Sustainability stories - Ireland YM
Tony Weekes, Ireland YM
In the late 1980’s, I was teaching in the economics department of a university in England. Two significant events in my life had just happened: I had become a member of the Religious Society of Friends and I had been invited to become a non-executive director of the (then fledgling) Ecology Building Society (EBS).
The latter experience is one to which this story particularly relates. The principal rule of the EBS is that it will only make loans on buildings and land which will contribute to what we would now call sustainability. It showed me – far more than anything I encountered in academic life – the potential for money to work for good ends … or to be part of the problem.
As member of the board, we connected with other organisations and initiatives who are concerned to bring ethical principles into spending and saving: Triodos Bank and the Ethical Consumer magazine, in particular.
I have continued to work on these issues. Fast forward to 2010: a Special Interest Group (SIG) at Ireland Yearly Meeting entitled Is your money working for a better world?. The emphasis was on our personal use of financial services and the decisions we make with respect to our Society’s finances. It was about how small savings can be part of the solution. Those who attended felt that we had done more to raise consciousness.
So, forward again … to November 2010. With the help of other Friends, a meeting took place in Dublin during National Ethical Investment Week (NEIW). The theme was Making our money work for a better world. We had speakers from Triodos Bank and Oikocredit, and I spoke about the work of the Ecology Building Society. The meeting was well attended, but there’s much more work to be done: to raise consciousness, to improve understanding, to allay some of the (understandable) despair – even cynicism – which now surrounds financial services.
One more small step in time: to Birmingham on 1 March 2011, when the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility (ECCR) launched its report The Banks and Society: rebuilding trust. A valuable resource in that it explains more about how financial services have failed the sustainability agenda and what, as users of these services, we should be doing to bring pressure for change.
Useful websites:
A longer article of mine in QPSW’s Better World Economics
We’d love to hear the story of you or your meeting too. Just email sunnivat@quaker.org.uk and tell us about it.
