Writing The Hoodies Code

If you’re here reading about our exploits it’s probably safe to assume that you’re ‘down’, in the parlance of the young folk, with the concept of Random Acts of Kindness - and our stated mission to commit them throughout our communities in Norwich and beyond.

But you could be forgiven for being perhaps a tad confused as to what all this pirate business is about.The piratey theme that runs through Hoodies For Happiness isn’t just an excuse for a bunch of grown men who should probably know better to run about the place calling each other by daft pirate names and singing sea shanties...frankly, we don’t need any excuse to do that. The H4H movement takes inspiration from pirates for a very good reason. Specifically Golden Age pirates, and the work of Sam Conniff, writer of Be More Pirate.

A first gathering...

Back in May, the good Cap’n Cornelius called upon me to facilitate a first gathering of a crew of kind-hearted gentle men he sought to bring together for a social activism project. The idea was rooted in the Five Ways to Wellbeing, with a particular emphasis on giving. Influenced somewhat by the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, he hoped to form a group to explore playful ways to spread happiness within our communities.

The purpose of this first gathering was to give the idea some shape - establishing our shared values, and what we collectively wanted this project to be.

And so, we began the process of writing our own Pirate Code…

Let me take you back in time to the Golden age of Piracy in the 1600s and 1700s – the era of legendary figures like Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, when thousands of pirates were active in the Caribbean and the Atlantic Coast, plundering hundreds of ships and out-smarting the governments of the day. These rebels went head to head with the world’s mightiest military forces and stuck a middle finger up at the ‘powers that be’.

Sam Conniff argues that the backbone of Pirates’ success in this era was the Pirate Code which brought a crew together and allowed them to work together successfully.

Each code was put together fresh at the start of each voyage or mission, and it was worked out collaboratively by the crew. So it wasn’t the Captain or the “boss” deciding the rules – they were worked out together.

A pirate code would have included long standing ideas or principals such as how rations or pay would have worked to make things fair - and that might not change much over time. But they’d also include very specific rules such as not smuggling women aboard dressed as men, or not drinking rum during an engagement until all of the captives had been secured – which presumably were based on specific instances of things going wrong and lessons being learnt!

This is how pirates organised themselves – out on the sea, without laws or governments to tell them what to do. It could have been absolute chaos, but in practice it was the source of their success - because they created order together. Pirates’ strength was built on trust, diversity and community – and that community was connected through working together and watching each other’s backs. So their success was based on their shared values and beliefs.

Now, nobody at H4H would ever dream of operating outside the law…of taking captives, or plundering Navy vessels and slaughtering their crew. After all, even the staunchest of anarchists would struggle to consider such behaviour to be acts of kindness. But we can learn a lot from Golden Age pirates in terms of how we organise our own band of ragtag rebels.

And so we sat down together to work out our own Pirate Code for Hoodies For Happiness – to establish what brings us together, what values we have in common, and what we collectively want this project as our mission or voyage to be.

A first draft

To get the (cannon)ball rolling, I posed three opening questions to our group of future Hoodies:

"What does happiness mean to you?”

“What will make this something amazing that you want to be part of?”

And perhaps most crucially:

“What would make this really shit?"

We broke off into two smaller groups to give these questions some thought, before reconvening to compare notes.

As you can see, the two groups had a lot of similar ideas and common ground. We began to systematically feed back and cross-reference our ideas. We trimmed the field and picked out our key shared principles, in most cases reaching a pleasingly easy group consensus. 

 

The Hoodie now known as Long Leg Willy was nominated as scribe - based largely on his notable talent for being taller than everyone else and thus being able to reach the top of the whiteboard quite easily. He added the shortlist of 17 agreed principles to the Hoodies Code board, enshrining them in Hoodie history forever.

Make it snappy!

Our guiding principles had been established, but all agreed 17 was a cumbersome number and a little pruning might be necessary. Without discarding any of the very worthy ideas on the shortlist, we narrowed our focus to 5 key statements or ideals that we felt summed up the Hoodies ethos most succinctly. 

At our next gathering these were agreed by all Hoodies present, enshrined in Hoodie law and etched in clay. By “etched in clay”, I of course mean to say we wrote them in felt tip pen on page one of a scrap book. And not just any scrap book, but the Book Of Dreams…but that’s a story for another time.

As the Hoodies' Code was agreed collaboratively, so we wrote it together – each of five Hoodies taking turns to add one of the five key principles on to the final document.

We then all signed the Hoodies' Code to put our names to it as our collectively agreed mission statement. But we signed it with our daft pirate names. Because that’s a lot more fun…and also our true identities are TOP SECRET.

Having established our shared values and aims, the second part of our initial gathering looked to identify and uncover the skills and gifts that each of us as individuals could offer our collective project, that we could use to achieve those aims. But I’ll tell you about that next time…

Deviously,

Davey

Ahoy there! Our thanks go to Sam Moon for taking time to meet with Devious Davey and I prior to our first gathering and from whom we learned much, including about 'Be More Pirate' ~ Captain Cornelius Bellowheart