Yesterday was the 17th of January – the day where, for the UK at least, most people give up on their new years resolutions. That’s a solid 17 days where people try to go for a run every morning, stop snacking, stop smoking, stop swearing or try and ‘be more positive’. This is before they realise it’s too difficult and decide that the life they had in 2016 wasn’t all that bad, so they’ll wait to see how that pans out.

I’m not judging anyone, we’ve all done it. Only yesterday I heard someone in our office say they’d given up having sugar between Mondays and Fridays – today they came in and announced that they had Apple Pie for breakfast.

We all know the feeling of invincibility that we enter a new year with; the want to change. And we all know the subsequent feeling of tiredness, restlessness and frustration that results when we realise change is a lot harder than you think.

But whilst it can be annoying to us personally, isn’t it also humbling?

So often when we think about change, we’re wishing it upon others “I wish they weren’t so…”, “I wish he would just…”, “I wish she would try and…”. We’re constantly asking others to change as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. But when we try and do it ourselves we learn it is never simple. We are creatures of habit, we default, and often in the worst ways.

Pecan’s vision is centred on change; we want to transform communities. We want to help vulnerable people, marginalised people, local people change their lives. This is hard, often there are times when it would be easy to give up… you start thinking, maybe we should change our vision instead “can we be a cat charity instead?”. But together we’re pushing past the 17th of January, and as a team we’re continuing our stretch of commitment (going on 28 years now) to bring about change.

This January we’re launching our latest project: Family Works… this is a programme that aims to make a lot of change. It is not going to be easy, but with your support we think we can just about do it.

So… keep updated with us this year: read the newsletters, email and call us – because we’re sticking to our resolutions and we look forward to seeing how it pans out.