I was invited a few weeks ago to speak at a conference in France called LIFT - it was all about bringing the spirit of the web to the real world. I talked about a few things including The Good Gym. In general -my point was that a lot of the formats through which we interact with each other are designed for us to behave badly- in fact they are designed primarily to limit our abiltiy to harm each other. I argue that we need to design more formats for another important human abilty - our ability to help each other. You can watch the full talk above, the Good Gym part starts at about 16mins in.
Tonight we held our first Good Gym group run. 11 of us assembled at York Hall - who’d kindly offered to host us. We did a minimal warmup and a few stretches - I explained the gist of the project and described our 2 missions for the evening.
We headed North and took a sharp left under the railwaytracks and onto the canal- the group was led by the speedy pace of Anna (who’s training to run over the Alps through three different countries within 24 hours).
Heading through Haggerston park we were briefly split in two at the traffic lights but still made it to St Hilda’s on time for mission 1: Tidying. Our runners made light work of emptying, organising and re-filling a huge cupboard of games food, cloth and stationary and were in and out within 10 minutes leaving the place looking immaculate.
Heading back East through Weaver’s Fields we were running towards mission 2: removing an out of date council poster that had been hanging around for too long on the railings of Bethnal Green. We quickly ripped the 20ft vinyl banner from the fence and raced back to York Hall. Total time of the run was 54 mins.
For us it was an exciting experiment in trying to do useful stuff for the area as a group and the feedaback was very positive and useful. As a result we’re very likely to be running another ‘fit for purpose’ group run in the near future. Thanks to everyone for coming and we look forward to the next one, watch this space.
Following the BBC news piece that went out a week or so ago, we had a big influx of runners. So instead of trying to meet everyone individualy, we thought we’d all go for a run together.
For a while we’ve been trying to think of things that we could usefully do as a group that wouldn’t interupt our run too much; we’ve thought of things like clearing rubble, cleaning windows, delivering library books, moving heavy things and painting walls. On Monday we’re going to give this a go for the first time. Our friends at St Hilda’s East have set us a task and we’re going to help them with some manual labour doing some important tasks that often get forgotten about.
If you’d like to come and run with us - here’s the details, the run will be 3 to 4 miles long.
Time:
7pm, 16th of August, 2010
Location:
York Hall
5-15 Old Ford Road
Bethnal Green
London E2 9PJ
(York Hall is close to Bethnal Green Tube which is on the Central line)
If you intend to come - email mark@thegoodgym.org and let us know to expect you.
Yesterday the Good Gym was featured on BBC London News. It was very exciting for us to see the project through someone else’s eyes - it was even more exciting to have a reason to go and spend a bit of time with one of our pairs of runners; Rebecca and her coach Elizabeth. Rebecca runs each week to see Elizabeth and brings her a small present - this week she brought her a fan because Elizabeth said she had been a bit hot the week before, at other times its been books of crosswords, cakes or newspapers. Elizabeth says that its nice to look forward to someone coming round each week and Rebecca says that its good to have a reason to get out of the house. The BBC piece has generated a lot of interest in the Good Gym and we’re still going through our emails from yesterday - so we hope to get many more runners going in the next few weeks.
Wouldn’t it be good to be able to email everyone, even those without access to the internet? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could email them little presents that would turn up in their hands the next day?
A new service being developed by The Good Gym and Patient Opinion will do precisely this for those with relatives in care homes.
Patient opinion has made a difference to the NHS by providing and easy mechanism for feedback, shifting the accountability of the NHS towards patients and citizens. They have now turned their attention to care homes too.
The Good Gym was set up to provide elderly house-bound people with friendly contact with the outside world. We know lots of runners who like to have a mission to complete instead of running just for their own sake.
Working together, the good Gym and Patient opinion are plotting an exciting new pilot that will allow the residents of care homes to receive written letters, notes and small presents, from their friends and relatives, who will only need to write an email. The new service, the name of which is yet to be decided, will be offered to a range of a care homes in Tower Hamlets over the next month.
Residents of care homes can often be isolated and lack stimulus from the outside world. In addition to this, Patient Opinion’s research has identified that very few care homes have internet access available to residents. The new service will bridge the gap between a busy younger generation and their older relatives, who may live far away and to whom they may not get the chance to write letters.
We will be working to formalise the process over the next few months, in the meantime, if you have a relative in a care home in Tower Hamelts and would like to send them a message right now, send your message to mark@thegoodgym.org and we’ll have it delivered by hand by a Good Gym runner.
As our cities grow, our ability to communicate with those around us seems to be diminishing. Why is this?
A new report from Cooperatives UK looks at the demise of neighbourliness. When I was born in 1982, the majority of people in the UK spoke to their neighbours every day. Now, the majority of us speak to our neighbours less than once a week.
Pubs and parties are described as the best places for meeting strangers, pubs however are losing their effectiveness - only 40% of us feel comfortable talking to strangers in pubs these days - in 1982 72% did.
The formats for our social interaction seem to be failing; our pubs and post offices (as mentioned previously on this blog), once the core of informal local social interation are failing us for various reasons. For romantic interaction the rise of the social acceptability and usage of dating sites seems to have addressed the failure of contemporary urban societies to find us boyfriends and girlfriends, but what are the new socially acceptable formats for friendships and neighbourly relationships?
Play is perhaps one format for interaction that we lack (if we’re not children) and which can break down barriers in neighbourhoods, but I think there are others that are equally undeveloped for adults. The enormous health and well-being benefits of sustained social interaction are under severe threat if the downward trend towards isolation and distrust continues in our cities. We need to design more and better ways of incorporating friendly, caring social itneraction into what we do everyday. The Good Gym is one attempt but we will need many more, on a much larger scale, in order to rebuild even the level of community cohesion that we had in 1982.
The Good Gym is currently operating only in Tower Hamlets, London. If you can't wait for it to get to your area then get in touch and we'll do our best to help you set it up.
