The Quiet Ones Are Listening: Filippa Brundish’s episode

By Brigid DeMento, 

our summer intern with the Foundation for International Education, from the University of Florida.

We tend to celebrate the loudest person in the room. The one who speaks first, speaks confidently and seems certain of the answer. Listening can look passive beside that. It can be mistaken for shyness, hesitation or a lack of ambition. But listening is not doing nothing. Listening is how we notice what is missing. It is how we understand what another person needs. It is how we absorb the shape of a problem before rushing in with a solution.

Our guest this week, Filippa Brundish spent much of her life doing exactly that. She listened, learned and gave everything to the work in front of her. Through her career as a project manager, Filippa became very good at getting things done.

Creating The Kindness Cooperation, Filippa saw the opportunity to use her project-management skills to make the world kinder, fairer and more inclusive.There is something both brave and practical in that. Kindness is often treated as though it is a feeling: something soft, personal and difficult to measure. Filippa treats it as something you can organise. You can build a project around it. You can create partnerships, complete safeguarding checks, coordinate schools and care homes, develop a model, test it and find ways for it to grow.

Her project, Project Joy, stands for Joining Older and Younger. It brings schoolchildren together with older people in care homes and dementia services. The children arrive with their energy, curiosity and stories. The older people respond with warmth, memories and attention. Both groups leave with more than they arrived with.

The older people are reconnected with a liveliness that may have disappeared from their everyday lives. The children grow in confidence and empathy. They talk about the visits when they go home. Their parents notice the effect. Relationships form between people who might otherwise live only streets apart and never meet.

That is where Filippa’s particular form of kindness matters. It is kindness with a project plan.

Listening may have been the beginning, but she has learned that there comes a point when listening must turn into speaking and then into doing. Confidence does not have to mean becoming the loudest voice. Courage does not require changing your nature. Sometimes it simply means trusting that what you have quietly noticed is worth acting upon.

Filippa calls herself a dark horse. She listens. She absorbs. She surprises people.

And perhaps we need more dark horses. People who have watched carefully enough to understand where the gaps are, and who then decide to step into them.

Project Joy does not begin by asking what can be delivered to older people or what children can be taught. It begins by recognising that both have something to offer. Both deserve companionship, dignity, attention and the chance to be known. That feels like the heart of her work, and it is also where the Golden Rule comes in: treat others, and the planet, as we would wish to be treated.

The Golden Rule is not only about being pleasant. It asks us to imagine another person’s experience and then build our systems accordingly. Would we want to feel forgotten as we grew older? Would we want our children to grow up without meaningful relationships beyond their own generation? Would we want the world to be organised only around what is fastest, cheapest or easiest?

Filippa’s answer is practical. Bring people together. Listen carefully. Make the arrangements. Do the work.

Kindness, in her hands, is not naive at all. It is a decision to believe that connection matters, followed by the courage and organisation needed to make it happen.