IT APPEARS that we don’t want to love our neighbours after all. Or even put away their wheelie bins.
A campaign to encourage people to commit conscious acts of kindness for neighbours and strangers has been a disappointing flop for its organisers.
An alliance of Christian churches, organisations such as St Vincent de Paul and individuals launched the “Love Your Neighbour” campaign in March in a bid to bring a smile to other people’s faces.
People were encouraged to do things such as put a neighbour’s wheelie bin back in the drive, cut shared grass verges, go for coffee with an unpopular work colleague or learn how to say hello in Polish to an immigrant neighbour.
The Evangelical Alliance of Ireland optimistically predicted that the campaign could result in more than one million acts of kindness being committed within a year.
People were asked to share their acts of kindness on www.loveyourneighbour.ie
However, six months later, the website contains just one such story.
A woman told how her family rented an allotment at a local farm and got to know their allotment neighbours.
Tom Slattery, director of operations at the Evangelical Alliance of Ireland, said that while the response from the church groups involved was good, the response from the general public had been “disappointing”.
“Initially the response was tremendous and we got a lot of feedback and encouragement,” he said. “However, that petered out and we don’t know of anything that’s actually ongoing in the public arena as a result of the campaign.”
Individuals may have taken up the challenge privately, he said, but they hadn’t spread the word about it.
Mr Slattery said the lack of interest in the campaign could be explained by people’s busy lives.
“I guess people are very busy. I guess people are very preoccupied,” he said. “I’ve no doubt that people are doing good things, but whether they are doing more because of this, I don’t know. I’m only speculating.”
Undaunted, the Evangelical Alliance will maintain the campaign website, and it is now working on an extension of the campaign called “Simplify”.
“As the recession bites, instinct tells us to hold tight to every penny we’ve got, and dream of the stuff we can buy when it’s over,” Mr Slattery said.
“For one month, our challenge to people is to live on the amount of money we would receive if we were on unemployment benefits.” The money saved could be given away to support people in need.
The Evangelical Alliance is a movement of individuals, churches and organisations from within all streams of evangelicalism in Ireland. Evangelicals are Christians who live their lives by the Bible.
They can be involved in a range of churches such as the Church of Ireland, Catholic, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches.
