Roots UK Exchanges: WHY are we?
The Roots Programme began as a pre-lockdown, in-person, pilot exchange between a small number of adult partners with the support of an even smaller team of Roots facilitators. The participants were from the North and the other UK regions and paired with people from large corporations and organisations in London. The initial vision was to bring people together, people who might otherwise never meet and certainly had no real experience of each other’s lifestyles and landscapes in this same society, supporting them to meet, talk, see how the other half live and break bread together. Post-Brexit, immediately after the results came in, we awoke to a UK that we couldn’t have dreamed of prior to the decision to hold a referendum. The referendum could not have done a better job of setting British people at odds if it had been designed to do just that. A society, unlike the US, that seldom found itself fractured across just the one burning issue was just that, bitterly divided into two distinct camps that defied traditional party affiliations and class camps. As the first in-person, pilot Roots exchange came to an end, in trotted the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lockdown wore on through 2020, Roots saw that the pandemic, as with all major upheavals through history, offered another rare opportunity to pause and reimagine the kind of society we want to inhabit. People across the country were embracing online means of communication, and at a rate nobody could have foreseen. The shapes of our relationships were changing, it was easier to chat on the phone or online than to see someone on the next estate down. The all-hands-to-the-pump call to the nation to lock down, the chaotic and changing ‘hands, face, space…whatever’ messaging followed by that trip to Barnard Castle sent our trust in government on a rollercoaster ride across the next couple of years. Medical staff, shop workers and transport staff all became ‘key workers’, keeping the population alive, fed and moving – and we clapped for them from our doorsteps. High levels of covid plagued the areas that experience high levels of deprivation, further highlighting the disparities in our society – who could miss it? Confidence in the British government became very low indeed, particularly within our marginalised communities. The vaccine rolled out from December 2020 and we saw further division across the country over those, with most reluctance, unsurprisingly, seen in those marginalised communities.
A new Roots team was assembled for the new brief, a small one once more but spread across the country this time, since online working had swiftly become the norm and suited the new, risk-reduced, online nature of the exchanges perfectly. Roots’ team are in Bristol, London, East Anglia, West Yorkshire and Scotland and our HQ is in Manchester. The newly formed team set about looking at how we could bring people together from across the UK to ‘see how the other half live’ and, as Ted Cantle wrote in his 2001 Report into the northern race riots, how those who live ‘parallel lives’ to our own exist.
In 1954, Gordon Allport, an American Psychologist, published a book called ‘The Nature of Predjudice’ and set out his hypothesis that, under the right conditions, bringing groups of people together under controlled conditions to make contact could successfully bridge divides and create dialogue, reducing discrimination, assumptions and prejudice. Just post-World War II, he was mostly concerned with desegregation in the US as troops returned home. The ‘Contact Theory’ has since been applied to many other in-groups and out-groups, such as with the integration of the LGBTQ+ community in a University in California and in reducing anti-Muslim sentiments in communities in the Netherlands. It’s such a simple hypothesis that it could almost be overlooked, but the kernel of what Roots envisioned was there.
Roots’ latest exchanges, starting out afresh and in a whole new world after the initial lockdown, took in the four principles that Allport had set out for contact theory to present the best outcomes. Our pairings would be across gender, generation, location, national identity, ethnicity, educational background, class and faith. We wanted to bring people together, initially, with equal status within the exchange, and so we began without formal introductions and pursued relative anonymity. Exchange partners have a common goal, to take time each week to explore someone else’s life, whilst reflecting on their own identity and life choices. Allport stipulated integrated cooperation, and so no part of the exchange is competitive – partners must arrange times together to converse and they complete a very simple activity cooperatively. His final principle was for an authority to encourage and support friendly, helpful, egalitarian attitudes. Roots are that structural body, supporting and facilitating with the lightest touch and the sincerest amount of humanity and warmth possible, to set the tone.
Roots don’t have ambitions to scale up massively and work with huge numbers of people on the adult exchanges. Our approach is small in scale and big in sincerity, warmth and individual impact. We firmly believe that deeper individual experiences create more mindful, longer term behaviour shifts and create more profound ripple effects across wider social bubbles over time.
We pair people trapped in social bubbles of sameness, seldom meeting or engaging with anyone too far different to themselves with those who feel marginalised, misunderstood or not seen and heard effectively within our wider society.
Register here for our latest exchange or contact clare@rootsprogramme.org to learn more about taking part in our series of 2022 and 2023 exchanges.
