Blogs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/18/bedroom-tax-pleas-council-...

Together Newcastle Development Worker Steve part of Question Time

http://www.newcastle.anglican.org/news-and-events/news-article.aspx?id=539

Written by Paul Hackwood, chair of trustees for Church Urban Fund  Read more »

This week you may have seen in the press the launch of the Church Urban Fund's online 'Poverty Look Up Tool'.

The tool is very simple indeed. What it does is enable people to find out about poverty in their local area and compare where they live with both more affluent and poorer areas, locally and nationally. Read more »

Each Monday we cook extra food with people in the neighbourhood and eat together. For some it’s a bit weird being in another home, for others used to the routine they roll in bringing or preparing food. Numbers vary from half a dozen to 25 or more. People muck in. Somehow we all eat together. A recent Monday meal and I’m looking round the room. Times are tough and everyone is looking weighed down. Read more »

 Final Lent Course - Asylum

So last night we gathered again for our Lent Course - ‘Are we washing our hands of England’s poor?’.

Tonight we talked around the issue of asylum.  The first part of our discussion was helping us to understand the terminology and definition of some of the words we were using - asylum, migrant, refugee.  What do these words really mean?  Who is an asylum seeker?  What circumstances have led women and men to be labeled in this way?

Did we know any asylum seekers or refugees?  We didn’t.  We considered why.   Read more »

Well, that was a tricky old discussion tonight. We were all over the place. I suspect the difficulty was that talking broadly about young people is a massive subject and something that we found very difficult to do justice in the short time that we had together.

We began by talking about the issues guided by one of our group who happens to be a midwife. She talked about her experience of seeing young parents who face childbirth and some of the acute difficulties that they face. She described how she and her colleagues make no assumptions about the folk that they encounter and circumstances that they might find themselves in. Read more »

Another full house for the second week of ‘Are we washing our hands of England’s poor?’, the Church Urban Fund Lent Course that I’m running.

This weeks theme was ‘forgive us our debts....’ a discussion around the theme of debt and unemployment. On Twitter @Clairemaxim1, who is running the course at her church in Southampton, commented ‘That was a very good session of #Lent course on debt #CUF. Got people talking really well.’  Got people talking! Blimey, what an understatement, we had 90 minutes of challenge, anxiety, subversion and radicalism.  Some of this was coming for people who present as ‘sweet old ladies’ but speak with the passion and verve of any resident of the Occupy camp. Read more »

On Monday I led the first week of one of the Lent Courses at St Paul’s, Winchester.  This year St Paul’s has offered people a whole smorgesbord of Lent reflection activities including the Church Urban Fund’s ‘Are we washing our hands of England’s poor?’