On Thursday, November 23, this newspaper hosted an important event, ‘Standing Up to Poverty’, as part of its diverse and shared community voice and leadership ethos.

People picking up their Impartial Reporter last week will have had the opportunity, if in a position to do so, to make a food donation to their local food bank.

If you can – but just haven’t had a minute – there is still plenty of time.

It is probably helpful to use the bag provided so that the collective generosity of the community can be counted and celebrated.

This is how good ideas spread, and other local papers and companies might follow. There is nothing wrong with being second or third to do something worthwhile.

Given the continued rises in food costs, rents and mortgages, not everybody who buys the paper can afford to put food into the bag, and some will be depending on the generosity of those who can.

So don’t feel bad about it. Everyone can use the bag as a symbol of a kinder economy and a caring community, and be inspired to do at least one specific action which they can ‘put in the bag’.

It doesn’t have to cost anything. You might even let this newspaper’s Editor know what that you did, and that idea might spread too.

I know of one such action this week that schools and/or adults could adopt and adapt.

The parents of a rural school very recently received a letter from the principal following a whole-staff discussion on the hardships facing the school and the school community.

Parents might have expected the letter to be an ‘ask’ for those who could find a little extra to help the school – but it was not.

The caring and respectful letter acknowledged and thanked parents for their unstinting commitment to the education of their children in the school, the effort made in getting them there every day, supporting homework, participating in school events, and for their appreciation and support of the teaching and non-teaching staff.

It then informed that it had been unanimously agreed by school staff that parents should not provide gifts from children/families for staff, or exchange presents for classmates in school.

The rationale was that while the generosity and desire to thank the staff was appreciated, it placed unequal financial pressure on parents, and anxiety on children, depending on the degree of financial stress at home.

The policy will be explained to children within the spirit of Christmas, and with kindness to each other being the best present of all, they will have an opportunity to be especially kind for Christmas.

It also reassured parents that the existing policy of ‘no child is left behind’ would remain when the school Christmas trip to the pantomime takes place, despite other pressures.

That’s what I call getting your education and development priorities right.

An inimitable eight-year old of my acquaintance has worn odd socks every day since last year’s ‘Odd Socks Day’.

For those not in the know, anti-bullying week was last week. Each year, the UK-wide Anti-Bullying Alliance programme of activities includes a day on which everyone in participating schools wears colourful odd socks to show their support for the campaign to end school bullying.

The impeccable logic was that he supported anti-bullying measures every day, and it would remind others to do. It also, at a stroke, ended his ‘lost sock’ problems.

It did, however, leave a new conundrum for this year’s odd-sock day, so he decided that for the whole school day, he would also smile and say “Hello” to everyone he passed in the corridor or school yard, “especially anyone looking a bit sad or lonely”.

So there is another small idea you could adopt and add symbolically to ‘Rodney’s Bag’.

Random acts of kindness don’t need to be prize-winning. Making a habit of them improves both your own emotional wellbeing as well as that of others. A smile, or a kind word, costs nothing in hard cash.

I believe that plain, ordinary, everyday people, everywhere in the world want the world to be a better place, and want to help make it so.

We outnumber the few who care about nobody but themselves and what they want; people who would trample over the needs or wants or fundamental rights of everybody else to get it.

Some of my core beliefs from childhood have not survived ‘lived experience’, but the belief that human instinct is ‘hard-wired’ to predispose people to care about each other, help others and to be happier working together for the good of all, has survived significant historic and current evidence to the contrary.

The reason is very simple. Every day of my life, no matter where in the world that day was spent, I have witnessed the kindness and compassion of ordinary people toward each other, regardless of whether they worshipped the same God, were born in the same country, were the same colour, age, gender, etc. People are people.

The great and persistent cruelties of the world are rarely caused by ordinary people going about living their daily lives, and I have seen them challenge injustice and cruelty with courage when, by chance, it has happened before their eyes.

The totality of individual and collective actions of solidarity, kindness, compassion and sharing, and community leadership within extended families, neighbours, streets, neighbourhoods, villages, towns, across the whole world, although smaller and less visible to each other, outnumber the great acts of cruelty that evidence ‘Man’s inhumanity to Man’.

I don’t believe in God. I think Man invented God in his own image.

It explains why so many Gods battle for supremacy, dehumanising and demonising people of ‘other Gods’.

However, I do believe in humanity. I believe that love and solidarity for our fellow and sister humans as equal humans will compel people to act to help each other, as government morality disintegrates globally.

I believe, if we each do as much as we can, however we can, the spring will come for the poor, for Palestine, for humanity, for the planet. We can, together build a better world.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine. (In the shelter of each other the people live.)