At points in British history, we have been known worldwide for our community spirit, it’s pulled the county through some dark times to a better place. However in recent times places don’t feel like a community, they feel like a collection of houses and flats where people live.
Times have changed from when people’s friends lived down the street or next door, with the accessibility of transport and different ways to communicate we can now have friends spanning far and wide. But this has come at a cost of people not knowing the people who live locally to them.
Now there is no real quick fix solution to rebuilding the local communities around us all as if you went round knocking on your neighbours doors just to say hello I am sure you would get a few odd reactions. But there are some things I think people could do, to help rebuild some community spirit.
At the last general election David Cameron launched the “Big Society” unfortunately this is something that has gotten lost with the problems that the coalition government have had to face. But the principle of getting people to volunteer to help out in their local community is a great one.
Just think if 50% of the adult population of the UK gave just 4 hours a week to do something in their local community that would be 60 million hours a week. With these hours poured in to our “communities” they would start to feel like a proper community again. We could even take it further people on benefits are allowed to work up to 16 hours a week before it affects their benefits so why not encourage these people to put something back in to their communities.
If we had proper communities where everyone knew each other then there would be less chance that Mr Smith at number 39 would die alone and not be noticed for three weeks. If the kids felt a sense of pride in where they lived they would be less likely to cause trouble and hang around in gangs. It’s an obvious and relatively simple solution to the problem, it won’t happen overnight and it will require people to give something in return for a better world, an odd concept today but as the old adage goes “you can’t get something for nothing.”
Times have changed from when people’s friends lived down the street or next door, with the accessibility of transport and different ways to communicate we can now have friends spanning far and wide. But this has come at a cost of people not knowing the people who live locally to them.
Now there is no real quick fix solution to rebuilding the local communities around us all as if you went round knocking on your neighbours doors just to say hello I am sure you would get a few odd reactions. But there are some things I think people could do, to help rebuild some community spirit.
At the last general election David Cameron launched the “Big Society” unfortunately this is something that has gotten lost with the problems that the coalition government have had to face. But the principle of getting people to volunteer to help out in their local community is a great one.
Just think if 50% of the adult population of the UK gave just 4 hours a week to do something in their local community that would be 60 million hours a week. With these hours poured in to our “communities” they would start to feel like a proper community again. We could even take it further people on benefits are allowed to work up to 16 hours a week before it affects their benefits so why not encourage these people to put something back in to their communities.
If we had proper communities where everyone knew each other then there would be less chance that Mr Smith at number 39 would die alone and not be noticed for three weeks. If the kids felt a sense of pride in where they lived they would be less likely to cause trouble and hang around in gangs. It’s an obvious and relatively simple solution to the problem, it won’t happen overnight and it will require people to give something in return for a better world, an odd concept today but as the old adage goes “you can’t get something for nothing.”
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