This is a social movement that proposes and promotes small and
easy changes (such as a smile) to implement in our everyday life and to
improve the world we are living in.
We Are What We Do, initiated in the UK, defines
itself as a social movement (not a charity, not an institution), a
movement driven by human momentum and an ability to balance artfully on
their neighbor’s shoulders. The initiative was set up with a modest
social design hunch. We Are What We Do are promoting the idea that
small and easy changes in our everyday lives can lead to significant
large scale change.
Their first book, Change the World for a Fiver, contained fifty actions that everybody could do. These actions work in isolation. But they work even better when done together. They were actions like decline plastic bags, smile and smile back and have a bath with someone you love. There are actions to compel us to find out how our money is invested, why we should shop locally, to learn a joke and to write to somebody who inspired us.
The first print run was for ten thousand books. But later over half a million copies were sold. There are now We Are What We Do organizations in many different countries. We Are What We Do explain their perception of social design and the situation in the UK like this:
"We, at We Are What We Do, understand social design to mean the way in which people influence each other. If you imagine that people are like billiard balls on a billiard table, glancing off each other, knocking into one another, being pocketed then we would rather not play; thanks all the same. We would much rather believe that people are capable of influencing each other, interacting with each other, standing on the shoulders of each other to create social change and influence this world that we live in."
"If you believe what you read in the papers we are suffering a twenty first century "social malaise"; voting in elections has been steadily declining; membership of political parties has fallen by two thirds over a single generation; crime, exclusion, obesity and depression are all on the ascendant and today’s generation - despite being richer than ever before - are unhappier than their 1940s counterparts. (Plus they had better haircuts.) When Margaret Thatcher, in the 1980´s stated that "There is no such thing as society", it seems it she was future-gazing to the isolated, alienated, self-interested i-pod generation. Happily, we don’t believe what we read in the papers. We believe the tens of thousands of emails we get every month, illustrations of people putting their actions into practice. We believe in the largest ever street demonstrations in the UK designed to change government policies on issues as diverse as world debt, fox hunting and the war against Iraq. We believe in the school children who we work with who intuit the We Are What We Do message. These do not appear to be the actions of a deeply apathetic nation. Anything but. They are the ripples of a people-driven movement."
Their first book, Change the World for a Fiver, contained fifty actions that everybody could do. These actions work in isolation. But they work even better when done together. They were actions like decline plastic bags, smile and smile back and have a bath with someone you love. There are actions to compel us to find out how our money is invested, why we should shop locally, to learn a joke and to write to somebody who inspired us.
The first print run was for ten thousand books. But later over half a million copies were sold. There are now We Are What We Do organizations in many different countries. We Are What We Do explain their perception of social design and the situation in the UK like this:
"We, at We Are What We Do, understand social design to mean the way in which people influence each other. If you imagine that people are like billiard balls on a billiard table, glancing off each other, knocking into one another, being pocketed then we would rather not play; thanks all the same. We would much rather believe that people are capable of influencing each other, interacting with each other, standing on the shoulders of each other to create social change and influence this world that we live in."
"If you believe what you read in the papers we are suffering a twenty first century "social malaise"; voting in elections has been steadily declining; membership of political parties has fallen by two thirds over a single generation; crime, exclusion, obesity and depression are all on the ascendant and today’s generation - despite being richer than ever before - are unhappier than their 1940s counterparts. (Plus they had better haircuts.) When Margaret Thatcher, in the 1980´s stated that "There is no such thing as society", it seems it she was future-gazing to the isolated, alienated, self-interested i-pod generation. Happily, we don’t believe what we read in the papers. We believe the tens of thousands of emails we get every month, illustrations of people putting their actions into practice. We believe in the largest ever street demonstrations in the UK designed to change government policies on issues as diverse as world debt, fox hunting and the war against Iraq. We believe in the school children who we work with who intuit the We Are What We Do message. These do not appear to be the actions of a deeply apathetic nation. Anything but. They are the ripples of a people-driven movement."
