The smell of success

"Hello Rioters. Look at your friend, now back to me; now at your friend, now back to me! Sadly, he isn't me; but if he stopped using antisocial behaviour and started using job centre he could be like me. Look down, back up. Where are we? You're at an interview, with the man your friend could work for! What's in his hand? It's an application form to that job he needs. Look again... the form is now money! Anything is possible when you get a job and stop looting. I'm at a desk."

Courtesy of the excellent Stuart Smith.

What is Justice Matters

At our first public gathering Victoria gave this brief introduction to how Justice Matters came about and where we're headed...

This all started for Sam and me when we visited the United Nations in New York last September. Looking around the UN we were reminded of our passion for social justice – for the number of people in need across the world due to preventable problems. However we also realised that we had become so caught up with the busyness of daily life in London that we ’d become quite able to hear of a problem on the news or in our church and want to do something but just not quite get round to it. Rather than being people characterised by the inability to ignore suffering, we were letting injustice happen because we were too busy to do anything about it.

So on our return home we gathered a few friends who were either in a similar position to ourselves, or who were actually doing something but perhaps finding it difficult to get people involved and gradually Justice Matters was born. We’ve been meeting since January and working out what this group could look like, and what we might actually be able to do. Now we are pleased to be at as stage to welcome you to join us.

Those of us who have been involved in setting up this community are coming to this from a place of faith and we want to be upfront about that. However, we believe that there is something in our common humanity which does not allow us to see injustice without a desire to see it changed. On our own it can seem that the problems we see are just too big for us to make a difference. We hope that through this community we can explore the issues together and learn how we can begin to do something.

In the coming months we plan to meet together to hear guest speakers, learn from one another and undertake practical action as a community. We hope you'll join us.

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.

The counterfeit bailout

"We spent hundreds of billions of dollars to save the richest companies and people in America, offering them a safety net that we had long since decided not to grant the poorest Americans - lest they 'take advantage' of it... What the banks were supposed to do with our money was to start lending again - which they had stopped doing - to credit-worthy businesses and homeowners for whom critical capital had dried up.

The American people were asked to trust the smart people who knew best and to count on the banks to restore the credit flow to individuals and small businesses that needed it. But some banks bought up (with our money) stocks, bonds, and other assets at rock-bottom prices and then made a killing in profits as the stock market stabilised and began to rise again. Then, to congratulate themselves for seizing this opportunity for making a profit, they gave out record compensation bonuses to themselves whilst wages for the rest of the country continued to fall and more and more people found themselves without a job at all.

It was amorality play almost too unbelievably bad to be true ; yet that is exactly what happened."

From Rediscovering Values by Jim Wallis, 2010 (Hardcover, p220)

The social cost of fiscal profit

"In 1720, the Grande-Saint-Antoine, a merchant ship, was placed under quarantine by officials in the French city of Marseilles. Several crew members had become sick and died from the plague. But this effort to stop the spread of the plague from the ship to city was soon ended by the city's merchants, who pushed for the authorities to release the ship from quarantine so they could bring its valuable cargo to market.

Uncontained, the disease proceeded to kill fifty thousand people in the city, about half its population, and an additional fifty thousand in the surrounding area. These one hundred thousand needless deaths ensued from [the mercantile pursuit of profit and the belief that the market is god]."

From Rediscovering Values, by Jim Wallis, 2010 (hardcover, p71)

A Community for Social Justice?

On Wednesday 5 January 2011 Victoria and I met with a group of friends and fellow rabble-rousers at the Elephant pub in North Finchley to discuss the possibility of forming a new Missional Community around the theme of social justice. After introductions, we used variously shaped post-it notes to capture our passions, skills and initial ideas. A survey of these post-its revealed a range of passions, including:

• Inspiring action – challenging apathy, raising awareness, envisioning and empowering
• Meeting practical needs – water and sanitation, housing
• Championing equality – including wealth, opportunity, rights of children and women
• Fighting poverty – at home and abroad, Fairtrade and economic development
• Sustainability
• Building community and relationships
• Theology.

In terms of the talent, those present were well equipped to support the running of a new Community, with project management / administration, publicity / social networking, event management and listening / mentoring / enabling all mentioned on the post-its.

In discussing ideas for what sort of things such a Community might do, there was a clear agreement that our meetings shouldn’t simply be about listening to speakers (though this will no doubt form part of our activities), but should balance hearing and doing. Suggestions included:

• Hosting public events with guest speakers (eg. Tearfund, WaterAid, Burma etc)
• Getting involved with wider campaigning opportunities, such as World Walk for Water
• Holding prayer meetings for global issues – might be directed at rallying church(es) or perhaps something accessible to outsiders
• Hosting film nights to show thought-provoking movies or documentaries (perhaps in association with Co-op and the Phoenix Cinema) with post-screening discussion (and prayer?)
• Running / joining a reading group (perhaps with similar aims to the above)
• Running a regular Justice Café with proceeds going to fight poverty
• Hosting an Unfair Games event in partnership with Active Barnet or Barnet FC / Saracens / London 2012
• Assorted practical activities such as litter picking, adopt-a-nursing home, English lessons for refugees
• Short-term mission to international development-related partners (such as Helping Hands, Compassion, Feed the Hungry, Habitat for Humanity).

Having read and discussed our passions, skills and ideas, we moved on to explore some of the finer details of how such a Community would function, what it would do and how it would meet the framework set out by Henry, Colin and David.

A clear voice for justice
One of the key questions was about the balance between seeking social justice locally and campaigning for it internationally. The majority opinion in the group was that international campaigning was a must, predominantly because of the great need beyond our own borders and also because international issues are perhaps more accessible, making it easier to attract new members to the Community. Whether the group adopts one cause at a time or several remains the topic of further discussion.

Some voiced concern that setting up a Community centred on social justice absolves the remainder of St Bs from engaging with such issues. To avoid this, we propose to model ourselves as an ‘MTF’ for social justice - that is to say, a community of passionate individuals and friends who will provide leadership and structure on the matter of social justice within St Bs, raising awareness of the issues and creating opportunities which will enable others within the congregation (and beyond) to play their own role.

In addition, there was agreement that while the local Church does need to be corralled into a more visible position on social justice, this Community was primarily about connecting with the wider community of Finchley, not just the church goers, enabling everyone to get involved in making a difference to social justices. Given Finchley’s population it is reasonable to believe that there will be folk out there who are interested in getting involved with a group like this. Moreover, with influential, educated professionals living locally there is a real opportunity to shape culture and policy not just locally but across the capitol region. For some, this Community may provide focus and structure for their existing campaigning activities; for others it will provide the tools needed to help them turn goodwill into practical action. This will be a core purpose of the Community - to help local people who want to do good but aren’t sure where to start.

A role in sowing social justice locally
Although many felt that the Community’s primary focus should be speaking up for international, there was a clear sense that some local action was required. However, what form that local action would take was less clear. On one thing we were agreed – we (and presumably many others in the church) didn’t understand enough about local needs to decide a local cause. It was suggested that it would be valuable for those present to spend some time investigating local needs and perhaps use this learning to highlight needs to others in the church. In this way our Community could serve a practical role in raising awareness and supporting the development of other St Bs Communities centred on the needs we identify.

Thinking about taking action locally, there was uncertainty as to how much could reasonably be achieved in one night a week (assuming that the Community was to meet fortnightly and only half the sessions would be dedicated to local issues). Likewise, there was concern that most causes would be disinterested in ‘hit-and-run’ help.

Some possible options options discussed to address the local element of the Community were:

• Research and gather information about local charities and ask members of the community to commit to volunteering at one or more in their own time. Give frequent opportunities for people to feedback and share what they are doing and to provide accountability.
• Advertise ourselves to local charities and organisations as an available resource when they need extra help for extraordinary occasions such as larger campaigns or events. Engage with CommUNITY Barnet and Barnet Pledgebank to identify one off volunteering opportunities that would benefit from our manpower.
• Give members ‘homework’, challenging them to carry out ‘tiny acts of good’ that sow genuine community during their everyday lives (for example introduce yourself to your neighbour, plant bulbs in the garden of your block of flats, befriend your supermarket till clerk etc).

For some of those present, there was clearly a desire to dedicate more time to local issues than international campaigning. It was suggested that these individuals might like to get together to pray about the possibility of forming a Community that centres more directly on a local need into which they might pour their energies.

A Community with soft edges
We did begin tentative discussions about the rhythm or structure of the Community’s gatherings, voicing a desire to be radically inclusive of all members (Christian or otherwise). While we understand that the leadership have proposed a model wherein the Community meets twice a month - once for a public event and once for a more traditional celebration - we were concerned about drawing such a stark division between the Christian and non-Christian members.

While no clear alternative model has yet been defined, it is our hope that the each of the Community’s gatherings would faithfully and unashamedly reflect the faith which has inspired its existence without creating a boundary between the Christian and non-Christians members. In this way, we hope to live out our faith openly and develop genuine, inclusive relationships with all those in the Community, allowing them ownership of the group's activities and development. In this way we hope to avoid a sense of those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘outside’ and instead generate a culture where we welcome people wherever they are at and draw them along on our journey.