Acting locally
The message that keeps coming to me during this yearly meeting is the importance of acting locally in our communities, something I have not thought much about before in a Quaker context. For some years now I have enjoyed working locally for a charity focused on local young people. I like the fact that when the MP visits it is my MP and when I go to see the council it is my local council. But despite working myself in the local community where I live, my Quaker involvement has been largely internally focused whether locally or nationally.
I enjoyed the presentation from Quaker Social Action this morning, focusing on action in specific local communities (though I would have liked to know more about why it was chosen and what we were to do with the information). Pam Lunn challenged us yesterday to learn the skills we would need to live in self-sustaining local communities. One of those skills will be how to deal with economic injustice in those communities.
When we did the preparation for YMG and tackled this I found it hard to see beyond "we have enough to do already". But things have already changed.
My meeting is just beginning to mourn a local charity, originally set up as a concern of the meeting, and now placed into administration this week due to changes in government policy and funding. The work enabled those unable to afford it to access social welfare legal advice: housing, benefits, family law, debts. The meeting's form filling service, helping people to access the benefits they are entitled to, could be at risk as a result. One of the things that helped give equal access to justice will be lost. What new ways will we be able to find to help create economic justice locally? In a community with many other church initiatives: Christians against Poverty, Soup Kitchen, Winter Shelter, what is God calling Quakers to do in our local community?
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