'Love' campaign aims for million acts of kindness

COMMIT RANDOM acts of kindness. Love your neighbour. Make people feel cared about. Surely some mistake? This sounds like a positive story. And it is.

A year-long campaign has begun to encourage people to commit random acts of kindness at least once a month.

Putting your neighbour’s wheelie bin back in the drive, going for coffee with a work colleague who is often excluded or learning how to say hello in Polish to your immigrant neighbour are just some of the examples proposed by the Evangelical Alliance of Ireland.

The alliance of churches, organisations and individuals has set up a website www.loveyourneighbour.ie offering a range of ideas for people keen to bring a smile to other people’s faces.

Seán Mullan of the alliance said mutual support and care were particularly relevant in these recessionary times. There might not be an economic value in giving a helping hand or doing an act of kindness but that didn’t mean it had no value, he said.

“We’re not suggesting that loving your neighbour is going to fix a broken economy. It won’t help you get your job back. It won’t save your pension plan and it won’t increase the value of your house but new acts of service carried out by thousands of people in this country . . . could change the society in which we live.”

Mr Mullan said there was a tendency for people to turn inwards and look after themselves in times of trouble. “The challenge is to do the opposite.”

He estimated that if 40,000 people did one act of kindness this month and half did the same next month and added another act, and if one quarter of the recipients did the same, it would amount to more than one million acts of kindness by the end of the year.

“I think that could bring about significant change,” he said.

At yesterday’s launch, Elizabeth Byrne of the Hacketstown Christian Centre in Carlow told how her centre had begun making cards and sending them to people who were sick, or going through a hard time, or needed congratulating.

“These cards just took off and people were coming to us, thanking us for them and saying what it meant to receive these cards,” she said.

Prof John Monaghan, vice-president of St Vincent de Paul, said making others happy did not necessarily cost money.

He said people could donate clothes to charity, give toys to a community creche or get involved in an adult literacy group.

Calls for help to his charity have increased by more than 30 per cent in some places in the past year.

“And sadly the two biggest challenges we are facing is providing people with food and fuel,” he said.

“Keeping the lights on, keeping the homes warm, this is the Ireland of 2009 . . . We are back, in fact, not in the 80s but beyond.”

Scott Evans’s Urban Soul group runs a programme for teenagers painting over graffiti and cleaning up public areas.

He recalled a group of young people who painted a woman’s flat last summer. “It wasn’t just about paint and walls and mortar . . . It was young people being transformed by serving. Their eyes were being opened up.”