Vision

All over the world, relationships are in trouble.  Families are becoming more fragmented due to migration, divorce and urbanisation.  Ethnic tensions continue to simmer beneath the surface of many nations where ethnic identity runs deeper than national belonging.  In companies, relationships between owners, managers and workers are becoming more distant and functional, and public services are frequently prone to disruption due to poor working relationships.  The hard reality is that economic prosperity often goes hand in hand with mounting relational poverty. 

What has gone wrong?  While there are many contributing factors, we believe that underlying them is a flawed perception of reality, namely that life is ultimately about personal fulfillment and material wealth.  This belief that individualism and materialism will bring us a full and satisfying life means we tend to downgrade or even sacrifice other goals and values – particularly our relationships.

By contrast, we believe that wellbeing and happiness ultimately depend on our relationships – not only our close family ones, but our relationships with people at work, in our neighbourhood, with public service providers and even strangers.  If we have thriving relationships in these areas, then we are much more able to cope with economic hardship or severe illness; whereas money is little consolation if our closest relationships collapse.

Although relationships is a “soft” term, meaning different things to different people, we believe nonetheless that it is possible to begin measuring the quality of relationships in a meaningful way, and to assess relational poverty or health.  In our work, we are identifying ways to respond to relational poverty and pressure, recommending changes to public policy and the way organisations operate, in order to increase relational wellbeing at the personal, family, community, organisational and national levels.