Blog

13/09/2019

Faith in Community Scotland have a mission to see the poorest communities in Scotland Flourish. In this week's blog Stuart Bell, community development worker with FICS explains how they try to achieve this goal.

I am Stuart, a community development worker with Faith in Community Scotland. I still call myself the newbie, but I have been with the team almost a year now – so the time limit on the title has probably expired!

I work alongside faith groups who are doing, or who are interested in doing, anti-poverty work in their communities. We recognise that in areas of poverty and depravation the skills and assets of local people are key to affecting transformation. We work to encourage these skills, which are essential in driving forward local projects that tackle various social problems, such as barriers for refugees and asylum seekers; food justice work; social isolation; and homelessness.

An interesting part of the work is the variety of folks that I encounter from different faith communities who all have a burning desire to use their gifts and abilities to make their communities a better place.

I’ve worked all over the city, and it has been inspiring to see the desire of local people to work towards the common good, even when faced with challenges of limited funding and available resources. Our approach of working with groups is done at their own pace. By taking the lead from them, our intensity levels of engagement will differ from group to group.

Our engagement may be a one off or occasional pop in to help direct a group to funding sources, or make links with others doing similar work. Or we may engage with a project more intensively over a longer period of time, helping to support them in different areas that enable their activities.

An example of a project that I have built strong links with is the ESOL project at St Aloysius Church in Garnethill. They have been working with refugees and asylum seekers - who stay all over the city - for a couple of years now, helping to teach them ‘survival English’. This equips them with the language skills needed to take them forward in their integration in Glasgow. I have been exploring with the project leaders ways in which links with other groups doing similar work can help to develop the projects scope of reach, and also journeying with them as they face the demands of providing a volunteer-run service five days every week.

Other work involves mental health and wellbeing – particularly the role faith groups can play in providing such support in their communities. We ran an event with input from SAMH and Finn’s Place Centre for Wellbeing earlier in the year, attended by leaders from different faith groups. The event helped to shed some light on what resources are available to groups who want to affect positive mental health, and how stigma surrounding the topic can be tackled.

We work across faith communities in Glasgow and the Central Belt, so if you are linked to a faith community that is interested in anti-poverty work please email me at stuart@faithincommunityscotland.org so we can explore how we can help to develop and support your vision. To find our more about the different areas of work Faith in Community Scotland is involved in, please visit our website https://www.faithincommunityscotland.org or like us on Facebook!

06/09/2019

Reaching Inwards, Reaching Outwards

This week in our blog Sr Isabel Smyth reflects on the recent Building a Home Together Colloquium on Faith In Public Life.

The school summer holidays are over in Scotland and there’s a sense of purpose and industry around. After a quiet few months our interfaith committee has become very busy. In the last week or two there has been an Eid dinner hosted by the Scottish Ahl-alBayt Society, a day with Church students, taking them to places of worship and introducing them to the work of interfaith in Scotland, a meeting with young people from three Catholic schools, working with St Mungo’s Museum to plan a programme which they will organise in their schools during interfaith week and a 24 hour colloquium on faith in public life.

This colloquium has become an annual event but this year it was special. For one thing we planned it in partnership with the Justice and Peace Commission and the Bishops’ Parliamentary Office and we had a Sunni and Shia Muslim and a Baha’i participating. This meant the majority of people attending were Christian but even this small number of people from other faiths made a tangible and significant difference. It was important to have an interfaith dimension, even if small, as we were reflecting on our common civic identity. The inspiration for the event and the title of the colloquium came from Lord Jonathan Sack’s book ‘The Home We Build Together’. In that book Lord Sacks suggests that the image of a home could be a powerful motivation for people of all faiths and none to work together to bring about the kind of society we would all like to live in – in other words to work for the common good.

The key note speaker, who set the scene for subsequent reflections and discussions, was Lord John Mcfall, a person of faith with long experience in politics. He reflected on the relationship between faith and politics, suggesting that both have the same intention in that they are working for a better world. He had some interesting and challenging things to say. Change, he said was the only reality in life and not to be afraid of it. While we lived in a time of instability and insecurity, people were yearning for answers to the big questions of life, something religion had to offer. It could be that religion might be the only architecture to hold society together – quite a challenge!

Cardinal Newman has a famous saying ‘to live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often’. But on the whole religions are conservative institutions and not often in the forefront of change. Religious founders were certainly innovators, often challenging the inflexibility of the conservatism of the faith and culture from which they sprung. But the developing tradition has a tendency to institutionalise the charisma and put its energies into maintaining the tradition. Religion, like nations, can look back with nostalgia to a golden age when all was well, stable and secure. But there was, of course, no such thing. Such thinking is a refuge from a world that is frightening in its insecurity and instablitiy. It’s this kind of thinking that has given rise, I think, to what we call identity politics, an attitude which also influences religions. There’s real evidence of a battening down the hatches in both religion and politics – a fear of the other, a sense that others are out to get us and we must look after ourselves and our own interests or ‘they’ will take over and deprive us of our livelihood and identity. In so far as this is the case, religions are in danger of setting themselves against society, rather than being the architecture that holds it together. This is only possible by embracing society, looking for the positive and good and speaking truth in love while inspiring fellow citizens to commit to accepting the human dignity of all and working for the common good.

To do this religion needs to learn a new language - the language of citizenship which Rabbi Sacks suggests should be the first language of us all, despite our second languages of ethnicity or faith. Someone at our colloquium suggested we needed to be bi-lingual. This may well be true but perhaps faith communities need to reflect on how far their language, especially in the area of morals and values, reflects the reality of today and is expressed in language that is positive and meaningful. In my own Church much of the language of faith and morals uses medieval concepts which are no longer relevant and suggest a cosmology and reality that is outdated. No wonder young people cannot take it seriously and are ahead of us in meeting some of the issues facing our planet and its future.

There was much more of course and in due time a report will be published on our website. Recently Pope Francis encouraged us to avoid unproductive discussions. In interfaith no meeting is unproductive if it establishes a bond of friendship and understanding but it was good to have discourse over matters that are important to all of us. The intention is that this should be the start of many more productive dialogues.

originally published in Interfaith Journeys at http://www.interfaithjourneys.net/

30/08/2019

Challenge Poverty Week 2019

Challenge poverty week runs from 7th - 13th October this year and the planning for this year's event is well underway as Irene from Poverty Alliance tells us in this weeks blog.

Challenge Poverty Week is an opportunity to highlight what is being done to address poverty, showcase the solutions we can all get behind to solve it and commit to more action in the future. It has been coordinated by the Poverty Alliance for the last seven years, and it takes place from the 7th to the 13th October 2019.

Last year nearly 200 events were organised by 130 organisations and elected representatives as part of Challenge Poverty Week. The campaign also received cross-party support, with leaders of all major political parties in Scotland taking part.

The key messages for this year’s Challenge Poverty Week are:

Challenge Poverty in Scotland? Aye, we can!

• Too many people in Scotland are trapped in the grip of poverty
• By boosting incomes and reducing costs we can solve poverty
• Solving poverty is about ensuring we can all participate in society
Why not take part?
You can get involved in Challenge Poverty Week by organising an activity or creating communications content. You can, for example:
• Organise a themed discussion
• Have an open day at your organisation
• Write a blog, make a video or talk to the media about the solutions to poverty
• Speak to a local politician about what needs to be done

To get more ideas on how to take part, ask us for a copy of our activity toolkit. Email Irene at irene.tortajada@povertyalliance.org

We are hoping to get substantial media coverage of the participant’s actions on a local and national level, with a focus on ensuring most of them use the framed messages and content we are disseminating for the Week. These messages are based on research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on public attitudes towards poverty and the most effective ways to build support to solve it by using framed language. We are offering free training to all participants in the Week about the learnings from this research on framing, with a focus on how to use language effectively when engaging with the media. You can learn more and sign up on our website: www.challengepoverty.net

The solutions we are advocating

We believe we can end poverty by boosting people’s incomes and reducing the cost of living. Employers can play their part by ensuring every worker is paid the real Living Wage. Governments at all levels must ensure that social security benefits are adequate to help loosen the grip of poverty and provide an anchor against the rising tide of low pay and high housing costs. Governments should invest in affordable and accessible services including transport, heating and childcare. Community groups and voluntary organisations have a vital role to play providing support, giving advice and mitigating the impact of poverty.

Objectives for this year’s edition

The majority of participants in 2018 were third sector organisations, followed by elected representatives, and a smaller number of very active faith-based organisations and local authorities. The rest were public sector organisations and trade unions.

This year we hope to keep counting on strong support from the voluntary sector, alongside more active local authorities. We are also targeting more faith-based organisations and charities whose work is not directly anti-poverty, which we hope will help our message reach further.

How can we help you?

The Poverty Alliance will give all the support we can to help you participate in the Week. This support will include:

• Provide an activity toolkit to help you get involved. Ask Campaigns Officer Irene for a copy: irene.tortajada@povertyalliance.org
• Provide free training on media and how to build support for the solutions to poverty
• Promote your activity through local media, social media and our event calendar
• Give individualised advice. (Email Irene at irene.tortajada@povertyalliance.org)
• Provide social media graphics, media templates, lesson plans and petition letters
Together we can challenge poverty
Challenge Poverty Week is a real, practical opportunity to build a stronger movement against poverty and demonstrate our values of justice and compassion. At a time when life is becoming tougher for many people, it is vital that we build support for solving poverty.

To find out more and get involved:
Website: www.challengepoverty.net
Twitter: @CPW_Scotland on Twitter
Email: irene.tortajada@povertyalliance.org
Phone number: 07561881374

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