FAITHINCOMMUNITYSCOTLAND

 

What’s Faith Got to do with it? S.O visits FAITHINCOMMUNITY SCOTLAND to learn what multi-faith efforts can achieve in Glasgow. We talk with Pauline Edminston, coordinator for the Transformation Team and discover what faith can do for Glasgow’s poor. We meet at FICS church come office, come community resource, come planning HQ, a great example of how religious resources can deliver more than prayer and cookies.

 

What’s faith got to do with it? Well not as much as you would think. Pauline spells out the facts, “We don’t sit around discussing faith all day, it doesn’t come into it when we are responding to poverty issues. Anyone who finds themselves in poverty from any religion experiences the same negative life style. These issues are not faith specific. We do, however recognise the need for religious communities to work with people they feel represent their community.

 

As we are interested in the truth about poverty, community contact is essential in clarifying problems and solutions.” There are currently have ten staff working in Glasgow – Scotland’s poorest and most religiously mixed city – and have ambitious plans over the next period to develop additional work in Dundee, in offering support to ex-offenders and their families, and in the development of an Interfaith Storytelling Centre in Glasgow’s Govanhill.

 

Our Board of Directors is a dynamic team brought together from across the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh communities with a huge level of experience within the public, private and voluntary sectors as well as a genuine passion to tackle poverty. We are about tackling the consequences of poverty, empowering local people, taking sides and working in partnership. Pauline went on to explain the work of the Transformation Team. “The work of the team is all about capacity building. This enables communities to create projects that respond to poverty issues through understanding funding applications, lobbying, consultation and delivery. We train people to do what is needed to deliver new projects responding to poverty.”

 

Contact Pauline for the “Fit for Funding Resources and events. The Cranhill Cafe works as a spring board for discussion and action in the community for young people There is some hope with a new Child Poverty Unit, set up by the Departments of Work & Pensions and of Children, Schools & Families in order to assist the Government in its target of halving child poverty by 2010 and eradicating it by 2020.

 

The new team will also have staff from Barnardo’s involved in trying to create a common point of policy making and contact. Meanwhile Barnardo’s have suggested the cost of child poverty to the UK is £40billion a year, emphasising the important economic arguments for tackling child poverty as well as the social and moral ones.