JM Weekly Update

Hello friends

Its that time again - the third Wednesday in the month, which can only mean that it's time to get together for another cafe session. This will be our final session in the Rough Guide to being an Ordinary Radical season (though not the last session of term, don't worry! More on that below.) As trailed last week, this week we have Ash Chafe coming to speak on his experience of life as an ordinary radical living on Strawberry Vale - be sure to come along and hear what he has to say! 

That's 7:30pm this Wednesday at Coffee Republic in North Finchley. Come early, grab a coffee and a pasty and meet someone new.

Don't forget that we gave you two challenges last month - to adopt a new ordinary radical habit and to invite someone along to this session. We look forward to seeing how you've done! In all seriousness, we are eager to see JM grow further - we want to fill Coffee Republic with members (and Raj's till with enough takings that we can further reduce our room hire costs), so please do get out and spread the word!

Speaking of getting out, some of us spent yesterday out of our comfort zones at Brent Cross. Read more about what we were doing and why in the post below.

I'd also like to flag up another opportunity to do something practical - we are partnering with The Bohemia to provide gifts and Christmas dinners to some of the older people of Finchley. The idea is simple: buy a gift for an older lady or gent, bring it along to our next pub session (5th December) and we'll spend the evening wrapping them up. There are more details below. This is an excellent opportunity to support a local business, invest in our community and raise our visibility, not to mention to bring festive cheer to some senior citizens. We'd love for all of you to get involved with this, so get thinking about what you might give...

That's all for now - have a great week, y'all!

Sam and Victoria, Elaine, Sara, Lizzie

Looking Out

While our cafe sessions this term are exploring what it means to be an ordinary radical, our autumn pub sessions will look at how we can develop and improve the network itself.

Wednesday 7th November, 8pm
JM has grown from an idea to a community of 20-30 people that meet regularly and another 20-30 that follow us on social media or receive our weekly emails updates. That's very exciting, but we want more. We dream of filling Coffee Republic with 40 people every month, of being able to make a tangible impact on issues we get behind and empowering even more people to find out how to act on their passion to see more social justice in our world.

At this pub session we'll be at the Bohemia sharing tips on how we talk to friends and colleagues about being part of Justice Matters and other ideas for reaching a wider audience.

It promises be another awesome evening - see you there!

Getting plugged in

Life is pretty busy, we all know that, so keeping track of what's going on in your favourite network for activists, optimists and ordinary radicals can sometimes feel hard.

With this in mind, we are striving to make it as easy as possible for you to keep to keep up to date with what's going on at Justice Matters through the communication channel of your choice. To this end, we have a Facebook Page (please Like us!), a Twitter feed (please follow us!), updates on this website and we also circulate weekly email updates to members on our distribution list. Given that email is the most accessible channel, all the most important information is shared this way, so if you are not yet on our list and would like to be, please just drop us an email and we'll get that fixed.

We don't want to spam you with a hundred emails as week, so not everything we share on Facebook or this site goes out by email. For the full experience therefore you probably need to keep on eye on Facebook or this website. But don't worry if you don't have time to keep checking in to see if anything is new - you can sign up to receive blog updates direct to your email inbox using the box on the right of the page. Alternatively, subscribe to our RSS feed to consume our updates in Google Reader.

Hopefully we've made it possible for you to find the information you need in the way that works best for you. Our intention is to make it as easy as possible to know what's going on and thus how to get involved with the network. We aspire to be a significant, dynamic community of individuals, both active in our areas of interest and interconnected with each other. In light of that, we invite you to take your engagement with us seriously - please read our updates and make time to attend our gatherings. Likewise, if you come across stories, campaigns or articles that you'd like to share with other members of the community, do post them on the Facebook Page or email them to us and we'll put them on here.

In an age of consumer capitalism, active participation in anything is fairly counter-cultural. It is our belief however, that the only way that we will see real change in our communities and across our world, is for people to reject the consumerist approach to life in favour of a more intentional lifestyle that 'seek[s] the peace and prosperity of the city' rather than self-interest and personal gratification. This is the idea at the heart of Justice Matters. Thanks for coming this far with us. We hope you'll join in striving to continue living it out.