The World Kindness Movement represents the work of organisations from 23 different countries. "It has gone way past the level of community endeavour," says its secretary general Michael Lloyd-White..... Each year, the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) publishes a World Giving Index, which attempts to track certain types of giving behaviour in 146 countries across the globe. The data is extracted from an annual poll conducted by research firm Gallup and ranks countries according to the proportion of people who have volunteered, helped strangers at random, or donated money to charity in a typical month.... "The trend that has been revealed is a disturbing one," says Dr John Law, the chief executive of the Charities Aid Foundation. The number of acts of kindness and charity dropped by hundreds of millions last year due to the global recession, he says.
The United States dropped from first to fifth place last year. Does this kind of behavior matter on a macro scale?
See below for the entire story:
BBC News - Can kindness movements make a difference?
More than anything that I've learned in class is that mass cultural and behavioral trends are at the roots of political and economic outcomes in at least some significant ways, so I would say definitely.
ReplyDeleteDoes this kind of behavior matter on a macro scale?
ReplyDeleteI would have to say most definitely. We talked about it a bit last Tuesday, just with the examples we talked about you can see the difference made when you invest within you community... i.e. Kalamazoo Promise
i agree with both of the above comments. i think we must start at a micro level to impact things on the macro level. microfinance is exemplary in illuminating that
ReplyDeleteI agree that this behavior matters at a macro scale but we have to be realistic and not over estimate the impact of kindness movement. I agree with this quote from the article
ReplyDelete"There's a misguided view that empathy is a universal solvent. Helping others is often about your own narcissism. What you think people need is often not actually what they need."