It all started when…

My name is Emma and in 2016 I had a brain haemorrhage.  I was really, really lucky. I survived and I don’t have any brain damage, but it has left me with other issues.  While I was convalescing, the ideas I had been thinking about for a while solidified into the beginnings of People Kind.  The move towards equality for women and minority groups are all brilliant and hundreds of years overdue, but I think that they don’t go far enough.  I feel that it is important to recognise that everyone is to be valued.
I teamed up with the Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) department at Sharnbrook Academy and together we have developed the awareness raising programme that is People Kind.

WHAT’S THE THINKING BEHIND PEOPLE KIND?

There is currently a global shift in attitude towards equality and women’s rights, particularly ‘Me Too’ and ‘Time’s Up’, the Always ‘Like a Girl’ campaign which champions girls’ confidence and asks, “when did doing something like a girl become an insult?” and the UN’s ‘He For She’ movement that describes gender equality as a “human rights issue, not only a women’s issue.” 

We feel that the stance of the UN is a good direction and that the focus on women’s rights needs to be built upon and expanded to value people, not solely women and through valuing everyone we can encourage understanding, acceptance and kindness as a default attitude.

As Mary Beard says in her book ‘Women and Power’, change needs to be fundamental and involve a shift in attitude throughout society, “you cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male, you have to change the structure.”

It would seem that this male-coded structure doesn’t benefit anyone, male or female. In ‘The Descent of Man’ Grayson Perry suggests “in their drive for domination, men may have neglected to prioritise vital aspects of being wholly human, particularly issues around mental health.  In their drive to be successfully masculine, men may be preventing their greater self from being successfully happy.”  He proposes that traditional masculinity needs re-evaluating as it is archaic and damaging in our modern world.  This theme is echoed by Robert Webb in “How not to be a Boy”.  He tried following the rules for being a man, “Don’t cry, drink beer, play rough, don’t talk about feelings” and asks “whether these rules are actually any use.  To anyone.”  A gender-equal world and declassifying emotions and attitudes so that they are neither male nor female would lead to benefits for everyone.

We think that this can be expanded beyond gender or any other determiner distinguishing one person from another.  We feel that positive change can come from recognising and identifying ourselves as people, rather than members of individual groups.  Labels on people seem to give us a justification for abuse.

Although we all have a basic human need to belong and be in a group with others like ourselves, we think that promoting messages of understanding, acceptance and kindness can be a powerful start to changing our society’s attitude towards outsiders.  We appreciate that this is a simplistic representation and that world peace won’t be achieved with a campaign, but it’s a good place to start!