Operation Kindness was initiated by the Mandala Trust in 2014 in order to promote the ethic of kindness which has always inspired and fuelled our work. Operation Kindness is a global family of activists, communities and grassroots campaigns. Its purpose is to imagine, articulate, implement and actualise alternatives to neoliberal globalisation based upon kindness, altruism and love. The aim of these alternatives is to deliver:
- Environmental sustainability
- Equality of access to resources and opportunities
- Restorative and redistributive justice
- Universal access to legal rights
- Genuine participatory democracy
Choosing kindness and love as a frame of reference, Operation Kindness activists, local groups and country groups express their core aims and principles in a variety of ways, mirroring the diversity of the communities they grow within – in Turkey organising student activist groups, in Uganda organising alter-globalisation dialogue and policy formation, in northern Europe taking direct action against corporate trade deals and the environmental crisis, and in Brazil organising awareness-raising social media campaigns.
Since 2014 the Mandala Trust has funded and supported the work of a number of Operation Kindness groups internationally, including:
- in Uganda, support and training for local young people and students from disadvantaged backgrounds and an innovative youth cooperative — ‘The Kampala Kindness Cooperative’. The OK Uganda activists also organise regular outreach to the local community, engaging in acts of solidarity including neighbourhood clean-ups
- in Jordan, OK activists organise a refugee solidarity group supporting children fleeing conflict in Iraq and Syria
- in Tecax, Yucatan, Mexico, OK activists have organised into a ‘Colectiva Mujeres’, through which local women engage in a range of community mobilisations which benefit children such as community garden projects, breakfast clubs for school children and mother and child yoga groups
- OK activists from South Sudan, themselves refugees, have facilitated youth peace dialogues as well as organising refugee solidarity groups in support of those displaced by the conflict in the country
- OK Zimbabwe activists provide educational support for children from poorer rural areas and run prison groups for adolescent inmates.