Through their eyes - a glimpse into the experience of Britain's asylum seekers

We had a great gathering on Wednesday, led by Ann-Marie, Dave, Zoe and Beth, looking at the issue of asylum and immigration.

The media paints a very specific image of the types of people that come to the UK seeking refuge and the life they live whilst here, but as we learnt through the case study of Alexander and his Belarusian family (ably voiced by Ann-Marie), the reality of life as an asylum seeker can be quite different to that media stereotype.

Anna Gallagher (Beth's daughter) also provided this excellent video which set the scene for much of the conversation during the evening.

Want to know more?
Read the free booklet from the Refugee Council, The Truth About Asylum.

What can I do to help?
Do you have a spare room? Would you or someone you know be willing to host a destitute asylum seeker for a day, a week, or longer with support from an experiences organisation? If so, visit www.spare-room.org or email hostmigrants@yahoo.co.uk.

Do you have spare time or can you give money? Barnet Refugee Service supports destitute asylum seekers in Barnet. They need volunteers to help at drop-ins and women's groups, to provide advice and do help with admin.

Live Below the Line

As I wrote last week, from this Monday, a number of us will be participating in Live Below the Line - a campaign intended to raise and awareness and funds for the 1.4 billion people around the world who live below the extreme poverty line. For five days we will be joining many others across the UK and beyond in spending no more than £1 a day on food and drink. As you can imagine, this is quite a feat, especially with food prices going up and up and a great way to talk to friends and colleagues about food poverty and social justice.

Doing our shop for Live Below the Line 2011

There are different ways to undertake the challenge: you can walk into a supermarket with a fiver and buy everything for your week with just that one note, or you can work out how much you're going to use of different items and calculate the cost of individual portions to reach your £5 limit. Both methods have their merits, so feel free to do either. If you choose, you can get people to sponsor you to undertake the challenge, and/or you could give the extra money you would usually have spent on your food shop to a charity like Tearfund, The Salvation Army International Development or Christian Aid who support international development.

To help with your LTBL menu planning, you might like to have a look at A Girl Called Jack website (thanks, Dawn) which has lots of budget meal suggestions. Victoria and I are going to  give her carrot, cumin and kidney bean burgers a go - let us know if you try any of the others!

Are you taking part? Let us know if you are - maybe share a photo of your shopping list or till receipt, or any budget menu ideas that others could try, and remember to tell your friends why you're lunch looks a bit different this week - you never know, they might be inspired to find out more about social justice and even come along to Justice Matters with you!

As well as all that, we will having our usual first Wednesday in the month gathering this Weds (1 May), when we will be chatting more about the practicalities of getting involved with seeking social justice. We will be at the Bohemia from 8pm - you can decide whether to take an evening off LBTL and buy a drink or just stick tap water...

GB joins the G0.7

"We also deliver in this coming year on this nation’s long-standing commitment to the world’s poorest to spend 0.7 per cent of our national income on international development.

We should all take pride, as I do, in this historic achievement for our country."

Read the full text of the Chancellor's 2013 budget speech: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/

Shared from the Justice Matters Facebook Page

The world is not impoverished

Via Phil 'Hoylus' Hoyle

Help without barriers

Emperor Julian: “Nothing has contributed [more] to the progress of the superstitions of the Christians as their charity to strangers... The impious Galileans provide not only for their own poor, but for ours as well.”
#generousjustice

Shared from Justice Matters Facebook Page

Failed States 2012

Failed states: An interesting infographic and 'postcards from hell'. Provocative reminders of a world in need of hope.

"If anything has become clear since we started publishing the Failed States Index in 2005, it’s that state failure is an entrenched problem -- one the world is far from figuring out how to fix. Every one of the 20 countries atop this year’s index has been there before: Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Iraq have never made it out of the top 10, and Somalia takes the unwanted No. 1 spot for the fifth straight year."

Read more: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/failedstates2012

Shared from the Justice Matters Facebook Page

The world I want to see

Last Wednesday, some of us went along to a panel discussion inspired by the forthcoming Rio+20 World Summit. The speakers - including Caroline Spelman MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Rt Rev Peter Price, Bishop of Bath and Wells - were asked to speak on the subject of 'the world I want to see' and then engaged in a lively Q&A session. Sara, Lizzie and Sam were tweeting avidly, so you can find more by looking up the #FaithinRio hashtag on Twitter.

First to speak was Caroline Spelman MP, who began with a review of what has and hasn't been achieved since the original Rio World Summit in 1992:

"[The original Rio Earth Summit]was a turning point in the way the world looks at the links between the environment, development, and the economy. There has been progress on poverty alleviation, with significant improvements in access to water, education and healthcare in all regions of the world. Many businesses have embraced sustainability issues, and renewable energy has grown substantially.

Yet substantial challenges remain. Approx 1.4 billion people around the world still live in extreme poverty and those who were the poorest 20 years ago are still the poorest now. Environmental degradation continues, and sustainability has not been integrated fully into economic decision making."

Spelman highlighted that in just three year's time there will be an extra one billion mouths to feed. By 2030, DEFRA forecasts that water, food and energy will all be stressed. Each of these are potential flashpoints for conflict as well as sources of suffering. We do not have the luxury of time; we need Rio+20 to hasten change that benefits the most disadvantaged. But growth should be about more than just raising GDP, she said; well being and quality of life should also be indicators of success. For these reasons, the minister pledged that the UK would to push for a meaning set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) to be agreed in Rio.

DEFRA have posted her whole speech on their website, so you can read what she said in full if you are interested.

Next up was Steve Waygood of Aviva who spoke on the need for better corporate social responsibility within the global business community. He said that consumer power was an important way for the masses to shape the behaviours of the multinationals, but since

"90% of the data on business responsibility is missing [from public scrutiny]"

holding businesses to account and making informed investments is hard. To solve this, Aviva are leading a broad coalition of businesses and other stakeholders to pushing for corporate accountability and sustainability. At Rio+20 they will be seeking agreement on a transparency framework to that will reveal the true state of an organisation's corporate sustainability. As Waygood himself put it: 

"Corporations should deploy their vast resources to improve lives, not just profit margins. Paying tax is just the start."

Third in the line up was Nanette, a lady working with CAFOD in the Philippines. She spoke about the importance of meaningful collaboration between communities, local government and local church to effect sustainable development, identifying that:

"ordinary people, anointed leaders and elected leaders need to take on responsibility and accountability."

She was especially keen to stress that sustainable growth must be socially just; Rio+20 must not be about developed countries making decisions about developing countries without their say or involvement. In the same way, she argued that while the Green Economy held great promise for the development of underdeveloped parts of the world, to deliver change that benefits local communities and not just shareholders, those green technologies should be in the hands of local communities, not the multinational corporations.

The presentations closed with a rousing statement from the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who spoke with great passion, challenging Christians to stand against poverty, the arms trade and the military industrial complex. He encouraged those present not to fritter away their potential but rather to spend their lives doing something that changes the world. After all:

"We can't just have a concern for poverty," he said, "we have to act to end it."

Watch the Bishop's speech in full:

Throughout the presentations and the Q&A that followed, we were reminded that the impact of climate change is not a future problem; for many in the developing world it is a real problem today. It was clear that amid financial meltdown in Europe, ongoing conflict in the Middle East and political scandals at home, keeping sustainable global development and the ambitions of Rio+20 high on the public agenda is going to be a struggle. Struggle we must however, for as Caroline Spelman identified in her closing statement, the charge we have is to leave the planet in a better condition that we received it.

An unfamiliar landscape

I came across the image below on Facebook this week. Its an incredibly powerful reminder that, contrary to our popular misconception, the world does not revolve around the West. It also reminded me of the West Wing episode in which CJ meets the Cartographers for Social Equality (watch a clip here if you don't know what I'm talking about).

(Click the image to see a larger version on which you can actually read the text.)

At Justice Matters we want to develop a more accurate (and therefore humble) understanding of our place within this strange and wonderful Creation and the humanity which peoples it's surface. If you'd like to join us in exploring what that means, please drop us a message or just pitch up to one of our meetings. We look forward to meeting you as we learn to walk this unfamiliar landscape...

Live Below the Line - Update

Today is Day Two of my Live Below the Line challenge and its going pretty well so far.

Over the weekend, my lovely wife and I worked out a menu for the week - three square meals a day and even deserts, all for just £1 each a day. Keeping it below £10 and healthy was hard, with plenty of items coming on and off the shopping list as we honed our menu to be as lean and efficient as possible. Even as a couple who are used to planning a week's food at a time, working with such a small budget meant it took much longer than normal.

The shop itself was equally time consuming, with lots of selecting and weighing veg to make sure we found the cheapest choice. Although we are doing this to raise awareness of people in extreme poverty overseas, the experience of working with such a small budget raised my empathy for those struggling on low incomes in this country.

The week before last I was queuing at the tills behind a lady for whom our challenge this week was clearly her everyday experience. Repeatedly asking the cashier to run a sub-total on her shopping, she kept having to remove items from the belt to keep below her budget. I hope I exuded quiet compassion as I waited behind her, but I fear that my mere presence, witnessing her struggle to make ends meet, may have heightened the humiliation for her. As someone who has never had to face that kind of hardship, this week of self-imposed struggle is teaching me as much about loving my neighbour across the street as my neighbours beyond the sea.

Live Below the Line

For five days in May some friends and I are going to try living on just £1 of food a day. We're doing this to raise awareness of global poverty and the 1.4 billion people on the planet today who have to exist on the equivalent of £1 a day for everything they need. In addition to making lots of noise about what we are doing and why, we're going to be giving all the money we would usually have spent on food to support Salvation Army International Development, who resource, empower and support developing communities to defeat poverty and injustice and enable them to build a better life and future.

If you've been reading this blog before, you'll know that I am involved in establishing a community of restless idealists and faithful activists, each passionate about bringing social justice to our hurting world. We've been meeting in locations around Finchley every fortnight since the start of the year and we're using this week of self-enforced poverty to live out the words we say. 

I'll be posting updates on my Twitter feed and Facebook status, as will others, so watch this space. Maybe you'd like to join us in this experiment? If so, drop me a note or comment below.

We can't end poverty overnight, but we can't stand by and ignore it either.