We wanted to bring you a special edition of the Greenwood Place Briefing.

At a time of alarm, this edition focuses on compassion and hope.

At Greenwood Place we've been surrounded by small kindnesses and human connections this week - a WhatsApp group in Rebecca's village sourced walnut oil for a disabled child's life-saving diet, a friend in London offered a home to a family separated for two weeks by quarantine rules.

HOW WE'RE LISTENING

We're listening to a number of charities and networks as they face into the crisis and are considering ways that philanthropy might usefully respond - both in the long and short term.

If you would like to talk to us about how to help those working to deal with the social and economic fall-out of this global pandemic, whether locally or globally, please call us.

WHAT WE'RE READING

On the Greenwood Place bedside table

As Greenwood Place adjusts to remote working and long distance conversations with our community, we’ve also been returning to books that sustain.

The late Viktor Frankl is best-known for his indispensable 1946 memoir Man’s Search for Meaning - a meditation on what the horrific experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived. For Frankl, meaning came from the realisation that whatever they took they could not in the end remove his choice of how he responded. “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.

A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL

Rebecca Solnit, interviewed by Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, discusses why disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, how neighbours and friends rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, grassroots community (even digitally), and meaningful work. It is a fresh, deep optimistic look at human nature. As Solnit says: “There is so much work for love to do in the world right now.”

Listen here

GRATITUDE

Every evening at 8pm, people across Paris clap for the healthcare workers. It's a trend: the UK will clap for carers at 8pm on Thursday this week. Let’s hope it spreads.

watch here

PRESENT CONCERNS: CS LEWIS

C.S. Lewis, writing in the early 1940s, feels relevant now: “How are we to live in an atomic age?”… do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, Dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together.

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends…. — not like frightened sheep thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

BUILDING COMMUNITY AT A TIME OF ISOLATION

Acumen Fellows are working now in 7 countries - building community, crossing barriers and creating change. In the UK , applications for the Acumen Fellowship are open until April 5th. Do you have what it takes? Apply here, or pass the link along to someone you know.

AND FINALLY...

In parting, we wanted to share something that one of our partners, Dr Raj Panjabi, CEO of Last Mile Health said to us last week.

“If we learned one thing from the Ebola crisis in Liberia, it's that humans are not defined by the conditions they face but how they handle them.”

The context was a discussion of Last Mile Health’s plans to provide community health support to all those who need it - including those requiring maternal healthcare, malaria medication and vaccinations - during the coming spread of COVID19 in Liberia, Ethiopia and Malawi.

Briefing No. 18