Learning Experience

Months ago Sally, our pastoral assistant, suggested we should investigate providing meals for families who might need them in our current challenging economic circumstances. Asking around I found that there were several projects of this kind being run by churches elsewhere in the diocese, and more were establishing themselves as 'warm hubs' with or without support from the relevant local authorities. Sally went about the project in an impeccable way, talking to every local agency she could who could be assumed to know more about these things than we as a church might - the home-school link workers, the food bank staff, the Council, the youth service, and so on. Everyone was very supportive and enthusiastic and money was forthcoming from the Council, the Bishop of Guildford's Community Fund, and the like. Most impressively of all, Sally was able to recruit a team of helpers hardly any of whom had prior connection with the church. The trouble was, as it turned out, that very few people availed themselves of the opportunity to benefit. The time of the sessions was tweaked, the marketing was amended, the schools (who were our main source of communication) offered to accompany family groups to the church hall when the sessions were on, but it never caught fire, and Sally has now called a halt to the project and is thinking whether it can transmute into something else. It wasn't the quality of the food which those who did come thought was great!

Thankfully we know it's nothing personal, as the Council report that other similar initiatives have met the same problems and are returning their funding. One 'warm hub' has had not a single person turn up in the months since it was established. I am relaxed about something like this failing: I think we did everything we could conscientiously have done to research and plan, and failure is part of the process of development. The experience does raise big questions about the nature of our local society and how need and poverty are perceived: we doubt that the experience in other parts of the country than leafy Surrey would be the same. But it's very hard to discover why something doesn't work than why it does.