A changing city – but always Mancunian

Please note: this post is 92 months old and The Cares Family is no longer operational. This post is shared for information only

There are so many things that make Manchester unique – from our history to our music to the character of our people. Manchester is always innovating and making new things that shape the world: the industrial revolution, the first passenger trains, the first personal computers. The list could go on. 

But the thing that really stands Manchester out is not just that we change the world: it's also how we do it – with a civic pride in our ability to connect the past to the present to the future, through embracing technology and forcing progress but always with one another in mind. 

It's that combination of constant change, rooted in our timeless values, that make Manchester what it is.

But we all know that rapid change can also feel isolating. 

From Ancoats to Chorlton, new apartment buildings are going up all the time. Shops are changing. People are arriving from all over the world. Pubs that sustained generations of community are now serving up £4 craft beers. And sometimes the world we've created feels a little too busy, with so much focus on how to save time, rather than how to spend it.

For all of us, that pace of modern life can feel unsettling. But for the older Mancunians for whom the city has been home for 60, 70, 80 years that change can feel altogether too much. 

An article in the MEN this week highlighted that pace of the transformation again. It says:

"In the early 1990s just a few hundred people wanted to make the city centre their home. Less than 30 years later, Manchester now faces the opposite problem. How does it sustain the biggest boom seen since Victorian times – in which an astonishing 50,000 people now live in the wider city centre, more arriving every day – without destroying its heart and soul?"

This short paragraph really underscores why Manchester Cares exists – to bring people from different backgrounds, generations and life experiences together to share time, laughter and new experiences so that Manchester can always feel like a home – not a hotel – for everyone, even as the world changes around us.

When we begin programmes in the autumn, we will harness the people and places of the city, old and new – and help form relationships between people who live side-by-side but too infrequently interact: young professionals just arriving and the older originals who've got so much to share too.

We'll have cocktail nights for those two groups in the new wine bars. We'll run trips to the new skyscrapers – hosted by the new businesses and employees that attract so many people to our metropolis – so that older people can feel part of their changing city. We'll help create friendships one-to-one so that we can bring some of the dynamic city in for people who can struggle to get out.

And we'll make sure that all those programmes have that unique soul and spirit at their heart – that this community is built the Mancunian Way.