- Greg Smith
- Dec 10, 2021
- 2 min read
This is an appeal! We really need you to read this bit please!
Like many small charities Unlock has had to manage a drop in income during the pandemic.
Over the two years impacted by COVID our walk income is down by around £15k overall. Our budgets are tight to the point where spending any less would simply not allow us to deliver our work. Our reserves are now only the absolute minimum we would need to meet our legal obligations in shutting down. The whole thing runs on about £62k a year. Staff work hard on modest (but fair) salaries and minimal hours (a total of 44 hours per week). Overall Unlock punches way way above its weight given its size and resources. We’ve made lasting impacts from Hastings to Glasgow and from Hull to Cardiff.
We really hope you know how grateful we are: for walk income, for faithful supporters, for generous donors, for the job retention scheme, and for your prayers.
But – Sorry about this! We need to ask you for your help, perhaps on a small but regular basis.
We need £20k to get us back to the point where we can establish new local work with confidence and devote the bulk of our staff time to frontline work, rather than hunting down funding. £10k is to make us financially stable again and able to plan for work that extends to more than just the next 3-4 months. And the other £10k to launch and support new local partnerships in places where the needs were already great long before impacts of COVID.
That’s the kind of amount that the big charities barely even notice (Children in Need raised £57 million in 2020). £10 a month from 200 of you would get us to £20k in 10 months. Committing yourself to that for a year or two gets us to a much better place. Even a regular fiver would be wonderful!
Unlock will be 50 years old in May 2022. Our impacts may be few but they are deep. The need for the unique work, envisioned by people like David Sheppard and continued for so long by Peter and Jill Hall, persists. Will you celebrate that with us by helping to restore our funding to a more functional and secure base for our ongoing work?
You can give in any of the following ways, whichever is most convenient for you:-
Online via Give as You Live Donate: http://www.unlock-urban.org.uk/support_donations.php
By Bank Transfer to Account No: 65031179; sort code: 08-92-50, quoting ref: appeal followed by house number and postcode if eligible for Gift Aid.
By cheque to ‘Unlock’, mailed to: Unlock, 15 Station Road, Rotherham, S60 1HN.
Yours sincerely,
Andy Dorton – Chair of Unlock National Council
- Greg Smith
- Dec 7, 2021
- 1 min read
A new book that considers the theme of Discipleship, Suffering and Racial Justice written by Rev Dr Israel Olofinjana, Director of One People Commission, Evangelical Alliance, has just been published by Regnum Studies, Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS).
- Greg Smith
- Dec 6, 2021
- 1 min read
This is an article for political nerds but has some interesting insights, especially for those of you who are involved in Citizens Uk and community organising, or in poverty truth commissions.
Abstract
Populist politics are an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary politics around the world. In settler colonies, Indigenous resurgence is also an increasingly important feature of political contestation. Both discourses involve questions of peoplehood, pluralism, and collective agency. The goal of this paper is to explore these phenomena side by side, and ask what they reveal about the present political conjuncture. I argue that both political projects involve a constructive element, as actors build spaces of political contestation beyond the state. In this way, each movement involves an often overlooked contest between politics ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. Ultimately, I conclude that the above/below distinction reveals important cleavages that are obscured by the traditional left/right distinction that structures much political analysis.
Keywords: populism; resurgence; politics from below; Wet’suwet’en