Faced with a perfect storm of the climate crisis, poverty, and unsustainable consumer choices, I wanted to come up with a solution. A new way for consumership and doing business in the region that tackles the poverty crisis with climate action. For small, local enterprises, huge, messy, and intractable problems such as these can seem outside their sphere of influence - collateral damage left by big faceless corporations.
But everyone can do something to embed ethics and sustainability in how we choose to do things. That’s why I created Kind Currency – a community interest start-up, based in Newcastle, with a mission to create an economy of kindness that protects people and the planet.
Kind Currency functions as a community. The power of community is the energy to create change. Community simplifies the problem by working collectively to deliver one purpose, ultimately enabling a solution to a capacity that not only allows us to overcome our issues, but also allows us to flourish beyond expectation. The community has two pathways, providing local businesses and local people with the power to challenge social injustice and climate change.
The community connects ethical businesses that join the Kind Business Club for free with our Human-kind Club subscribers, conscious consumers keen to make more ethical and sustainable choices, ready to shop kind. This subscription fee subsidises our ‘Kindness Fund’, which is then used to provide resources and opportunities to the kind local people living in deprivation; our voluntary and charity workers, care workers, NHS workers and exservice people.
In setting up Kind Currency, there seemed to me to be a natural overlap between our mission and that of The Good Work Pledge, established by the North of Tyne Combined Authority, headed by Metro Mayor Jamie Driscoll. The Good Work Pledge is designed to help local businesses demonstrate their commitment to providing not just jobs but good jobs – ones that provide security, development opportunities, and a decent standard of living.
To ‘take’ The Good Work Pledge means signing up to five ‘pillars’ of good practice:
Valuing and rewarding the workforce
Promoting health and wellbeing
Effective communications
Representation developing a balanced workforce
A social responsibility.
Taking the pledge, said Mayor Jamie Driscoll, is a chance for businesses ”to showcase the fact they’re a good business, and a good employer, providing and delivering consistently good work”.
The similarities in purpose between Kind Currency and The Good Work Pledge provide a clear opportunity for collaboration between the two initiatives. And so, as part of their application to join Kind Currency and be celebrated as a ‘kind business’, local enterprises are required to meet the first pillar of good practice – that is, valuing and rewarding the workforce – and any two of the remaining pillars. The idea being that kind businesses are good to work for – and vice versa. Both communities support local people, local businesses, local communities, the local economy, and the local environment, embedding kindness and sustainability in what they do.
It’s early days for Kind Currency but it’s fantastic to have the support of The Good Work Pledge, the NTCA, and the Mayor. I’m looking forward to the opportunities we can create together for the people and businesses in an effort to make the North East the kindest region in the UK. No-one can do everything, but everyone can do something. A kinder way of doing business is just a start. Our collective voices and actions can deliver change.
We can alleviate the poverty crisis and the climate emergency but only if we come together, community is our most valuable asset.
