What’s the difference between #charity and #community?

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Is there something you do that might be considered ‘charity’ but you just do it because you love it?

When I was at university, I was involved in a charity called K.E.E.N. — ‘kids enjoy exercise now’.

It brought together three groups:

- disabled kids, who spend most of their lives either with family or with people paid to take care of them

- students, who spend most of their lives cut off from people of other generations other than their lecturers and so on

- the siblings of the disabled kids, who spend most of their lives being second in the attention hierarchy to their often needier brothers and sisters

And it brought them together every Saturday morning, in a leisure centre on Blackbird Leys estate, to play ‘sports’ — well, games of all kinds.

The hidden beneficiary here was the parents — they got some genuine respite — a time when all their kids were happy and playing — and the kids got tired out which I am sure helped them get on with other stuff for the rest of the day too.

It was a great thing — set up by Elliot Portnoy in 1984, I supported bringing it to London in the mid 90s and it’s exciting to see that it has spread around the world (just google ‘Kids Enjoy Exercise Now’).

But I’m not here for plaudits — in fact, that’s the point.

Why it was so great, for me, is that it wasn’t a charity. It was a community of equals.

We had students who came along looking to have something that sounded good on their CV. I suppose they got that, though they didn’t usually stick around much beyond the first session. They probably wanted to do good, but they were giving up their time as charity — helping poor disabled kiddies.

Those who stuck around did it because they enjoyed it. A total break from incredibly pressurised academic work, a nice group of people, a chance to *play*, to see a load of friendly faces including the kids, to be silly, to do the hokey-cokey (and the parachute game, and football, and all the rest).

It wasn’t always total joy — I often had a hangover, some of the kids and some of the volunteers were more boring than others. But I kept going back because I got something out of it, because the reward was intrinsic to the activity.

I’m suspicious of philanthropy, of doing something from largesse. I’m sure there’s a role for it, of course — but /and, if you can create a situation where people are in it because they get something good out of it, I think you’re doing something far better, and far more powerful.