CCTS
Review 40 - December 2008

III: Foleshillfields Project in Coventry

Presentation by Heather Parker and Mark Hinton

Context of the Work

Heather said that she and Mark would focus in turn on context, activities and challenges. They worked in the Hillfields area of Coventry, a city with a population of around 300,000. In the 1950s, Coventry expanded to six times its previous size as the car industry grew. It is very much an immigrant city. During the 1950s many Ukrainians, Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Northern English people came in to Coventry, followed by Afro-Caribbeans and South Asians. Hillfields is the part of the city to which, traditionally, immigrants have come, some then moving on to other parts as they become more prosperous. So, for instance, although not many Sikhs now live in the area, there are still many Gurdwaras and Sikh shops.

She and Mark had received an award from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in 2004 to work for five years as ‘visionaries for a just and peaceful world’. They live, and are part of the community, in Hillfields. There is a staff of eight, all part time – or, rather, paid part time! The six people attending this CCTS seminar were members of the core team. All came from the Hillfields community, or lived in it. There was also an extremely diverse group of about 50 active volunteers. Their premises were two flats at the bottom of a block of flats, which were leased to them rent-free by the local Housing Association.

Nature of the Work

The aim of the Foleshillfields Project is to bring communities together and to introduce an internationalist perspective, so that people look outwards as well as inwards. They are particularly interested in the divisions based on race, but as they have gone on they have become more conscious of the role of class divisions.

Mark said the project runs all kinds of social events. They organise a monthly women’s lunch as well as other events for women, and work annually in a primary school that is 90% South Asian Muslim, or has been so historically. He and Heather began this work in 2002, before the start of the present project. There is a youth group, and a community garden in front of their office. They run occasional music events, and have held some dialogue events, for instance bringing Africans and African Caribbeans together. They have parties and once a week an open house, so that people can just drop in. They have also held some events to explore the diversity of languages in the area. As a small organisation, they can be flexible and responsive. They also, to some extent, do things they like doing! Their internationalist perspective finds practical expression in links with two schools, and an organisation for the disabled, in Kenya. A number of international students also get involved as volunteers every year, some from the peace studies course at Coventry University, some from other courses. Soon there will be interns from Senegal and Japan.

They have also done some work which brings in money, for instance community consultancy work, and they hold fund-raising events. They run well-structured community events and are good hosts – relaxed and welcoming. Getting people to listen to each other is a central part of everything they do. They like to set up events where people are doing things together and chatting informally with each other, but they also ensure that there is a point at which people are in small mixed groups and each person is given an equal amount of time to answer a particular question, which might be ‘Where did your granny grow up?’ or ‘How has racism affected your life?’ Relationship building is the key to their approach. They demonstrate a way that people can be together, rather than trying to teach them to behave better.

Mark gave an example of a recent project. For some time he had been wanting to reach out to Jews in the city. In the project they work with many Muslims, and misinformation about Jews that circulate amongst them are a real problem – as indeed they are outside the Muslim community. So they organised a community celebration of Passover, for Jews and non-Jews. Some Jews in Coventry are active on the left, in anti-racism and other work, but rarely get to be visible as Jews. It was surprising how much there was to talk about, and these conversations proved a useful entry point for dealing with racism and other issues.

Then they had a party in which the Jews, though a minority, played a central role. This was a good example of their approach.

They did a lot of talking and listening to each other and sorting out relationship difficulties. They try to strike a balance between doing things together and fighting any necessary fights with one another – ‘fighting towards each other rather than away from each other’.

Challenges

The aim of the project is to be a beacon of hope in what is really a depressing environment. People's sense hopelessness and despair can be a major obstacle. They want to express it and they want you to do something with it. Some face the threat of deportation and are not allowed to work. They may face violence or isolation at home, unemployment, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse are all widespread problems. It is challenging, in these situations, to maintain the hope that things can be good – that we can create a good community, a good world.

Another challenge is that there is so much to do that there is a temptation to take on too many things and not do any of them well. The team had to decide on what were the key things to do, given their resources. Was it worth Mark spending twenty hours doing a little music event, or would it be more useful for him to be fixing their website, which had been broken for nine months?

Funding was a problem. The JRCT grant was for them to set up the organisation and share a post, and they were in the hugely privileged position of not being bound by outputs. However, additional funds had to be found to cover staffing and other costs and these come in small pots from various sources. No-one on the staff has a permanent contract, instead people get five hours here or there from this or that pot. So the project is under pressure, both externally and internally, to show some concrete outcomes. They also have to pay close attention to relationships within the team, especially given the fact that the two founders of the project are white people, leading a group of workers and volunteers of whom only a small minority are white. They try to create space for everyone to take leadership and influence the project without pretending that they are not the leaders of the project at this point in time.

Another challenge had to do with passion versus organisation. They tended to attract people inspired by the vision but not necessarily so interested in doing the typing and keeping meticulous records.
Mark then invited the other members of the project who were present to contribute.

One woman said she had come from Birmingham, where she had not experienced too many problems. However, after September 11 she noticed that as a Muslim she was being treated differently, and that her community had retreated. She did not feel there was anywhere she could go where she could trust people. She became involved with the project when they ran the course on global citizenship at her son’s school and she volunteered to help. This experience empowered her to believe she could do things to achieve change and that a better future was possible.

Another woman said that what she particularly valued about the project was the attention to detail, for instance over the way people were made welcome. She also valued the attention paid to the bigger picture – how issues of race and class affect relationships between people. A third woman had said that one of the big challenges for her was to counteract the divisions caused by oppression, within the team and amongst volunteers. She had also remarked on the divisions between South Asians like herself and East Asians. For her to have come this far – to understand how people are restricted by oppression and to be able to speak out about it at a meeting, as she was doing, represented an important achievement. A participant from Japan said that he used to hate the kids on the street who were the main ones harassing him. (They would come up to him and say ‘Are you selling DVDs?’ – assuming that he was Chinese and selling illegal copies.) But he said the conflict was not only between white people and immigrants but also amongst the immigrant population.

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