Trustees' Report and Financial Statements 2010

Chairman's statement

It is good to be writing this report on the progress we have made with Church Urban Fund over the last year. There has been plenty of activity and a considerable amount of change in the organisation since the last Chairman’s report.

The recession generally, and the effects of spending cuts, have created a real sense of urgency for our work. We have achieved a lot but there is a lot to more to achieve in creating momentum for tackling poverty together in this country.

We have spoken out about the disproportionate effect of the cuts on the poor (see our work on this at http://cuf.org.uk/cutting-edge-survey-impact-spending-cuts-2011) but we are committed to creative responses to the reality of less money and less welfare. Focussing on what local people want, providing support and encouragement as well as resources, training and money to make things happen is, we think, a winning combination.

One of our key achievements is that we have begun to put flesh on the bones of what is arguably the most fundamentally challenging social policy issue of our day – how to facilitate flourishing localities through a national structure. This is at the root of the government’s localism agenda and its Big Society initiative, and at the core of the debate about social welfare and how we facilitate the development of a flourishing society.

This is the key issue for Church Urban Fund too. How do we develop truly reciprocal relationships between our friends and partners beavering away in local communities and our friends and partners, funders and policy makers at a national level. How do we support and not stifle local initiatives whilst at the same time making sure we have the resources to enable them to flourish? 

Over the last few months we have had some honest and sometimes difficult conversations with the local communities we work with and have developed some new models of working. Our CUF Locals will give us a network of organisations, working deep in local communities, which have aligned themselves with Church Urban Fund nationally and agreed to work together.  Our aim is to have a legally robust relationship between the local and the national and for there to be cross-fertilisation of funding, ideas and support. This will give us a very real opportunity to address the issues of poverty and disadvantage that are the core of our task as Christian people, both locally and nationally.

Those who read last year’s Chairman’s report will see this as a natural progression of the relational approach outlined there. Our values remain the same: we take people seriously and treat them with respect and integrity; we recognise the power of relationships to transform lives.  We value local action by local people. We hold on to the idea of virtue, that our faith and our politics (with a small p) are worked out in the engagement we have with the people and the situations we come across. When we come at things from this perspective, we can see that there are many things that can be done which are fairly practical and simple but which have a real and positive effect on people’s lives.

As we look forward, the next twelve months will be a time where we continue to work out this way of working and hopefully see some first fruits. 

Canon Paul Hackwood