The Big Thing People Miss When Thinking About Values
January will mark five years since I started working at the Common Cause Foundation. A key reason why I wanted to join the organisation was its unique mission – shifting cultures away from competition, inequality and oppression, and towards regeneration, equity and harmony, by celebrating and elevating the intrinsic values that underpin our care for […]
Extrinsic motivations and the law of unintended consequences
Social and environmental campaigning is plagued by the law of unintended consequences. As Common Cause has long highlighted, campaigns and communications intended to elicit deeper expressions of social or environmental concern also influence attitudes and behaviours in seemingly unrelated domains. For example, some communications urging uptake of one environment-friendly behaviour may undermine commitment to another […]
Hope for the future of life can be found in our cultural values; we need a media sector that reflects that
Our collective, or ‘cultural’ values are hugely important; they impact what we collectively see as important in the world, and what we think and do about social and environmental issues. In order to make real progress on social and environmental issues, we need to see different values championed in our cultures; values such as care, […]
Reflecting on Indigenous Wisdom and the Urge to Oppress: A Continuing Dialogue
Last year, we shared insights from a series of conversations we hosted with Indigenous people, exploring the potential of a social psychological model of values to support their social and environmental justice campaigns. At the time, we viewed this as the beginning of a broader, ongoing conversation. We were eager to invite voices from other […]
How should the new UK Government talk about climate action?
The public tide is turning when it comes to climate action. We know that more people than ever before consider the climate and nature crisis to be real and of the utmost importance to tackle. Despite little mention of climate change during election campaigning, we have seen MPs elected from across the political spectrum who […]
Queering Conservation: Addressing heteronormativity* in conservation practice
Early this Spring, a small group of us – mostly queer identifying, plus a couple of straight allies – spent a couple of days together in the beautiful grounds of Gregynog Hall in mid Wales, to dive deep into an inquiry of what it would mean to queer conservation. This was building on a series […]
From neighbourliness to social justice
Most people prioritize concern for their friends, family and community At Common Cause Foundation, we draw attention to the love and concern that most of us express for our families, friends and communities – in other words, people with whom we are in frequent contact. The Schwartz model of values, which we draw on extensively, […]
Values & Covid-19: Feel the pain: systemic racism and the social conditioning of our values
About a month ago, we reflected on what the pandemic has been revealing about the values on which our society is built. We focused on the fact that many of the “essential workers” who keep the country running, often at great personal risk, are also people who experience one or multiple forms of systemic oppression, […]
Values & Covid-19: Peering through the cracks of a pandemic
Covid-19 has changed our world in ways that we could never have imagined, and in doing so has revealed many anomalies that have challenged us. In our 24/7 world, the brakes have been slammed, a stop button has been pressed, re-focussing our gaze and bringing all attention to rest on how we live during and […]
Values & Covid-19: The genie’s out of the bottle
The popular story tends to go that in times of fear and uncertainty the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary strengthens, not weakens. We stick with our friends and family, putting our own needs first. But, despite being faced with so much grief and apprehension during the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen communities do the exact opposite. […]