Six Strangers

'The ‘Six Strangers’ project by Can Create originally started out as ‘UK in One Zoom’: a vision of an online space in which people from across the UK could come together to share their experiences of Covid, to reflect on what they had learned, felt and thought about during the pandemic and to explore their hopes for the future.

The team at Can Create decided to limit the sessions to six people to enable an intimate metaphorical kitchen table discussion. Having a group of six allows everyone to participate, including the initially reserved. After a couple of sessions, the project was renamed Six Strangers to better express the spirit of the project: what happens when six strangers meet, do they talk or shout, find common ground or stick to entrenched positions? The aim was to show that when people start listening to one another they can also narrow their differences and find things they have in common.

Four things stood out from this work:

• First, a lot of people are very keen to listen, share and talk to make sense of the experiences they have had during Covid.

• Second, there is quite a lot of trauma, distress and anxiety to process. Engaging with that, to surface it, may help ensure that visions of the future have an emotional grounding.

• Third, people are very keen to build on models of civic virtue and heroism that have emerged during the crisis which has been both a challenge and an opportunity to show moral leadership. That is where the most promising ideas for the future will come from: examples of moral courage and civic virtue now.

• Fourth, there is a strong sense that this is no over. Recurrent crises will be a feature of life. So the capacity to cope, respond and adapt to crisis will be fundamental.