Manchester and in me. The problem is in Manchester and in all of us.
Each of us have these moments when we’re aware of someone else’s need, but don’t necessarily have the time, money or imagination to do much about it.
Despite wanting to do something to help, what we often do, and this is where we have to be honest even if it’s inconvenient, is nothing. We do nothing. We go out to work or college or whatever, we come home, maybe watch TV or do house chores or go to the pub, then we go to bed. And start it all over again the next day.
Rather than coming up with a grand vision with highly-structured and overly-prescriptive expectations, as I was praying late in 2016, an idea dawned on me…
It was inspired by 3 things,
- My neighbour who paid the bill of a customer in front of her in the queue because her card declined.
- The reminder of an old film called “Pay It Forward” .
- And then, mostly my hero, Jesus Christ.
I started asking this simple question…
“What if we could change Manchester one single act of kindness at a time?”
What if we didn’t try to co-ordinate it all, but we started with all the above inspiration, and set ourselves to carry out a few simple acts of kindness, and instead of asking people to “pay us back” we rather dared them to “pay it forward”. That is to say, for the receiptient to consider what they can do to help someone else. It’s not a transaction between 2 people but a chain of events, each triggering another one making Manchester a better place. Not perfect, but better than it is now.
As a local church pastor I would like to try and make a diffrence both in myself and in Manchester in general so would recommend 6 simple markers to help people figure out what they can do to make Manchester better.
1. Is the idea simple?
If it isn’t, the truth is most of us won’t get round to it at all. That might not be great but it doesn’t stop it being true. As I said earlier, we’re all busy.
2. Is it repeatable?
If so, this is perfect because it is likely it will be repeated thereby allowing the act of kindness to be multiplied across the whole city by dozens of different people.
Is it truly repeatable – perhaps like the Ice Bucket Challenge was but less of a fad that fades after 3 months – there is the potential for a movement – rather than a moment – of kindness.
3. Is it portable?
The “suspended coffee” is one of my favourite ideas in the world. You go into a cafe and buy 2 drinks, one for yourself and “suspending” the other. This means someone else who cannot afford a drink themselves ie they have lost their wallet, is on the street or otherwise in a terrible state, can come into that same cafe later that day and then ask, “Have you got any suspended coffees?” The cafe can then check and, if yes, give them a free coffee without the business losing out.
It’s a great idea that came out of Naples, Italy, but the problem is that not many places in Manchester actually do this scheme. According to my research, Starbucks don’t run that scheme and Costa hadn’t heard of the “suspended coffee” idea.
Maybe we could all ask them to start implementing it.
If the big chains decline for whatever reason, we need to find other ideas that are genuinely portable and don’t just work in one location on a particular day. In the mean time, here are 9 places in Greater Manchester that do run the scheme: suspended coffee locations
4. Is it for the right reason?
I was disappointed recently to find a video on a Twitter post under the hashtag #PayItForward where someone actually filmed themselves giving a coin or two to someone on the street from their car. They then uploaded the video of themselves to the Internet. The giving, in itself is nice, but this kind of showing off is actually unhelpful and can corrupt the original idea of helping people in need and make it into something about ourselves.
Jesus taught quite directly about this in Matthew 6:3, that giving to the needy should be done in secret and out of purer motives than self-promotion. Not everyone believes in Jesus as I do but the wisdom still stands: the best acts of kindness are done without a fanfare behind it.
I would like to recommend, if anyone discusses #PayItForwardManchester on social media or in other public forums, when they do so they only share what others have done for them, not the other way around.
This is not intended to be a collection of smug self-congratulatory people but as the collective imagination of ordinary people wanting to take on a dare to do small things that will make a big difference to someone else’s day. Not necessarily “organised”, not necessarily “random” but canny, quiet and kind.
5. Is it safe?
I’m not against taking risks but we need to be careful that anything we do is legal, ethical and safe enough that it doesn’t put people in vulnerable situations.
If someone has an idea to make Manchester better and they’re not sure if it’s safe, ethical or legal, my simple advice is to ask someone with real experience in this area – e-mail a local councillor, ring the police non-emergency number or cotact someone else who would know.
Please do not do things alone, do them in pairs or 3’s where you can. This brings combined wisdom and accountability to it all.
6. Will it really help or rather enable a bad habit?
I don’t recommend giving money out on the street, and all the homeless charities in the region are committed to getting people off the street rather than encouraging them to stay on them where life expectancy and quality is awful, especially in the winter.
I don’t recommend handouts but rather buying people food, “suspending” a coffee in participating cafes or donating to the Big Change Campaign which deals with long-term solutions around housing and work readiness.
So, what’s next… The Launch Event
(1 March 2017)
An ongoing conversation needs to happen between people who want to make Manchester better, who want to Pay It Forward. We all have to start somewhere.
Hope Community Church are running a launch event in the basement function room of a great East Manchester Pub on Wednesday 1st March 2017, 8pm. It’s simply called “Pay It Forward Manchester”
We will have live music there and a chance to have a drink and meet people, to recap on the big idea of Pay It Forward and then to explore different ways (simple, repeatable, portable etc) that ordinary people can make the city better.
As hosts of the event, we at Hope Community Church don’t have all the ideas, but we want to invite people to come and see for themselves, to explain how our faith motivates us to do this, and for you to help us dream dreams for a better Manchester.
So that we have an idea of numbers to expect – and can tell the pub management before the day itself to make sure it’s staffed well-enough – we could really do with knowing an idea of numbers. So if you can come, please email hopecommunitychurch1@yahoo.co.uk and use “Pay It Forward Event” in the subject field, with your name and a mobile if you want to.
We hope to see you there, and beyond this we hope to see Manchester changed for the better, not necessarily by setting up more structured community work, not necessarily by starting something really complicated, but by ordinary people who love their city doing lots of small things for their neighbours – and doing them for good motives.
Hope Community Church (MCR) 