What is People Need People?
People Need People is a Warm Data Lab-based project coordinated by the International Bateson Institute.
Our mission is to support communities to recognise and attend to the interdependence of their well-being and to produce collaborative systemic responses to local and global needs.
These are trying times.
The institutions that are supposed to protect and care for people are failing. Institutional structures seem unable to meet the complexity of people’s needs. Independence has been revealed as an illusion. It has become the nemesis of communities, polarising and fracturing their social fabric.
When expertise isn’t enough.
When a community is vulnerable, the experts come in. The health experts offer health system consultation. Education experts offer new curriculum. Housing experts offer building projects. None of them are responsible addressing the systemic nature of the vulnerability.
“Please select from the following options.”
Rarely are communities asked what they believe is needed. But when the occasion does arise in which the community is given a voice, that voice is often fractured. The only support the citizens can request is what they perceive as possible. The community is left to ask, “What is on the menu?”.
Simple solutions.
The “menu” is a collection of charity or policy offerings that invariably excludes some and funnels discussion into discrete silos. Health system support, education system support, unemployment support, all operating in relative isolation, all with separate metrics and deliverables.
Widening fault lines.
Existing institutional support is unintentionally divisive even while it hopes to make change.
The existing system reinforces itself by segmenting and siloing the support it provides to communities. The irony is tragic, as rivalry is stirred and polarization increased in communities that are most in need of the nourishment of one another’s support.
Unheard and unmet.
The interdependency of the issues remains unmet. The community is often worse off than before any “assistance” was given. This leaves no pathways for support systems to work in concert towards shared community and service goals that are mutually supporting.
Hope from interdependence.
People need people for the tough times ahead. Hope lies in the possibility that people can and will rise to the occasion of helping one another. The People Need People Project addresses the nature of community in a new form, creating conversations that reach beyond the polarisation, fracture, and silos.
The ties that bind.
Now is the time to allow for the connective tissue of our societies to form in new ways. New relational patterns beget new structures from the richness of new shared connections. Warm Data Labs support people to lean into each other in times of need.
People know what they need.
They only require the time and space for to uncover it for themselves — together.
