Commission for Social Responsibility

Night Shelters
Several Methodist Churches in London support winter Night Shelters for homeless people.
This power point presentation by Sally Leigh (London Coordinator, Housing Justice) gives a snapshot of the situation in 2008-09.

Night Shelters rely on volunteers. If a member of your church would like to volunteer, please contact Housing Justice to see about training and local opportunities.

Social Workers
There has been a lot of media coverage of failures in the field of social work. The District is committed to supporting Methodist Social Workers and has set up a Social Workers network. The District contact is Rev Sheryl Anderson.

Environment
The Commission is supporting the London Churches Environmental Network.
The district contact is Rev Jennifer Potter.

Economy
The Commission supports the work of Mission in London’s Economy. ) A sermon on the use of money (remembering the teaching of John Wesley) can be found here.

London Citizens
The District is supporting two of London Citizen’s campaigns.
The London Living Wage campaign requires all employers to pay above the National Minimum wage and pay the London Living Wage rate of £7.60 per hour (2009-10). All Methodist employers – Churches, Projects and other business or home contracts – are asked to budget for this. It is recognised that this may need to be phased in. The District is suggesting a two year period to implement this by 2011.

Strangers into Citizen campaign is for undocumented migrants to be given a work permit if they have been here for at least four years and not been in trouble with the law.
District contact is Rev Paul Regan.

City of Sanctuary
The district is supporting the City of Sanctuary initiative.

Research
The District undertook research into how many of our churches are engaged in social care and civic engagement initiatives.

The survey found that most Methodist Churches make significant contributions to their communities in respect of services, including activities and groups for the elderly, children and young people, parents and families, and around healthy living.
“In addition, Churches make important contributions through hosting other organisations in their buildings, often at sub-market rents, and by becoming involved in community and faith forums.”
Queen Mary College study ‘Social Care and Civic Engagement in the London Methodist District 2007’.

If you wish to see Prof Wills’ introduction to the report given at the launch event on 9 June 2007 at Westminster Central Hall, you can view her PowerPoint presentation.

Roehampton Institute commissioned another research report which was published in 2006 examining Methodism at the national level. Their findings about the extent of Methodist involvement in the community are consistent with our findings.
“The more trusting a social group is the more likely its members are to become involved in community activities. The results of this research suggest that Methodist members have high levels of trust and that this is translated into social participation…
“Overall, we conclude that Methodist church congregations make positive contributions to their communities. As far as we can tell, Methodists are more engaged in the community than the population at large. Methodist congregations possess higher levels of neighbourhood and general trust, are tolerant of difference and are more likely to be involved in both formal and informal voluntary activity.”

Roehampton study ‘Social Capital and the Methodist Church 2006’
The Commission is proposing to repeat this research exercise in 2010.

Fair Pensions a campaign that the Social Responsibility Commission is supporting.
FairPensions is running a Tar Sands campaign and the Methodist Central Finance Board was one of the organisations who used their shares to co-file the AGM resolutions on Canadian tar sands operations which will be voted upon at the upcoming AGMs of both BP and Shell in April and May. FairPensions are now mobilising people all across the UK to ask their pension provider to support the resolutions. They've created a nifty little web tool which allows people to do this with particular ease; click on FairPensions.

Already over 3000 people have emailed their pension provider with a request to support the resolutions. This has been achieved as a result of a wide variety of supportive organisations contacting their members to suggest that they log onto the website and take the action. Various church networks, unions, and NGOs have contacted members with this request.
The Social Responsibility Commission would like you to consider whether you could contact your pension provider to support this campaign?

Paul Regan, Co-convenor Social Responsibility Commission