Supporting your concerns – Quaker Peace & Social Witness grants help local meetings translate faith into action

A wide range of projects supported by local and area Meetings are receiving Quaker Peace & Social Witness Relief Grants in 2010. A total of 16 projects are currently beneficiaries, with 10 of these new this year. The grants for this year total more than £84,000.

Photo: Moses Bigirimana (co-ordinator) and Charles Ndayisenga of ICRP, Burundi

From gifts made in the past, QPSW has a General Relief Fund to finance this grant-making scheme. Grants help projects or programmes for the relief of people who are suffering as a result of natural disasters, climate change, war or conflict but not immediate crisis relief. The projects aim to help people to move to a sustainable or more sustainable situation for the future.

Each project which comes to the QPSW Grants Group for discernment is brought by a Britain Yearly Meeting Quaker Link – a person or group which advocates for and liaises with the project, completes the application and persuades at least one local meeting to support it. In the past three years more than 26 local meetings (LMs) or area meetings (AMs) have supported QPSW relief grant applications individually or with others.

These projects were supported this year.

Dabane Trust – Health and Hygiene Campaign for Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

£4,000

A project in Bulawayo, educating the community in managing waste to reduce disease where the sewerage system has collapsed and is awaiting repair.

Supported by Mid Somerset AM

The Quaker Congo Partnership with  Communauté des Églises Évangéliques des Amis au Congo Democratic Republic of Congo

£6,000

To provide initial micro credit loans to women and also to buy a vehicle to get patients to the only community hospital for 45 km.

Supported by Cambridgeshire AM and Manchester and Warrington AM and in partnership with Congo Yearly Meeting

HealthProm, Afghanistan

£5,962

Working to reduce maternal and infant mortality.

Supported by Dunblane LM

Palestine Trauma Centre The Children’s Wellness Project, Gaza Palestine

£6,000

Training people to work with children who have suffered post-traumatic stress as a result of the conditions in Gaza.

Supported by Bewdley LM.  The Centre is also supported by Galway Meeting (Quakers) in Ireland

Swazaid E-Motion Programme, Swaziland

 £6,000

To train school staff to provide a more supportive regime for children traumatised by being orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

Supported by Ruthin LM and North Wales AM.

Frontier Primary Health Care Project, North Western Pakistan

£4,000

A final grant to this programme for refugees and asylum seekers, as the project becomes self-financing. Earlier grants were given for the building of a community labour room and girls’ classroom in an area where large numbers of internally displaced people had arrived fleeing from the insecurities in the surrounding areas.

Supported by SE Scotland AM

Room2Heal, London

£6,000

A one-year grant to initiate a programme of therapeutic support for male asylum seekers, which will balance the existing provision for women.

Supported by Totnes LM

Co-ordinated Action for the Relief of Destitution in Swansea (CARDS), Swansea

£6,000

To establish a scheme where local people host asylum seekers who have little access to other accommodation.

Supported by Swansea LM

Imprezza Academy, Kenya

£6,000

Children and young people will be assisted by the school-building work at the academy  where work on the latrines, showers and a kitchen as well as the science block has received grants in 2009 and 2010.

Supported by Mid-Thames AM

Gulu Youth Development Association, Uganda

£1,500

Gulu Youth Development Association provides vocational training to teenagers in Uganda. The association will use the grant and the construction skills learned by their trainees to get a roof on a new workshop/classroom where wheelchairs and bicycles are made.

Supported by Farringdon Quaker Meeting.

Quaker Peace Network West Africa, Freetown, Sierra Leone

£4,000

Another roof, this time on the Meeting House and Peace Centre in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The building is used as a skills training centre and Quaker Peace Network-Africa will hold its gathering there in 2011, bringing together Quakers from about 13 African countries, the UK and US.

Supported by Keswick, Mosdale, Penrith, Frichley and Bath Local Meetings. Quaker Peace Network West Africa also works with local Quakers and American Friends Service Committee.

Friends Peace Teams African Great Lakes Initiative, Rwanda

£6,000

The Batwa people will learn and pass on skills in trauma healing and sustainable development.

Ealing LM is supporting this project directly and also supported the grant application. This project is in partnership with Rwanda Yearly Meeting

Initiative Communitaire pour la Réduction de la Pauvrété, Burundi

£6,000

A project to improve livestock and animal husbandry in an area where Tutsi, Hutu and Twa peoples are putting the genocide behind them and working together for a better life. This project was first funded in 2009.

Supported by Burford LM and Witney LM.

Hlekweni  Friends Rural Service, Zimbabwe

£5,000

The final instalmentof a grant for a Drip Irrigation project, part of a range of work supported by Friends of Hlekweni.

The project is supported by Milton Keynes LM.

Mines Advisory Group, Cambodia

£6,000

Providing long-reach tools for mine clearance work still required in Cambodia decades after the war there.

Supported by Kelso LM and SE Scotland AM.

Mari Amman Services Society, Tamil Nadu, India

£5,480

A final instalment for desalination of tsunami-damaged lands in Tamil Nadu.

Supported by Hemel Hempstead LM via Hope for Children.

For more information about the scheme, contact:

Debbie Taylor
debbiet@quaker.org.uk
020 763 1038