Charity
Charity of the Month – Church Urban Fund
Tackling poverty together in England
Jesus said: “I tell you the truth: whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25: 40.
It is often difficult to think of communities living in poverty in the UK, but the statistics are staggering: 13.2 million people are currently living in poverty – that’s more than 1 in 5.
Many people in the poorest parts of England are trapped in a complex web of poverty that is hard to escape. This can affect all aspects of life, from health and well being to quality of education and the chances of getting a job. Children from deprived backgrounds are nearly a year behind their peers in language skills by the age of five and they are over three times as likely to suffer from mental health problems as those in well-off families. People living in the poorest areas of England are likely to die 26 years earlier than those living in the richest areas.
But even in the poorest communities there are committed, talented and enthusiastic local people working to tackle poverty. The Church Urban Fund was established as a registered charity in 1987 following the publication of the landmark report “Faith in the City”. Over the past twenty-four years the Church Urban Fund has worked with more than 6,500 inspiring individuals and churches that are responding to the needs of those struggling with the effects of poverty. The projects that they run address issues such as homelessness, youth unemployment, and drug and alcohol dependency, working to meet people’s material, spiritual and emotional needs.
The Church Urban Fund is the Church of England’s response to poverty in this country, working in partnership with Christians who feel called to put their faith into action. The Fund’s vision is for every church, in very community, to tackle poverty together by giving time, money, action and prayer, and its aim to increase the passion within the Church for the poor and marginalised and make the Church’s response more effective. Each year it supports over three hundred church and Christian projects tackling poverty, such as Streetlytes UK, a unique homelessness support charity in London run and managed by people who have overcome addiction and homelessness themselves, Hull Youth for Christ, working with young people in one of the most deprived areas of Hull (and of the UK), and the Narthex Resource Centre, based at St John’s Church Sparkhill, Birmingham, serving the needs of vulnerable refuges and asylum seekers.
The following prayer was written for the Fund’s commissioning service in 1988:
Lord, we praise you for what you have given us and for what
you have promised us.
Give us the courage to come out from all our churches into the world,
that our lives may proclaim your glory,
and your whole creation may reveal your love.
We give ourselves to you and ask that our daily work may be part of the life of
your Kingdom,
and that our love may be your love reaching out in the life of the world.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
During February please pray for the work of the Church Urban Fund in enabling projects to transform lives in England’s poorest communities and consider making a donation to support this work. You can find out more about the Church Urban Fund, and the projects mentioned, on the Fund’s website www.cuf.org.uk.
CMS Mission Partner – Alison Fletcher’s News
This week has been an interesting mix of the fortuitous and the long planned. I’ve learned that some things just work out extraordinarily well here, and some things require a little more engineering – but for either, if the situation is not conducive, it won’t happen!
Last week I scheduled a meeting for Monday morning with William, the HIV department manager, and Ronald, one of our nurses, to discuss one aspect of the nutrition programme which has troubled me for some time. Currently, the adults and children get the same food parcels, and actually the kids in addition also get some sugar and soya flour. It seems ridiculous to me that a one year old child would get more than a fully grown adult, but for the last 18 months no-one has been able to tell me the rationale behind it. The budget is up for renewal and discussions have been going on concerning it for the last six months. Finally, enough other things got cleared off my lists so that I could address this small but significant area, and as the budget is about to be finalised the window of opportunity was narrow. Of course the scheduled meeting didn’t happen but I managed to rearrange for the afternoon. Just as we sat down to discuss it, Dr Rory, our boss, came to our office to pass on a message – and it was the perfect opportunity to ambush him for his suggestions (and it saved me having to go and find him about it later). We had a great meeting and decisions were made within a very short space of time; later today I have a meeting with the donors to request an increase of 50% to the content of the adult food parcels and this is very exciting. I wasn’t expecting it to be so easy and straightforward as things here rarely are – but the conditions were conducive and something got done.
Another meeting I had this week was one I have waited at LEAST 6 years for! Our ward for special babies, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) has been running for around 10 years now, supported by donors based in Australia, and linked with neonatal specialist nurses and doctors in Seattle. During my time here the unit has grown from being a small, jammed, boiling hot, noisy unit, to a purpose-built much larger ward with acres of space and better facilities: imagine having to work in a space less than 10 metres by 10 metres with up to 20 babies at any one time, plus 20 mums, plus cribs, incubators and cots, oxygen machines pumping out heat, UV lights dazzling one’s eyes in the corners, drip stands, wooden stools, up to 5 or 6 staff, cleaners....the heat in the old place was incredible and at times it was a fraught place! The new place has a very helpful layout with space to move and even space to see babies who are brought back for review after being successfully discharged home.
Up to now, physio work in the NICU is somewhat limited, mainly only going to see a very sick baby the doctor has referred, when there are concerns over his lack of activity, or an inability to move a particular part of the body. In the past we have tried to increase the amount we do, and I have talked on and off about the ongoing developmental needs of our sick babies, but nothing has ever come of it. Babies who are premature are at risk of problems with development, often due to an immaturity of their brains and bodies at the time of their birth. Babies who have problems breathing at birth are also at risk due to the lack of oxygen which can damage their brains. It is therefore important or helpful to advise the baby’s mum or family on how to promote development, (sitting, crawling, walking etc, along with visual and hearing skills, language and hand function). The aim would be to maximise the child’s development and independent function, and reduce the impact of long-term disability on his, and the family’s, life. The Seattle team and I have had periodic discussions about it too, but in a by-the-by way, a dream that something might one day happen. Personally, I think the unit just wasn’t ready for it, and the last decade has been about improving the immediate and acute care for sick babies, some of them perilously so. The skill of our Kiwoko team has vastly improved during this time and we are seeing sicker and smaller babies surviving where they didn’t a few years ago. Care has moved beyond the immediate sickness and I’m told that currently around 50% of the babies come for some kind of review at some point after going home; this is great and a real achievement for the unit’s staff.
However – nothing much happens with developmental follow up and towards the end of last year I decided to tentatively give it one more chance and see where I got with it. I talked firstly with Dr James, the doctor in charge of the unit (who is also one of our surgeons!); he was very keen and recognised it was an area we could do more in, and after a couple of brief discussions we agreed to raise it with our Seattle friends when they came this past week. Amazingly, they were eager to talk about it too, and we had a 4-way discussion with myself, the donor organisation’s clinical practice manager, a neonatologist and the donor’s Uganda country manager. It was great! Finally, after all this time, we had a serious discussion and thought about what kind of service would be appropriate, what the goals would be and what training would be required. We even got as far as thinking about the end point – at what point the NICU follow-up would finish – when the child with long-term disability would be referred on to other hospital services or rehab services in their local area, if living far from Kiwoko. Nothing, of course, was concluded, but it was an important discussion and it will generate further consultation and discussion in the near future. While I will of course not be involved in the running of this new eventual programme, it is exciting to have been involved in the start of it. It feels like it is something I can tick off my list, and something which will continue after I have gone. It took six years, but it is DONE!
Other things which have got done this week include a start-off meeting for the process of handing over the entire nutrition support programme for the HIV clinic. I’ve struggled to know how to do this as the programme at times seems so complicated with many small parts to it – in the end I decided I’d meet with the triumvirate who will each have a role in it, one of whom started off as my clinic assistant/translator and is now a vital cog in both the clinic and nutrition wheels. We had a good meeting and I feel confident that it will all work out and continue pretty much as it is at the moment. I’ve spent most of the past 18 months sorting this programme out and making it run better and as it is only just at a point where I’m happy with it, I’m quite nervous about handing it over! Progress has also been made on revamping the Wednesday night bible study at the nursing and lab schools, and we’ll have another meeting next week. We hope a new system will be set up, with all new students attending small group meetings weekly, led by two or three carefully selected staff members. This, we think, will be a good way of helping new students integrate into the hospital community, and for them to receive pastoral care and support in that setting. Senior students will continue with the current Wednesday night format, again led by one or two staff members. All of this has been possible by my impending departure – and it is exciting to be involved in its inception and launch.
However...there are plenty of things this week which have not gone done! A meeting about community physio was postponed, I’m behind on preparation for another ‘rehab week’, teaching nursing students about different aspects of rehab, I am behind behind on all the things I need to handover, and I’m yet to manage to pop in to the new physio building to check how far the work has got! Other things keep cropping up which interrupt my days, so in many ways it has been a frustrating week in amongst the successes. My plans to ‘finish’ work at the end of February look now to be a little optimistic, but I still hope the bulk of it will be done by then. I leave Kiwoko at the end of March so while there is time, I’d hoped to use this for the more personal goodbyes and the endless house clearing and packing. But my experience here has taught me that things do seem to fall into place at the last minute and I’ve turned into someone who can cope with this...so for now I’m not concerned about it all!
Alison
