Welcome to Hyphen-21.
We promote ideas and initiatives which advance community. We encourage the skills required for a community under pressure to survive and flourish. We seek to affirm and strengthen the skills required to connect I to Other, especially where "Other" seems especially distant or different.
Go to "Hyphen Projects" for the list of initiatives and campaigns we support and pursue. They include
* "Poems for…" - a project that displays poetry in public places and celebrates
diversity. It is funded by the Arts Council, the Department of Health and the
John Lewis Partnership. Previous funders include the King's Fund and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Since 2008, when the project launched its own website www.poemsfor.org, people from all over the world have been downloading its poem collections.
* A code of professional conduct for psychiatric ward rounds and similar
meetings. The code's purpose is to the make such meetings less intimidating than often they are. It has been commended by the Department of Health.
* A strategy paper on how to sustain staff morale in care organisations.
Go to "Background" (top left on this home page) to learn more about the principles we work from, the strategies we work by, and some of the thinking we have engaged in.
Hyphen-21 is a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee.
The Hyphen between I and Thou
I have found a raft
to ride the tumult
the breaking of towers
the malign intrusions
of Sell
and Spin -
this hyphen
hovering
between the loose edges
and clashing waves,
this foothold
this dancing ledge
of hope and connection.
Rogan Wolf, © September 2000
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"We are members one of another and without a set of relationships,
a community and a society, no individual would survive or flourish." |
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David Jenkins, ex-Bishop of Durham.
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| "Humankind cannot bear very much reality" |
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from "Four Quartets" by TS Eliot ("Burnt Norton")
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"Just as the melody is not made up of notes nor the verse of words nor the statue of lines, but they must be tugged and dragged till their unity has been scattered into these many pieces, so with the man to whom I say Thou…
as I become I, I say Thou…
All real living is meeting." |
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Taken from "I and Thou" by Martin Buber.
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"[Social Care] workers are a group of people who are being called upon to live dangerously at many of the pressure points in our present confused, confusing and increasingly divided society. As such you are the objects of, and therefore presumably in your own persons and reflections the subjects of, a great deal of confusion, anxiety and uncertainty. Your position is highly ambivalent and ambiguous and therefore both actually painful now and potentially promising with regard to the future of our society and, indeed, of human beings on this earth."
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David Jenkins, ex-Bishop of Durham, speaking in 1988
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